Not helped by the fact that one of the top EA reps for the game is actively reading this thread! Lol!

Alrighty then...

Well then I'll tell this straight to his face. I'd rather give my money to the people working hard here to make the game playable than give it to people who couldn't be payed to make it playable in the first place :\

I'd rather keep a pride in myself and my own honesty. That is more important to me than getting a game, or getting a game fixed.

Is that why half the game (TS3 + all expacs) is unfinished? Not working properly? Buggy? Because it's too hard lol?

At long last the answer I was waiting for. Well then I hope developing TS4 is not hard because god forbid you actually try to put in effort and produce quality work

Don't bother, this person probably hates their job more than we hate them.



Or feeding the fat cats, but please do go on, if that makes you feel proud of yourself.

You don't have the right to take someone elses work without compensating them for it and then spout some self indulgent BS excuse about consumer rights to justify it.

... While also "feeding" developers, artists, animators etc. that worked their arses off.

Well, with car animations being too difficult to incorporate, I can't say I'm surprised. It's all just really hard you guys!

Looking at the amount of money the company makes, I think they're all well fed regardless.

That is nice for you that with the official patches Skyrim is all fixed but that doesn't change the fact that quest-breaking bugs still exist. That is why there is this Unofficial Patch which also links to the DLC patches as well. There's also a HD texture pack that optimises textures better than the vanilla ones, and also a game optimization patch which increases frame-rate and other things.

As good as Bethesda are and as much as I like Skyrim, to say that Bethesda could make The Sims better and less buggy is completely absurd - it is also a completely pointless argument.

I also just want to add that Skyrim on the consoles is almost unplayable to this day - there have been several patches but the frame-rate becomes non-existent as your save file exceeds 10-11mb.

Edit: Both of these games are buggy and have had to be fixed by their modding community. That is my point. Neither developer is better than the other for this reason. Having online patches available just means that the developer's can release the game when they want to because they can just patch it later. This is the bad business practice that needs to change.

Maybe Beth should have used the other 68 when recording VA for the game then!

Yhea and the Sims 4 has over half a million sound files back in september which could be even more including the music... Afterall the 70 voice actors of Skyrim are speaking their native language, while the Sims voice actors need to speak and train a non existing language which is quite a big difference huh?
http://simsvip.com/2013/09/30/sims-...s-sounds-files/

Two wrongs don't make a right. Sorry to trot out a cliche

This!!! A million times!!!

I didn't think anything worth doing wasn't difficult to do. As far as my disgust with EA, it's also because I really like the Sims games. I have to put a lot of effort into my job that barely pays me enough money to scrape by in life, and I get home exhausted. I expect the same from the people making the game I want to put my hard earned money into.

As far as comparing Skyrim and Sims, that wasn't what was happening on this thread. It is only speculation on "what if" another developer made a life simulation game. It was not comparing the two games side by side. Of course, Skyrim runs differently from Sims. DUH!!!! I really hate to be snarky here, but some people are going overboard on this thread. I, myself, am not stupid and have had schooling in basic programming, and I work with computers every day. I am not ignorant to the work that is involved.

Why is it so terrible to say "What if"? I'd love to have the time and money to develop a game myself. I'm so used to working crazy hard at my job everyday, I overcome things other people are constantly saying, "It's too HARD!!!" Bunch of frikin' whiners. Oh, it's hard? I DID IT.

Oops, I forgot to also say, edit to add: "And, what did it take???? A little effort." The thing is, is that if those people who were supposed to have done the job right in the first place had put that little bit of effort into it, I wouldn't be having to redo/fix their messed up job in the first place and I wouldn't be getting home so exhausted at the end of every day.

Just because a company has a large profit margin doesn't mean they pay their employees well. I understand not wanting to feed all those overstuffed managers and CEOs, but if a game, all the creators who actually put effort into it will most likely just be fired. Plus, its likely that the people in charge of developing the Sims 4 have goals that conflict with the people actually working on it.

It's a he haha. And yes, you got it right! I actually thought it was new...

LOL! Yes, I'm sure talking gibberish makes it all sooooo much harder. Truly an unmatched achievement to voice sims. Once you have done that as a voice actor, you can do anything! Err... I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make here. Bethesda still employed a lot more voice actors than EAMaxis, so using that as a reason why Beth would be unable to make a sims game has no logic to it at all. I'm sure Gideon Emery would be able to say "shoo shoo!" and "commensnella" (I've been playing Sims 1, so ).



There are fair criticisms to be made against Skyrim, but this is not one of them. Go talk to a random Khajiit, Dunmer and Imperial. There, three voice actors already. What kind of argument is this when it comes to sims anyway? I hear more sims with the same voice than I hear identical Imperial soldiers.



