Skyrim is a bit killy, yes. But I've logged over 300 hours playing it. And I'm not a shooty killy player. I play Skyrim for the same reason I play the GTA games, because they are big open worlds. They are beautiful. They offer exploration and open land. It's also why I played so much of TS3. That is all missing from TS4.

The scenery and open world of skyrim do look very appealing, but I have tried to put up with shooty stuff for the sake of a good game and I just can't.
If you *can* put up with (or even enjoy!) combat games there seems to be much more choice available.

I still play Sims 4 almost every night and I find it therapeutic. Not because it's fun, but because I've been incredibly depressed and consumed with worry the past couple of months. When I'm feeling anxious or on the verge of panic attack, I just start playing Sims 4 and I go from panicked and anxious to drowsy and nodding off. I've even awoken to discover that I managed to fall asleep sitting up completely vertically in my computer chair. I'm in a better mood when that happens, because it's kind of funny. Pretty wild, never had that happen before till Sims 4. Sims 4 is also good for my health, because it helps me get more badly needed sleep. I've often gotten so drowsy playing, that I go to bed before my bedtime. Doctors should start prescribing Sims 4 for curing insomnia.

Games like Skyrim and Fallout 3/NV had the opposite effect. Those games used to have me so geared up, they'd keep me up till 5AM.

@GnatGoSplat I hope things go better for you soon. I played sims with my young son when my daughter was extremely ill in hospital, and we both found it a safe outlet for emotions which felt out of control at times.

I can attest to being a player that will spend hundreds of hours on a game if the game is good enough to me and have been known to spend whole weekends, nights, etc. enveloped in a good game. To me, if a game is really good, like reading a good book, I don't want to "put it down" and it's really hard to stop playing. I was able to do that with both TS2 and TS3 base games, because there was enough to keep me intrigued, and the game-play was challenging enough and the games weren't devoid of the many things left out of TS4.

It doesn't happen for me much anymore because I don't have enough time to spend on games, however, I do agree with those here that say if a game is good, I will get completely lost in it, just the same as I've done in the past with a good book, and lose hours, days. . .

To me its not even about the missing things. The game just isn't right in some way. The depth that was present in TS2 is gone, it's not a little world with little miniature people any more, Since TS3, those sims are just playing pieces now for the player to score points and do challenges through.

All they had to do was improve CAS and graphics in TS2, and add ageing or story progression and it would be there. Sims characters were much more subtly varied when they had personality sliders and interests. The move to traits made them into parodies.

For some reason I don't want to understand but do is the shift away from being able to make sims with distinct personalities into being able to make caricatures of people that only exist on sketch comedy shows and poorly made webcomics. You can't make a college guy who participates casually in parties with his friends, you have to make a DUDEBRO. You can't make a sim that's interested in physical fitness as one facet of his life, you have to make a body builder with a personality disorder and unhealthy obsession.

This makes the game flat. It's now the equivalent of the game dangling jingle-keys in front of its players going LOOK LOOK HOW WACKY AND EXCITING THIS IS. Jingle, jingle, jangle. "Emotions" are flashy like that with no substance. And who ever, once for a single moment, thought it'd be acceptable for a Sim's "Emotions" to change 8 times from walking through the backyard to their kitchen?

....but...and this is a big but with pimples on it...the problem I had with previous iterations is that the game kept getting in the way. In my way. I was forever being tripped up by the way the devs thought the game should go.
Now, with a much lighter touch and flexibility from the game engine my imaginative journeys aren't being continually frustrated.
I don't even have to download loadsa mods to achieve that.
It's a much quieter game.
Like a talking Barbie with the voice chip ripped out...so I no longer have the wrong voice saying the wrong things.

I haven't played it for longer than half an hour at a time. It actually makes me quite sad.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about because Sims 4 is the most directed, 'narrative' based Sims ever made as a main series installment. The other games don't even come close to being 'dev directed' in comparison.

I'm not good with the shooty-killy. In fact, I'm not even good with war on a grander scale.

I was into the Civ games for a while. But, I was never any good. Here I am, trying to develop my nation.My cities are strangled trying to build buildings, while the other nations are building up their forces to beat me up. Cue my annihilation at the hands of Roman soldiers / Mongol hordes / Russian nukes.


They devsplained it as "traits affect more things in your Sims' lives, so we limited you, lest the Sims act wonky". Lazy is not just a sedentary lifestyle, but a hate of work and a lack of ambition. The hate of work extends to chores, therefore you can't have Lazy/Neat.


