omg... but that is the other alternative I guess. Sims3 certainly headed towards rabbit holes. The next logical step is to have rabbitholes for homes too.

Im pretty sure if TS3 did TS4 will. Not to mention open world is becoming a staple now in video games.

Anyways, i want rabbit holes 100% removed. They are pointless. We can just have buildings we can enter. Rabbit holes were likely only designed to help reduce frame rate drops, since if you rendered every building and object in the open world it would be slower on older computers. But personally, thats too bad. Buy a new computer people and stop living in the past.

residenteviloutbreak: A Microsoft Executive tried that same approach (telling people to stop living in the past) in regards to having the new Xbox being always online.

He got fired.

Open world, yes can't see them going without it.

Rabbitholes, harder to say. They weren't popular but if you sat through the lectures in University Life you pretty much got a first hand view of why they might have done them. The only way I think you're going to get away formt hem is if they make the work some sort of mini activity. Stealing a page from the Sims Medieval might work. I remember the blacksmith needing to do a few activities to make an item. Gives you something to do "On the job".

This comment from yesterday's EA The Beat post seems to imply that it will be an open world:

"The Sims 4 encourages players to personalize their world with new and intuitive tools . . . "

Honestly, I do not mind the rabbitholes too much. If they make the game run better, then I'm willing to keep some rabbitholes. I'm not willing to watch my sims through jobs or schools. But whatever the end result is, I'm not gonna complain,. The only thing I'd really complain about is the story progression. I hope it's not as crappy as it was in TS3.

I would hope I wouldn't have to get a new computer. I just got one this past Christmas, I won't have the money for another one.

Microsoft back tracked on that.




Read more: http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/ne...l#ixzz2SdBBk4mw

You say that like everyone has the money to buy new computers just for one game :P

The Sims 3 started heading towards rabbitholes, yes, but looking at the expansions you can see that the Sims team spent the rest of the Sims 3's life trying to make up for it.

World Adventures' cafes and markets, pretty much the entire Ambitions expansion, Late Night's clubs and bars, some (at least. I haven't gotten very far) Showtime venues, Supernatural's elixir shops, and a decent amount of campus buildings in University are all moving away from the rabbithole idea.

Some of them could have gotten away with it if the Bistro and Diner could in the basegame, but I think the lesson has been learned that generally, simmers don't seem to like them. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more basic jobs were still in rabbitholes, though. It seems a decent place to shave off some processing power rather than processing twenty sims sitting at computers and occasionally popping off to the bathroom. It's in places like restaurants where I think simmers really want to get involved.

edit: not directly aimed at Inge Jones; it was just the post that got me thinking.

This is funny coming from a person who is obsessed with The Urbz - A Sims game released in the past.

It's also funny that you said this yet you have "The Urbz and Sims 2 Fan Forever! " written as your biography in your profile. Who's living in the past now?

I'm pretty confident they'll keep the open world. As many of you already said, it would be a giant step back. I just hope they ship a much, much better and customizable story progression with it. I hate, hate, HATE when control is taken away from the player. The open world had its drawbacks here and there but overall it was a great feature.

About the rabbit holes, well one reason they were added is because there was no off-screen mode like TS2 for the open world. So a certain amount of rabbit holes are needed. What angered most players is that a lot of venues that should have been opened and were open in previous sims games, weren't. Things like going to a restaurant, go shop for groceries and owning actual businesses.

Another TS3 experiment was the professions you could "follow your sim" to. On the one hand it it was exciting but on the other hand it became repetitive pretty quickly and not to mention that it became more of a headache when playing large families than anything else. So I'd definitely like some open professions to make a return but certainly not a whole lot. Either they have to make it so you can assign your sim a task which it'll do without having you to check back on it every 5 sim minutes and manage stuff that will cause sims to queue stomp or they have to find another way to make the open professions more exciting and more manageable.

I sure as hell don't.

Me neither. These are dark times we live in these are.

Well, it's unfortunate for fans who can't afford a machine to run a modern game, but that doesn't mean EA needs to be catering to four-year-old mid-range computers.

I would LOVE open worlds to come back in TS4!

