Hekateras
2nd Oct 2011, 08:09 PM
When I saw that another patch had come out - one they'd dubbed as "version 2", nonetheless - and read about the nifty features, I was excited. I dug out my copy of TS:M and my savegame files and reinstalled everything and updated my mods.
I love the idea of TS:M, but the gameplay is clunky and restrictive and terrible. The gameplay surrounding families and children in particular felt like a huge step backward. Children with generic faces, uncustomisable looks, very limited interaction options with adult sims or each other (for crying out loud, you can't even hug them! And while the toy swords are cute at first, it's all they ever play! What, the Middle Ages didn't have tag?). Children who never grow up, while also being, for the most part, uncontrollable. Children that you can't easily move to a different household or age them up to Townies or anything.
So I was pleased to see what appeared like a solution to some of that in patch 2.0. Finally, you can change their clothes. Finally, you can move them out of the household.
Unfortunately, while doing something right, EA also failed utterly to make it anywhere enough. You CAN move children out, but the option ONLY becomes available when a new child is born AND the household is already at the limit AND you can only select ONE child to send away. There's still no way to deal with cluttered and full households short of killing the hero sim living there.
Why?
What's so difficult about implementing a universally-available "Send Child away" option when you click on the child sim?
Oh, and of course, the bugs persist. The Blue Eyes bug is still there, viciously. My Hero sims still "Lose a friend" whenever they try to change clothes or when I edit them in CAS to get rid of the blue eyes. (The blue eyes don't seem to be an issue if I refrain from using custom eye colours, but why should I have to do that?)
There's still no option for a free camera like in TS2 and TS3.
I'm glad to see there's the option to set Privacy on house rooms (people crowding all over the monarch's bedchamber was getting ridiculous), except, well, it doesn't seem to actually work. Not all the time, at least.
I love the Sims series, but EA has been very, very lazy about this one. Only half a year later are we finally starting to get the features that belonged in there from the beginning, and even then it's not polished. And yet, they charged a hefty sum for the original, and they're charging another hefty sum for the first expansion, which, to the best of my knowledge (and please correct me if I'm wrong), adds "new stuff" without actually fixing any of the gameplay issues.
All I want for Christmas is a finished game. Any game.
I love the idea of TS:M, but the gameplay is clunky and restrictive and terrible. The gameplay surrounding families and children in particular felt like a huge step backward. Children with generic faces, uncustomisable looks, very limited interaction options with adult sims or each other (for crying out loud, you can't even hug them! And while the toy swords are cute at first, it's all they ever play! What, the Middle Ages didn't have tag?). Children who never grow up, while also being, for the most part, uncontrollable. Children that you can't easily move to a different household or age them up to Townies or anything.
So I was pleased to see what appeared like a solution to some of that in patch 2.0. Finally, you can change their clothes. Finally, you can move them out of the household.
Unfortunately, while doing something right, EA also failed utterly to make it anywhere enough. You CAN move children out, but the option ONLY becomes available when a new child is born AND the household is already at the limit AND you can only select ONE child to send away. There's still no way to deal with cluttered and full households short of killing the hero sim living there.
Why?
What's so difficult about implementing a universally-available "Send Child away" option when you click on the child sim?
Oh, and of course, the bugs persist. The Blue Eyes bug is still there, viciously. My Hero sims still "Lose a friend" whenever they try to change clothes or when I edit them in CAS to get rid of the blue eyes. (The blue eyes don't seem to be an issue if I refrain from using custom eye colours, but why should I have to do that?)
There's still no option for a free camera like in TS2 and TS3.
I'm glad to see there's the option to set Privacy on house rooms (people crowding all over the monarch's bedchamber was getting ridiculous), except, well, it doesn't seem to actually work. Not all the time, at least.
I love the Sims series, but EA has been very, very lazy about this one. Only half a year later are we finally starting to get the features that belonged in there from the beginning, and even then it's not polished. And yet, they charged a hefty sum for the original, and they're charging another hefty sum for the first expansion, which, to the best of my knowledge (and please correct me if I'm wrong), adds "new stuff" without actually fixing any of the gameplay issues.
All I want for Christmas is a finished game. Any game.