Yes, certain interactions with others and objects changes moods. That's how it is supposed to be, you insult a sim it may make them angry. You cook and it may make you inspired. It's pretty clear as to why the sim is in that mood they are in, it's not some random change.

Moods are a conglomeration of moodlets. It's not some random change that happens. You can even see when your sim will be in a certain mood if you just look at the moodlets.

Well, the question wasn't whether it's intentional. Yes, I would assume that they didn't make all those by a slip of the finger. Someone designed the game that way, obviously. Just whether it makes anyone else actually think the TS4 sims have more personality, or care more about them.

And I'm just not convinced they have more. You insult a sim and they become something or another existed already in TS3. Remember those "Elvira thinks Kitty is boring" or "Vivian thinks Kitty is extremely irresistible" in the top-left corner? Yeah, they already had that, just toned down to something more realistic, not turned into the centerpiece and be-all of the whole game.

And at any rate, the point remains that the sheer number of such interactions and their predictability (e.g., brush teeth => confident, etc) means

A) it's hard to avoid such mood swings that make no sense, and

B) even trying to either use or to avoid them, means twisting my gameplay in unnatural ways. E.g., stop brushing teeth entirely if I don't want that moodlet overriding everything else, or avoid telling jokes if I want to flirt in the next 4 hours, don't cook new food if I don't want to be inspired, etc. At that point I'm still not using the game as a semi-realistic people simulator, I'm playing an arcade game with medals. And more importantly,

C) I'm still not seeing them having more personality, since that's what we were talking about. I'm not seeing them inherently being more confident or more insecure in social situations, I'm just seeing whether I made them brush their teeth and dring an Earl Grey Hot first.

Even giving them a relevant trait, just means I'm seeing whether that randomly popped up or not. For like two hours a day they're confident or flirty or whatever that gave them, and only unless something else overrode it, the rest of the time they're acting identical to everyone else in that situation. Giving a sim one of those emotion traits just made me think it's like someone based the game design on The Cure's Friday I'm In Love.

"Personality" doesn't mean being the same robot as everyone else. And I'm using "robot" deliberately, because that's actually how the robots in Into The Future worked. You just plugged a chip in any slot, and yay, they instantly have a certain emotional state or proficiency.

I didn't say that TS3 didn't have it though, you say it is toned down to be something more realistic and I don't agree with that. To me it is more realistic because it affects the sims around your sim. Like how a hot-headed sim can make other sims angry for instance.



No, it's not hard at all. No, if your sim brushes their teeth and then feels confident it's not the sole reason your sim feels confident.

Example. If all day your sim was insulted and treated wrong...maybe they'll be angry. Their moodlets at the bottom would be +x, +x, +x all going towards the angry emotion. One little positive emotion doesn't get them from going to angry to confident. Now if all those moodlets I mentioned were expiring within the next 10 secs, and your sim was still brushing their teeth...NOW they feel confident. Or if you do other things that build up their confidence, then they will.

So I strongly disagree that it makes no sense. Just consider the traits your sim has and the moodlets they have.



My sim is also a chef, so she cooks a lot. Her feeling inspired is not some every day thing, sorry that's not my experience. I don't see moodlets override other moodlets. They each have their own weight explained clearly at the bottom of the screen.

So it doesn't work like how you say it works. That if you do this activity, it puts them into this mood and if you do that activity it changes the mood instantly. No, it adds a moodlet that can go into changing the mood. It will change the mood if your sim wasn't very strongly set in that mood in the first place.

How you explain it just doesn't work that way. For example, "Alseep" is a mood. It's weight is +10,000. Right now my sims are asleep. My main sim has 4 other moodlets.

+1 Happy - Nicely decorated
+1 Uncomfortable - Has to Pee
+1 Tense - Low Fun
+1 Bored - From Work

Obviously +10,000 overrides these other emotions. As I speed the game up, oh look at that...+1 Uncomfortable (Hungry) so when she wakes up her mood will be "Uncomfortable" because the "Asleep" mood will completely disappear and she'll have two moodlets going towards the uncomfortable emotion.



I am.



Well, for like two hours a day or not. It affects what your sim wants to do. So then it can actually extend the time they are in that mood. Your sim is now flirty so she flirts and thus adding more moodlets that contribute to being flirty and keeping her in that state longer.



Well here is the thing though, TS4 has the same system as TS3 just altered and added Emotions/Moods. So if you think the Sims in TS4 are robots then they must be in TS3. In TS3 they also have moodlets and traits. You could actually argue the case for TS2, but TS3 and TS4 use very very similar systems. I justs feel like Emotions improved upon that system.

Edit: I also just did "Brush Teeth" interaction because I wanted to see the affects it had on a sim. It's just a +1 Confident emotion, the only reason it alone would make a sim confident is if the sim had other Confident moodlets and it put confident over the top of the others or if your sim wasn't doing anything at all. It should be noted that "Happy" mixes with other emotions too though but it makes other positive emotions last longer.