Do they still exist? They don't for me, which was my point. After the official patches I no longer had trouble with the Thieves Guild questline, which I could not continue without using the console before. Blood on the Ice is supposedly a very glitchy quest, but I've always had it trigger without problems. That doesn't mean that others don't encounter serious bugs anymore, but it suggests the issues are not as universal as you're trying to imply. Unlike the corruption in Sims 2, which is guaranteed to happen if you delete sims, or if Mrs. Crumplebuttom gets bitten by a vampire, etc.

I think the frame-rate problems are mostly limited to the Playstation? That's what I heard. Apparently playstation's design differs quite a bit from PC and Xbox, which made it difficult for Beth to optimize for it. Which is really bad, obviously, and sucks for PSP owners who thought they could play the game decently. But I don't own a console so I can't speak from my own experience here, and I have also seen PSP players say that they did not have problems with Skyrim.

Like I said before, bugs are frustrating and annoying but with the scope of games like Skyrim or The Sims it is not possible to discover and fix them all prior to release, especially on PC because no PC is the same and this means one will have problems that others (or the company themselves) did not have. You said it yourself that there are still quest-breaking bugs in Skyrim, while for me Beth's patches have gotten rid of those. Doesn't that indicate how much can differ between systems? It's not feasible for Beth or EA to know of everything that can go wrong in the game beforehand and fix it accordingly. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do bug tests of course and fix as much as they can before release. But I'd rather have them release patches to fix other issues afterwards than that they abandon support as soon as the game is released.

I'm very disturbed that so many people have decided to "disagree" with Graham back on page one. Look at Hearthfire, look how clumsy those "housebuilding" mechanics are when Bethesda DOES do them. To refine those, to make them anywhere near what the building tools in the Sims franchise do - that's tedious, expensive work and probably new expertise to develop among their crew. The Sims looks like an extremely difficult undertaking to me, I try to factor that into my criticisms, and we all should, and I think Graham made a reasonable point. How 20 or so MTS users can just say "oh well that's just rubbish" to such a basic and fair point, I have no idea.

At the same moment, I'd love to see competition in the genre, seeing as its lack is probably a grand part of why EA seems so blaise and marketing heavy about The Sims. But let's not pretend it's easy for competition to emerge. It would probably only happen under circumstances where another company head-hunted some key expertise from EA.

And Skyrim is a bug fest. It's just easier to fix nearly all of the bugs (on PC) through the unofficial patches and through console commands, than it is to avoid the huge variety of annoyingly vague issues that crop up in TS3. A lot of the problems with TS3 were deeper and more fundamental than scripting mods like (most of) Twallan's could touch. As a core mod Awesomemod had more potential, excepting the culture of petulant meenness and elitism (that I'm actually kinda fond of, in a funny way) surrounding that mod.

And of course a lot of the problems with TS3 were of the "It's actually not a bug, it's a feature" variety - just myopic or stingy design.

Don't worry about posting honest feedback or constructive criticism... I welcome and appreciate it. There are always things we can do in the studio to improve, and players do influence the direction we take things. One of the things I enjoy the most about my job is being an advocate for our players and taking your suggestions back to the team (notice how the teeth textures were updated recently? yup... fan's comments influenced that).

I personally have two pet peeves which makes me drawn to topics like this like a moth to flame.
1) The term "lazy developers". I've worked on different games for different companies in this industry, and lazy is never a word I would use to describe the efforts that members of development teams give.
2) The idea that something is "easy" to add to a game. Thinking something is easy or difficult to add is usually completely missing the point. Instead it's a matter of complexity and time. Further, there's almost no correlation between something being "easy" to do in real life, compared to being "easy" to make happen in a game. Things that are actually "hard" to add to a game typically involve advancements in tech, which isn't really what people are asking for most of the time.

That said, I reflect on what I knew before I worked in the industry and what I've learned sense then and I understand where these sentiments come from.

Seriously. What a joke.

"Fans mistakenly think that developing The Sims is easy. It is not."
Well based on the last game I would guess that it's damn near impossible. That's the image that comes across. Pointing out your own incompetence in a bid to make customers less demanding of quality is just pathetic. Really pathetic. Downright insulting to me as a customer.

Oh great. Huge stupid mistake. They looked way better before.

What does the number of voice actors has anything to do with the quality of the game? Having 70 voice actors doesn't make your game superior lol.
Just saying the number of sound files says literally nothing

Well there's a start! Now, how about adding some customization? I don't like a perfectly realistic game, but I'd love seeing slightly more aged teeth in elder sims. The fact that all sims in my game have pearl white, perfectly straight teeth bugs me.

On second thoughts, maybe such a feature wouldn't flow with the artstyle very well... Still want it as a mod though.

I clicked disagree on the basis that some of us *do* know it's hard to code The Sims Not all fans are totally ignorant of game programming.