Yes I know and I don't think anyone is really yelling to from the roof tops about 'auction house system coming!'. I included the article (short as it is) because it just seemed to me that it was a reasonable question that could have been answered within the content of the discussion (short as it was) and a 'no comment' jumps out like a sore toe and makes me very concerned.

I appreciate articles can be written out of proportion, and I appreciate Graham setting me straight on some things - thanks G!

But Origin, CC's and no CASt lump them all together and hint, talk about, confirm or suggest they are changing the rules makes me feel sick and sorry guys but IMO not getting a bit rain in the base game pales in comparison (even though this is one of my pet wishes too) because if changing the fundamentals of the creative side of the Sims is very near and dear aspect to me not excluding great gameplay.

Glad we're not getting an auction house. But can you really blame us for thinking it was a possibility? EA's let us down so many time now that all the ambiguous answers make us think of the worst-case scenario, not the best. Perhaps it's time to rethink the silence and answer questions with an outright yes or no.

I'll log onto Origin 5 times a day and( 6 on Sunday) if I can have CASt back. I can't go back to clogging up my game with a bazillionthousand recolours of everything....I just can't.

People already charge for their creations (paysites), looks like EA is finally looking for their share of the pie. Sounds like a logistical nightmare to me, considering what a spoogefest the Exchange is.. Good luck to them!

I am so glad that I am not the only one that 100% DOES NOT WANT on-line ANYTHING in my game. I suggest that this be an optional patch for those people who want it, otherwise, I will not be buying Sims 4. It was crammed down my throat in Sims 3 and my game has never run smoothly since then. It bloated my game to the point that it crawls and stutters with only a small amount of custom content installed. I never had that problem with Sims 2.

This along with the fact that CaSt is not included with Sims 4 is shameful. I do not want a game that I HAVE to look at the UGLY creations that EA employees come up with without being able to fix them.

In TS3, you can easily set the game so it never connects to the Internet. And if you've done that, the (very minor) bits of interface that are connected to those features can't possibly be causing performance issues.

Massive amounts of content in the EPs and patches that contained those online features would, of course, bloat your game and could lead to performance issues. The hardware requirements for a fully patched/expanded TS3 are greater than for the base game, and base TS3 requires a lot more than fully patched/expanded TS2. (To quote a programmer friend of mine, TS3 is about 30 times the load on the graphics pipeline than TS2.) That is just the nature of game development. Later = bigger = slower, unless you keep upgrading your hardware.

Just commenting about TS3, btw. However, if it is indeed possible to play TS4 fully offline, should be the same.

On the performance issue, though, the same programmer friend points out that CaST compositing adds about 3 steps to rendering anything onscreen; so leaving out CaST should actually improve graphics performance significantly. Personally, I love CaST and feel it's worth it, as I'm sure you do Just pointing out that CaST is demonstrably responsible for a big performance hit, whereas having online features if you don't play online... isn't.

My hardware can handle the game; the game can't handle the hardware. If the game used my quad core GPU and, including what's on my graphic card, over 8 gigs of RAM, I'd be pretty happy with TS3. It's a bloated nightmare with EPs installed. I keep changing things to streamline though because I'm such a Sims addict. Unfortunately since so many things that have been broken in Sims 3 EA tends to just ignore, it doesn't have me excited about Sims 4, especially when their selling point is emotions. Wow that's. . . just not. . . very exciting.

Edit: I'm aware of the resource hog that CAS is and like you I still like it.

Yup, would be awesome if TS4 were much better optimized to take advantage of today's and tomorrow's hardware than TS3 is

No Cast very likely means no game for me. I can't stand being so limited with base game stuff, which half the time is ugly in it's effort to be unique or fun.. In Sims 2 I had soooo many downloads it was ridiculous. Sometimes just getting a family the way I wanted was hours of tedious downloading. It became like a pill that spoiled playing the game.. Sims 3 (because of cast) was what I had been dreaming of. It was a breath of fresh air... Playing free! Creating what I wanted, how I wanted and then playing, swoop..

This is really sad news for me. I have been eagerly looking forward to the next game.

