To me the bills were extremely low in the sims 2 and 3. I always found my sims having an overabundance of funds once they reached the top of their careers and didn't have a lot to spend it on. (I was not the mansion type with most of my families). I feel like in 4 there is a little more balance. The house my sims live in costs them around 7k per billing cycle. My simself is a Medical Specialist and the sims version of my husband is a Project Manager and I find it hard to be able to afford the bill lol. I'm curious to how the thermostat will raise the bill.


Didnt they have decorative a/c units with GTW? Or am I thinking of a different iteration? Lol

ETA: Just checked right now lol and under roofing objects you can find two versions of a HVAC vent. These do not have to be placed on a roof. They can be placed in other locations in the lot. These also came with Base game. Not GTW. So I was wrong about it coming with an EP

Granite Falls in Winter looks VERY pretty! I like it.

WOW!!
the snow looks super amazing!!!

Edit: how is it funny? I really mean that.

The snow is very pretty. Too bad it seems to teleport underground, or in space. Who knows where it goes.

I always have to use the Sims 3 camera. Since switching from my old gaming PC to my new MacBook Pro the controls have been even trickier to master - I think I’m good now though. But without the Sims 3 camera I’d be stuck.

Looks awesome! I'm actually super excited. I can't wait to see how the outerwear works and how clothes are updated for warmth (I kind of like that - they'll freeze in tank tops if it's cold out vs just having an outerwear category that doesn't really impact the sim)

Quality matters though. A problem with Sims 4 is that there are entire skill levels that are pointless and do absolutely nothing. Video Gaming is a particularly bad one where it's effects are minimal. Gardening is another great example because by comparison, tending your garden would initially take ages in Sims 3, then your Sims would get faster at weeding and the like, thus making the job less time consuming. In Sims 4, weeding and spraying for bugs take ages regardless of skill level, and there's several skill level ups for the gardening skill that do absolutely nothing new or have minimal effects. Baking and DJing are especially odd ones as all they do is earn money and improve money earned, but the actually amounts they earn are downright inferior to some alternatives, such as Painting or Writing. That's another issue too: far too many skills whose sole purpose is "lolmoney" with no neat side benefits.

The quantity is welcome, but the quality of the skills could absolutely stand to improve. If we went down the list and looked for skills that felt properly utilized from beginning to end, I have the feeling the list would be cut rather short.

I almost hit "disagree," but then I realized (not to be Clintonian) that it depends on what the meaning of what the word "making" is. I would say that earning money is not so easy. At least outside of the club perk that makes promotions much more frequent. However, I totally agree that making money is easy. Just give your Sim a painting or gardening hobby. Paint in all available spare time and it won't take long to be in the black from this hobby. Alternately, plant some blackberries and/or dragonfruit, both of which are straightforward to come by after the first Spice Festival, and you will soon be on easy mode. I find bills in general higher than they'd be in TS3, other things being equal, but it is not that hard to make ends meet anyway. You don't even need to go as far as dragonfruit at first. Send your Sim out to dig, harvest, and collect every collectible in your neighborhood once that's possible, and (provided you're wise regarding where you place your first house) it's 500 Simbucks for you at a conservative estimate -- more than enough for the weekly bills for a starter house.

I did thought video gaming is quite as a stranger and doubted they implemented something meaningful to it. Nothing saying that it is impossible to come with great conceptual ideas for it, but knowing how developers execute things... Though what does that skill bring onto gameplay anyway If I may ask? Better win chance towards competitive video games as it increases?

He seems that thing as a hobby for TS2:Freetime was pretty useless as all it did was unlocked new social interactions, a dedicated secret lot and an golden badge will be given. All those seem not much different from most of the hobbies.

That twitter account... for some reason, I don't want to ever open it. It just keeps making me cringe... and I usually rarely do that or acknowledge 'cringing' as an actual action a person can do.

I would enjoy animals or living off the grid, though I have no idea how chicken, cows and pigs would work in TS4 because you only have a limited amount of lots and you can't even decide how big they are, so having a house, garden, barn and field (with probably oversized dimensions) in one lot seems nearly impossible...