I know, I was one who thought that The Sims 3 had a lot of problems and I stayed true to The Sims 2 for so long... However, it was for entirely different reasons than here. The Sims 3's missing features I knew had the opportunity to be fixed in time. Plus, The Sims 3 presented major new features such as the open world, and story progression. In addition, it added neat CAS features like Create a Style (goes well beyond CAS, but you get my point) and a weight slider.

The Sims 3 gave me plenty of reason to invest in it, because even though it was with plenty of flaws, it presented a reason to call it a sequel. The Sims 4 does not do that. I can't even be happy about the thought of returning Seasons, Pets, toddlers, and pools, because The Sims 4 is such a stagnation of the formula. It does absolutely nothing to drag me in and keep me holding on for the return of those features. In fact, even when they do return I still won't have any interest in the game, because the base-game does not do enough to make me see it as a sequel, or really anything worth "moving on" to. Other major lost features like Story Progression and Open world... Is there even any hope for their return?

The circumstances are completely different. I can't have any hope for The Sims 4. It doesn't have any potential in my eyes, whereas The Sims 3 was brimming to the top with it. Whether or not The Sims 3 delivered upon that in part or full is another discussion for another time, but the fact of the matter is that The Sims 4 doesn't present any reason to make me have hope for it.

But I love Cheerios.

The OP's question is : Nearly 1 month later - have the new features outweighed the cut features?

My assumption is that she was asking people who have played the game for a month. If someone hasn't been playing, how would they be aware of what features are part of the game, for purposes of comparison?

Folks could base their opinions on videos and various posts, but does that really give them the information they need to answer the question fairly?

All the more reason not to piss in it as mustluvcatz said.

This is exactly what I've seen in the Let's Play videos, horrid attention deficit. It's worse when there are more than one Sim to control in the household, but that can be more than only one Sim, as in there are already problems showing with a two Sim household. I thought that Sims in previous versions of the series had this problem, but it is nowhere near what the Sims 4 Sims have, and it does seem to be linked to the way the multitasking and moods were made to work in the game.


This doesn't make sense to me. I don't have very much custom content in Sims 3 at all, because I can recolor almost everything. It's not worth it to me to lose that so that I will need to download a bunch of custom content.


This is where the problem lies. I expected to be WOWED, like I was when I watched the GTA 5 game-play trailer before that game came out. I'm going to expect that a game in this day and age will WAY outperform and outshine a game from 5-14 years' worth back. I have worked too hard for my money to give it to someone who puts out a sub-par product. People expecting less and less from EA is why they will continue to get away with this. They cut out features that go all the way back to Sims 1. That, as far as I'm concerned is not acceptable.


This argument isn't exactly correct. Sims do autonomously dance on the counters as well as many other trait related things in Sims 3. I am such a control freak that I control almost all my Sims' actions, however, I've even seen a lot of the autonomous stuff in the game during regular game-play. Then, when I did the Million Dollar challenge and the Asylum challenge in Sims 3, those Sims were over the top in doing things based on their traits. They also did not starve to death because they were engrossed in an activity and would autonomously go to the kitchen and fix food whenever they needed to. I was not allowed to control the actions of most of the Sims in these two challenges and found they would autonomously take care of their needs quite well. They did not have the terrible attention deficit problem that I've seen with the Sims 4 Sims, even when the player directed them to do something. Most of their autonomously chosen actions would not be dropped or queue stomped. I watched in awe at how well the Sims in Sims 3 work without direct intervention from me.

Like I said, I'm usually a control freak over my Sims because I generally have a plan for their lives, but even then there are still times that things in the game happen without my intervention by which I am pleasantly surprised, and at those times I go with what my Sim wanted instead of what I exactly had planned for him/her. So far I have yet to see anything in TS4 that outshines TS3, especially with all the routing problems that are even worse than some in TS3.

In the Million Dollar challenge, the hot-headed and grumpy Sims were often ticking off the other Sims around them, and those actions would lead to fights with the other Sims. I don't normally allow my Sims to fight each other, other than the sparring interaction that comes with World Adventures' Sim-fu, which is a skill building task and not a, "I'm going to kick your butt" task, probably because I'm a very nonviolent person in real life. I cannot stand the thought of hurting someone or other people doing so. So, I was actually surprised at how many fights arose due to the Sims' autonomous interactions in Sims 3, because of how badly ticked off those Sims were with each other.

Oh, and it just makes no sense to me for a Sim to feel confident from brushing his/her teeth. The moodlet in Sims 3 made much more sense this way, with the "minty breathe". I don't get inspired when I brush my teeth, I get a minty fresh feeling.

We're not supposed to be arguing. This is a discussion thread, not a debate.


I'm not sure what you're talking about. I feel confident when I brush my teeth. It's one less thing to worry about as I face others, I know my breath won't embarrass me and I won't have food stuck between my teeth. Brushing my hair and making sure that the buttons on my shirt match the button holes do the same thing. There's a lot to be said for grooming.