In this day & age, with the wealth of creative minds eager to excel, I cannot see why the "wow" factor couldn't have been so eye-popping that no one would have minded so much that CASt was excluded because of "surprising new thing/s" that these minds can come up with -- if allowed to go for it.
Anyone who's watched a born teacher work with her/his students will know exactly how it works. But they need that leader, that catalyst. Then the enthusiasm is almost unstoppable.
However, you have to want that as the main thrust of your company.

Whatever they come up with for an online store is what I am very worried about.

Compare the prices of the sims 3 online store to the DLC of ANY OTHER GAME. Its rediculous how high those prices are and I truly cannot understand that there appearantly are many people actually buying that enough that they keep releasing new content for it every month. A quarter of the current prices would be reasonable. Just compare to the content of the basegame.

Also, stuff packs. For sims 2 it contained a lot more. Its very disappointing for sims 3 in comparison, and I can only assume to be disappointed further in this regard.

My advice? by reducing the prices for DLC, much more people will buy it, and it will improve EA's reputation. Being voted for as worst company various times cant be good for business, and EA is already seen as extremely greedy. No, just not seen at it, they simply ARE that greedy. cant be any miscommunication about that. Start working on that reputation.

Reduce those DLC prices to be a quarter of what it is now, and the store will sell a lot more, there'd be much more buyers. People would have no reason anymore to complain about high DLC prices, and the positive reputation would further increase sales through word of mouth.

Yes personally I have rarely bought anything through the store not because of lack of resources and not because I didn¡¦t like what I saw but because I have been around the block enough to realise what is a good deal and what is not.

I am not a teenager who can nag Mum or Dad to death to get something. I am the Simmer who has been the backbone of the franchises success for many years and yes I believe I need some respect for my unwavering support and this is not to be ripped off by different angles of selling new content.
Midnight Hollows alone will cost me near the same price as a standalone EP. How will we cope with cc¡¦s being feed through the same channels?
EA you are ignoring the core of the franchise and just trying to snatch sales from the fickle, how long can this last¡K¡K ƒ¼ I really hope not into the next series.

Only used my free points to buy stuff from the store, a few items on sale as well when the price was actually normal compared to the content provided. like 75% off the normal price or at least 50%.

Think I got the entire beach set that way because there wasnt much swimwear in the basegame and the wicker furniture works great both indoors and outdoors. Really need to weigh every decision on what to buy from the store. I'd probably have spend a few hundred euros on store content if it was reasonably priced. Over all the years I mean. I'd have bought all the stuff I thought was nice without being held back by insane prices.

When given the choice to buy three sets from the store or an entirely new expansion for the same price, I'd rather get the expansion pack. Which by the way have gotten quite pricy as well. They used to be sold for 30 euros each, can be lucky to find it for 40 euros these days.

I haven't brought anything from the Sims Store, but I do remember when EA took over Pet Society and the prices trebled overnight.
So I hacked the game instead.

Learn from that, EA. I was willing to spend small amounts of money on luxury items, but when you started charging £5 every week for a single mystery outfit (which would be one of five) that couldn't be traded if it were a duplicate, I stole from you instead to be sure I wasn't getting ripped off. And I feel no shame, especially now you've shut the game down and I've lost the things I did pay money for.

Agreed. CASt is customised channel upon customised channel upon customised material. CASt could be replaced by a system where players can simply dump pngs of a certain size into a folder of EA's choice to be used as swatches (like non-castable overlay textures) and I think we would all find that satisfactory. Especially if it was so simple that every object could offer every texture as a swatch, and didn't have the extra complication of another resource dictating what object it could be used for. Textures in TS2 had to be made for specific objects, which imho was just irritating and bloating.

Yes, CaSt was made to bloat the game in Sims 3. If something like it is introduced in Sims 4, it would be best it not be such a resource hog. This is a great idea Inge.