Btw, he also said they won't go for cruelty, so they won't let us slaughter animals, but we might be able to "harvest" bacon like we harvest eggs. Then someone mentioned how a certain farming game lets pigs search for truffels and Grant took note of that.
Just throwing this out here.

Nah, the other ones are old ones..
and probably were shot by a far less talented-at-shooting-videos-in-game person

"See! See! We DO listen and we DO care! (Actually we've made the pack already, but we won't tell you that part.)"

I hope that farming game pack ain't the next one, I need that rumored witches game pack NOW!

That’s just stupid. Hog farms are a thing solely for the purpose of raising, and slaughtering pigs for their meat. It’s far from cruel, but the Maxis definition of cruelty is so vague and distorted that basically anything is cruel to them these days. No one’s asking for visual slaughter, they could easily add a “sell for meat” off-screen option that gets rid of the pig and adds pork to your inventory. Of course that’s probably cruel too, since farm animals are only to love and pet not for food. Maxis makes me think of American Dad, where the daughter referred to milking cows as raping them. LOL

True. Remember, one of their patches had to change a trait's name just solely to fit the political correctness agenda. There was and is no reason to have changed, because the description doesn't even match the different definition of it. Sure it may be an insult to call someone by that title, but hey - you can't sugar coat the term however you want when it is what it is, especially when in inevitable to not get someone offended in 2018.

Slaughterhouse is out of the question. And If they were, they would really have huge double standards (still nothing about dog houses). Not really a win-win situation either way

Been playing the Sims 2 recently and it makes me miss Sims 2 era Maxis/EA. Also, I forgot just how much meaner the mean/fight interactions were in TS2 in comparison to TS4 ... like wow.

Random comment, sorry.

Witches would be an awesome game pack! The engine is there with what they've done with Vampires so I'd be really excited to see witches fully fleshed out that way. We need at least two more good supernaturals in my opinion

Hopefully the next pack with supernaturals will be... Supernatural, so that we can have toddler-supernatural behaviours patched in for allll the existing ones, and get one or two new ones with the rest (Aliens, Plantsims) built out properly.

In reference to your comment, if they would take the time to just revamp the sims themselves then it would make the game better and bring back that nostalgia from ts2 sims even expanding from it. Fix up and AI and make traits count as much as emotions. Tie them in together. There are modders on this site that have looked at the code and gave the sims personality. (Polarbearsims' personality please mod has the perfect example). I really wish they would set aside from all the adding new content and focus on fixing the broken content already in the game.


Okay now back on topic lol

I'm a TS2 player myself, but I just wanted to point out that what you're describing isn't 'broken' - it's a deliberate design choice. It might feel broken to us old school players because it's a completely different underlying concept, but to new generations, these are the sims they know and love.

Sorry, I write for a living so I get a little bit particular about these things since language shapes perception. A lot of players on the forum perceive this iteration of the sims as 'broken' but that implies something that was created to be one way but is damaged in some way due to error or accident. TS4 isn't broken, it was just designed differently than previous iterations. What I'm hoping for is that subsequent packs and updates will address smaller issues around gameplay that will in turn impact larger ones favourably.

That said, fights may change, moods may become stronger in certain packs, mods are available that do a lot of these things - and coming from TS2 I'm very familiar with the epic power of mods - and a whole host of other things could happen in upcoming packs that will change things.

I really want to see more done with toddlers, children and teens - (can you tell I'm a family player?) and I'm holding out hope for a really neat university pack too. And of course, cars would be nice - they might include them in a 'vacation themed' pack that also includes things like boat and train transport or opens up some of those riverboats or similar - how awesome would that be? I want more careers too - that would be nice, to see more logical ones make a comeback (or see all the careers become 'active' at some point... maybe with Create-A-World? I dunno. There's lots that can still be done.

Is there any more news? Given that Seasons is at E3 I would thought we would hear more impressions of it.

The Season's stream is on the 15th and I don't think the Game Changers are allowed to do their own streams yet.

Early access starts on the 19th and embargo lifts on the 20th iirc.