The only reason I play this game at the moment is to test my mods. The only reason I mod is to prove EA's vision wrong.

I imagine the no goal mods are very popular because nobody wants the game to provide defined goals. It's almost like the game is gamesplaining that you can't play it that way.

Boy, I'd have to disagree with that. Sims 3 made me feel like I could never play the way I wanted.

Have to agree with VerDeTerre, there were portions of Sims 3 that sickened me not only because it attempted to direct my gameplay but because it was so inappropriately judgmental, in particular the Reputations system which 'punished' for divorce and children out of wedlock; however my views on that been mentioned here many times. In defense of Sims 4 we don't have that sort of nonsense now.

Yes, it was already ruined in TS3. TS4 has not made any improvement on that situation, IMHO

But what about those social groups in TS2? That was the pits as far as I am concerned. One of my sims got a bad reputation simply because he was quiet.

This threads seems like a duplicate of the receptacle.

If anyone hasn't ever played Skyrim, I would definitely recommend it because it's so open-ended. There is a war going on,
but you can choose not to do the war part and opt for peaceful negotiations. I have played for a long time as a hunter living
in total isolation in the woods, as a kid growing up in skyrim, and then as an insane mage that goes around setting fire to stuff
all day long. You can even choose not to do the main quest if you don't want to. The possibilities are endless.

Dragon Age probably doesn't compare to Skyrim since they are different games. But I just wanted to say that I've been obsessed with everything Dragon Age lately. I'm not into the killy and shooty games either, so I used cheats to kill the mobs... but besides that, I had a lot of fun with the first two games (getting Inquisition soon). I might give Skyrim a try just because I feel like there are similarities between them? Don't know, will have to see.

Agreed.

We had three previous generations of the games. Each one had their own positives and negatives. The game could have been a success if they had just looked at what worked. CASt was a great tool but laggy. Fix the previous problems and you've got the ultimate design tool. Don't cut it out. Had Sims 4 opened up the community rabbitholes and brought back restaurants (Plus added more like spas and the cinema) and actually put effort into fixing the babies they'd have solved several problems with Sims 3 already.

Then they could just work on evolving features. Made build mode more like an architectural simulator with split levels that don't require using the testing cheats to make, have it so instead of age groups sims age gradually.

If you have problems with stuff like that and you like RPGs, i would defintely recommend Ni No Kuni. I haven't played it for as long as Skyrim, but it lasts longer than most games and it's just an amazing and emotional masterpiece.

Not really. The Receptable is mainly about TS4 and its faults and also about EAxis situation in general, This thread is mainly about TS4 and other Sims games and also about alternative games in general. I long felt that such a thread was badly needed.

The Public Disgrace system also punished you for those, in addition to those random accusations. What's truly stupid is that you can lose a suit for slander even if it's false. Money down the drain and your Sim is still stewing, and being booed. On top of that, "WooHoo with an Occult" is pretty much the Sim equivalent of interracial, and one of the Public Disgrace offenses.

Also - the forced and uncancellable punishment of children/teens was annoying. Maybe the player should have been notified when a Sim autonomously did something bad and then a new social - Punish - would appear.

Oh that . I hit disagree on the previous posts because I thought 'what the heck are you all going on about!?'. I modded all those things out because I hated them too. I've always modded out the dictatorial stuff, including in TS2, also.

Especially with TS3, those things were put in the game because too many people kept complaining about how there is "no challenge" to the game. I want to smack everyone who says that to a guru with a wet noodle. Those who want challenge need to be very specific about the kind of challenge you want. Otherwise we end up with poorly designed, poorly coded, rushed dumb stuff that some dev decided would be challenging to players.

If you want to mod out those elements, that's great, but then what is really being claimed is that a modded S3 game is less intrusive than a unmodded S4 game. Well, yeah....

I disagreed, because i don't think that was tangie's point here. Don't want to speak for her, but seemed like she admitted that she didn't know what you and the others were talking about until she remembered that she modded the annoying part out and that we should learn from this to be very specific when we tell the devs what we want.
On the other hand, i played TS3 vanilla and i just played without the celebrity system (you were able to turn it off in the settings, don't know if that was patched or not though). So, yeah, you had the choice to play without something that was directing your gameplay, i don't really have that choice in TS4.