I would be okay with Inge's texture idea if the system could also change the tint/brightness of the individual PNG (because in-game rendering is never the same as your graphics editor's and I don't want to have to leave the game 10 times to tweak it to the right shade of blue or whatever) and if it would let you refresh the texture swatches while in-game, so if you decide you don't have the right kind of fancy wood pattern or whatever, you could go grab one and plonk it in without having to exit and reload the whole game.

And what you would effectively end up with is an optimized version of CAST. Although you would be losing the additional channels that could be assigned to different parts of the object. Which would still be acceptable. You could still customize appearance in game, visualizing the effects right there, rather than switching in and out of game to fine tune one object, let alone a roomful of objects. And if that's what we're getting, great.

But we're not getting that. If we were, they would have told us about it as soon as the first post went up about the loss of CAST. A Guru would have been right there telling us "Don't worry. We're giving you even better tools than CAST to customize your environment with". Instead, we've heard nothing, except one discrete suggestion about being a squeaky wheel if we want some kind of in game customization option like CAST to be available.

I just can't express how disgusted I am by the lack of CAST.

Required Origin login (either just when installing or everyday does not matter to me, even one required log in is a deal breaker for me), exchange integrated into the game (does anyone with two brain cells even use the exchange?) and a bunch of other online crap they probably want to waste their time on....just stop EA. I don't want online ANYTHING in my game. Unless that stuff is hidden away in the options menu and can be completely turned off, I don't want it cluttering up my game. The shiny store button in TS3 was horrible enough, but at least you could turn all the other online stuff off.

This is terrible, for most of us, the Sims is a single player game. Instead of wasting time doing features that nobody wants, how about using that time into things people do want, like I don't know, CASt? Pssh, nah, who gives a crap about that, being constantly reminded that the exchange exists is much more important!

"Gibeau is very proud of the fact he has never green lit a single project that consisted solely of a single-player experience. He insists that every game EA publishes has an online component to it. His reason for doing this? Apparently EA has “evolved with consumers” suggesting he thinks this is what consumers want in every game."
Oh dear *almost dies laughing*. Yeah, like the SimCity franchise clearly needed an online component, say, does anyone remember how that one worked out? I say we start taking bets on how long it is until this A-hole is fired. I'm betting 6 months after the Sims 4 comes out and the online stuff, especially the required Origin thing, is a disaster. At least that's what I hope happens if the consumers have any taste and dignity.

I swear, if someone doesn't find a work around to never ever having to use origin, the Sims 4 might as well not exist for me. I've never had that crap in my computer, I have no use for it, and I'll be damned if I'll have it now. I passed on SimCity, I can pass on on this-

You know I went away for a month and I'm noticing that we still have no new information about gameplay, only that there is no Cast. Apparently all EA cares about is online...not a good sign. Damn shame, I really like the looks for the sims in this game.

Re the title in the original post .... I am not very worried at all. I still plan to wait and see what experiences the "rank and file" Sims 4 players (not the ones who gush over the game because it's .... squee ... The Sims!) have with the game. If they love it, and my computer won't get hives trying it, I'll buy it. Simple.

If others' experiences are mostly negative, or my computer can't handle the game, I won't buy it. Period. No worries.

I think that EA has already indicated one won't have to be online to play, so that's good .... I think. What remains to be seen if you need to be online to complete a "quest" within some bearable time span ... let's say, a week .... rather than three months because you don't want to bug your friends for a quest item. Or if you have to buy special kumquats from the Store to shorten that time span. That is a trick mimicking many Facebook app games, and that would not be out of the question as a temptation to EA. And no .... being reminded that you "should" be online to do this or that is annoying. Do not want.

As long as the online component is strictly limited to inviting your buddies over and chatting, and it's strictly optional, I'm OK with that. Might even consider trying it myself if I don't find myself with something nasty on my computer. Hey, I'll even overlook a subtle EA plug in the chatbox, as long as it's subtle and not "BUY THESE KUMQUATS!" (in flashy, bolded, eye-blindingly blinking text)

But even if it turns out that way, I wouldn't be worried. There is enough Sims stuff to keep me occupied in my current series for now. I can always give Sims 3 a go. And hey, if worse really comes to worst I can take more real life walks. Pick flowers. Do good deeds. Something.