It would be Farmville, without the farming...

Like most everyone else has said, the open world concept is the killer feature in TS3, along with CaS/CaSt. Without either of those things in TS4, the latest iteration won't be worth buying. They've already told us CaS will be improved, which leaves the open world.

Not sure if this belongs in this thread or not, but I'll add... ever since yesterday's announcement, I've been feeling pretty meh about TS3. I just don't care. As much as I was looking forward to IP, it just seems pointless to get it now. And I was never thrilled with the final EP or SP concepts. Think I'd rather hang onto my money and wait to see what TS4 is like, instead of spending another dime on the disappointment that TS3 has always been.

I'm definitely getting IP; wasn't sure I'd get any of the other stuff that's coming for TS3 and this announcement probably makes getting it even less likely.

The RH we have now were actually an improvement IMO over your sim just disappearing off the screen for 8 hours. We had actual buildings where we could see where our sims worked. Besides, I'm in the camp that wants the rabbit hole concept to stay for many if not most jobs, because I don't want to (nor can I) micromanage everyone in a family.

What I do want next time though is some kind of lot marker like the fog emitter that could turn any kind of structure into a RH. Then we could really go crazy making themed 'hoods.

Also what I want are open shops, restaurants, bowling allies, coffee shops, etc. Entertainment venues should have been open from the start. In that sense TS3 was another step back from TS2.

With new Technology nowadays it wouldn't make sense not to have and open world plus to travel them. In order to make Ts4 Superior than TS3 this is one of those thing that should be mandatory.

four years is extremely outdated in the world of technology. definitely invest your money in your computer if you are a fan of gaming.

If those were the base game requirements, we'd actually have been golden. Remember, this thing, TS3, was made to run on a single core machine P4 with 1.5 GB of memory and a really old video card with Win XP as the base OS. Last machine I had like that had to be in the early 2000's. When the game came out in 2009, I was running on a DuoCore w/Vista with 4 GB RAM and a decent, if not ultra high end, 9800 GT video card. Certainly exceeded specs. And it still chugged. And that machine was probably a mid-range for 4 years ago.

For TS4 to not expect a decent multi-core processor and some type of discrete video chip solution (or at least a high end integrated one like the newer 4000 Intel series that aren't terrible for at least lower graphics settings) to get high graphics settings and larger and more active populations, then why bother? Might as well keep cobbling on to TS3.

I hope they add open professions, but the player should have the choice to either follow the sim around or forget about them when they're at work (having the choice of "things happening all the time" and "assign tasks and forget about them unless something acute shows up", and an option that works like in TS2 where the only action is chance cards - all 3 on the same job). This should be fully possible, and would add a lot to the gameplay. Staying with the sim at work and help with the tasks could give them extra credit, while leaving them to auto-work would bump up the job performance in a smaller degree. The choice of how to work like in TS3 (work hard/relax/speak with coworkers...) is a nice addition to the auto-setting.

The jobs were a bit too similar in TS3. The "catch 5 ghosts" or "hack loose on 5 doors to save people" got a little boring after a few times. There are so many other features they could add that wouldn't be repetitive if they only put some brains into it (not zombies! Got enough of them in TS3, most annoying feature ever!). I still hope for a proper hospital. Should be possible, and would be fun. It's something they touched upon in the TS3 game, but it didn't work out properly (stupid rabbit hole).

shit, i'm still on windows xp. my favorite operating system.

I really hope so

I'd like to see them use a system similar to Minecraft, in which you can make your worlds as big as you want to, but the world is divided up into "sectors" (or districts, or subhoods - whatever).

The sector you're currently looking at is active with high detail. The adjacent sectors are rendered in low-detail. The rest of the world is deactivated completely. Like this:



I suppose it would have a couple of problems, though. If you had eight Sims spread out all over the city, it might take a while for sectors to switch from deactive to active. Also it would be a bummer if aged stopped in the deactive sectors.

That ^ is exactly what I meant with my first post about only having a small area close to you open. I thought maybe if you wanted to visit a friend on the other side you could just pull up a map and have a short loading screen like you do in Elder Scrolls and many other games with large maps.