The Sims 4 Review

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IamLEAM1983
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The Sims 4 Review

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

There's something about Electronic Arts' most recent predicament that I find hugely ironic.

It all started with Consumer Reports billing EA the Worst Company of the Year in 2013 – past all the Goldman Sachs, JP Morgans, Wal-Marts and Comcasts of this world. A video game publisher winning a Turd Award for being the absolute worst. The mind boggles, honestly.

Of course, a PR bandwagon followed. Revisions were promised, some introspection was scheduled, and EA's new mantra became “Player First”. Origin received substantial improvements, the ridiculously optimistic Good Game Guarantee was put into place, and the platform even made some strides in attempting to copy Steam's concept of flash sales. We suddenly had a 24-hour grace period in which to scrutinize a game with our expended cash more or less waiting behind a simple form request, and you could plainly tell EA's personification was somewhere in the back, whinging.

“Please like my games!” it probably said from behind Origin's digital counter, on the same tone Oliver Twist used to ask for another bowl of soup. Not that SimCity helped, and neither did the fact that the massive backlash forced a complete restructuring of The Sims 4's initial online-only concept. From a DRM-heavy and cloud-based experience, the Emeryville campus suddenly had to open up the game's infrastructure and fall back to the tried-and-true concept of the game-generated subdirectory in the My Documents folder.

The DNA of that erstwhile hyper-social experience is everywhere in The Sims 4. Smaller spaces means smaller loading times and more space for player-controlled Sims. Emotion-based gameplay strips the Moodlets of much of their complexity and reduces the concept of having a specific mood to twelve systemic events that can be rigorously predicted, therefore making optimal multiplayer seshes a possibility. Want Bob Newbie to be Inspired? Take a Thoughtful Shower or read a book. Would you rather he took to the exerciser to shed those excess pounds? Take a Brisk Shower to become Energized, or go sit at a bar and take a few sips. Everything you see and do in the game has been reduced to a hyper-efficient minimum that would've opened up potential latency bottlenecks but that also robs the Sims themselves of much of the personality the ads are so aggressive to claim is still theirs.

“They're so smart it's weird!” pipes the voice. If they're so smart, how come Joe Rombie still hasn't figured out that putting his dishes on the counter is more effective in terms of steps taken than climbing upstairs to take care of his dirty dishes in the master bathroom?

For the very same reason, customization takes a serious blow. Wanting to save on page file sizes, Maxis limited much of the stylistic options for the game's expected plethora of furniture and appliance options. Gone is the bloated and heaving Create-a-Sim menu from the previous games, full to bursting with fourteen expansions' worth of additional content; and we cut to a disappointingly efficient clothing selection. You're finally free to clad your Sims in formal sleepwear if that's your thing – because sleeping with a cummerbund is totes comfy – but you can't quite pick out your gibus to match with your bedspread. Most items have upwards of fifteen color combinations predefined and some basic modding can still allow for the creation of additional clothing items, but much of the previous game's flexibility is gone.

Pools and toddlers are gone, and at this point, I really don't feel like adding my own two cents to this debate. Yes, I'm disappointed, but no, you won't see me react like the Marauder Shields supporters, who sometimes seemed to treat Mass Effect 3's vanilla ending as being high treason. On the other hand, the meager improvements don't do much to endear the game with me on any consistent level, even if I'll be the first to admit the interface has been vastly improved from TS3. Being able to shuffle rooms around and to seamlessly add foundations are both welcomed additions, with the tiered placement of windows and the use of the ALT key to finagle an item's location being interesting add-ons. Being able to search for furniture or building items based on their keyword is a godsend, and the text filter almost entirely negates the use of the icons associated to each item type. Want some stairs? Screw looking for the Stairs icon, just type out the word in the Search bar. All the possible stair combinations will pop up. It's a fast and effective addition that I'm glad Maxis cribbed form modern operating system designs.

Otherwise? Eh. The series continues to display its democratic leanings with its low requirements, but somehow continues to run solely out of a 32-bit executable. If you're sitting on a large RAM count, as is the case for most modern gaming PC owners, a large chunk of your hardware's power will be completely ignored. 16 GBs? “Hah!”, says The Sims 4, “I only need two!”

It's sad, as I can't imagine how blisteringly fast the game's many, many loading screens would have been, otherwise. As soon as you leave your immediate neighborhood, you're treated to a loading screen that can last up to thirty seconds. The open-world aspect of the previous entry is gone, replaced by – again – efficient little chunks of terrain that cut back on user requirements to an insane amount.

What makes that pill a little easier to swallow is the character creation screen. The same basic push-and-pull mechanics from Build mode are involved, with your sliders being mostly suggested rather than shown. Highlight a specific facial feature or a body trait, and you can pinch or pull it into shape using your mouse. Once the rough details are ironed out, you can slip into Detail Mode in order to really finagle those eyebrows' placement or the size of those irises. All of that comes to life thanks to the continued masterwork of the animation team, with Sims straddling a very comfortable line between Pixar's humans and your typically limited action figures.

Otherwise, I haven't seen anything as egregious as TS3's memory leaks, but the game does have its fair share of small bugs. Spent plates can sometimes vanish from a table's surface, the Sims' ability to find paths through house layouts is slightly improved from the previous game but problems can still arise; and I've seen occasions where two Sims occupied the same physical space... Yay, collision detection bugs! Pair that with problems associated with the Gallery and the way certain downloads and uploads can result in the game crashing, and you end up with a small amount of fairly negligible annoyances.

Overall, I'd say The Sims 4 is a decent entry into the franchise, but only if you're a newcomer. If you aren't, then The Sims 3 packs less optimization, that much is true, but also reams of additional content, even before the expansions are considered. As it stands, the game's current release only serves to highlight the disappointing effects of releasing a product while depending on future content to justify the core item's value. The idea of thinking that I bought the game not for its core features but for the future prospect of going on dates or owning pets is disappointing, and it absolutely does feel like this pricing model scams the end-user out of more cash that he should realistically have to part with.
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