Fallout 4 has that same system only more developed. My settlements are elaborate and interesting and the hood builder in me is deeply satisfied.

Your words intrigue me. As of right now, I am still infatuated with Fallout 3 (another recent introduction!) and am invested in trying to figure out why people hate it so much. People keep saying that Fallout New Vegas is better, but they never go into detail why! I should very much like to know.

As for Fallout 4, I am being held back by two things:
One: Playing as a mother/father of an already-named son. Family attachments in real life are very troublesome for me. I can't just throw myself into a role-play with such an important already-designated relationship and affection.
I know that Fallout 4 doesn't prevent you from going off and doing as you please once you're out of the vault, but being in the parent role is very different, I think. As a child of a parent in Fallout 3, there is more freedom to seek out new things and people...perhaps because the land is so desolate and hopeless looking. There is this need to strike out and build upon your skills because you have never truly tried your own strength before.
In Fallout 4, you are the parent. You had life experience before the vault, you interacted with people and knew that life wasn't a path of roses. Seeking your child, no matter how much time has passed, has got (I would think) to be of paramount concern. And I just don't feel that's in the character. Bethesda is so busy trying to craft a compelling story, but also allow for player/character independence of action and mind that it (depending how you play) doesn't always follow the narrative path. That really bothers me.
An example from the Skyrim expansion Dawnguard: When interacting with Serana, you can tell her you have a robust family life or no friends at all. You can talk about the joyous relationship you have with your parents or otherwise how dreadful it is to be around them. The interactions are small, yet meaningful. I don't see that freedom in Fallout 4.
The second thing is the voice acting for the protagonist. I don't know about you, but I always have a different voice playing out in my head for each character I play. Having one voice, one expression, one interpretation for the protagonist (with no option to revert to a silent protagonist) really turns me off. It would remind of Saints Row 3 & 4: Sure, you look like the character I envision, but you don't act like them and certainly don't speak like them.
Perhaps Sims has spoiled me. I just love character customization and, if it can be had, glorious sandbox gameplay. :lovestruc

~ Sorry for the long post. I fear I became rather passionate.

While we're all here, would anyone mind giving me a quick rundown on Skyrim and Fallout 4?

Sims is the only computer game I've ever played, although I did play console games years ago.

That what happened when I played, too. In fact, I did not "rage-quit", I "disgusted-quit" That is when I found out about Bethesda games, which eventually led me to Skyrim.

The Sims Medieval is a blight on the landscape of my mind.

Or something like that.

Couldn't tell you about Fallout 4, but Skyrim - yes. It's a fantasy western RPG. There's a lot of lore, too, if you love that stuff - but it's possible to ignore some of that and just do quests. But if you do get into the lore, there's some...really weird stuff. Anyways, you can play as humans or elves or cat/lizard-people.

I'd suggest the Unofficial Skyrim Patch. It's sort of the nounlinkondelete for Skyrim, and fixes a lot of glitches including the ones that break the main quest. Game's incredibly moddable too - there's entire gameplay overhauls to one that adds cat tails to everyone.

Hmm. Sounds pretty interesting and kind of sandbox-y. Thanks. Googling it, and it looks beautiful, too.

...I wouldn't need the tails, but I'm glad the people who do have the ability to add them in.

Several members of this forum.

It doesn't sound appealing to me to have the game create a town around my family. I want to have the option to be in charge of building and shaping the town myself. But to each his own.

I just imagined the Sims 3 as some sort of multiplayer/MMORPG. Where you can make your Sims and put them on a lot and have them go out and interact with other players' Sims. Granted, you'd probably have the griefers who are just mean to everyone, but I'd definitely play if it was available and you could have private servers.

Most of us here, we not only play that many or more, but we want to. The lives of each family are just as important as the next and for those of us who play an integrated hood where playable sims take on all possible roles from being another sims gardener or doctor, all the sims are connected in a real way.



The families ARE the town.

You can
TS2 style ageing you can use either nraas SP (but this requires a lot of changing of settings)
Because I'm lazy I use instead
awesome + mod of randomness , that has TS2 style age-settings.

For none RH businesses you can use my mods that are now supported by the lovely folks in nraas
For bars (and other businesses where you want to get paid for the service), you can use the testing version of nraas go here, then you can set the price of using a door. and the money goes to the lot owner.

The only RH I have currently in my hood is a city hall rug, because the nraas unemployed career is attached to it (but the rug is in the basement with no access to it), and a school rug, so my kids have a school But, even with the shcool I use zerbu's ultimate career mod, which basically means, they stay and work in the building you build to be the work place, instead of going to the school.

I'm currently using arsill's custom role desk, which basically means you can give roles to sims. So my city council member who runs the city is actually a custom role sim.

Now I'm going to shamefully advertise, If you want to see how I run my town, check out my Iron Edge videos.
I'm one of those simmers who play both TS2 (I also do TS2 LPs) and TS3 and dearly love them both.

And I agree with the second poster. If you want TS3 related answers, you should post to the TS3 section. Because they are the ones playing the game.

Well, the families are the town for the rotational player, maybe not so much for the legacy player, a play-style which never appealed to me.

ETA - Thanks for the links and info, ani_. I'm going to check out your videos when I get a chance. It'll be interesting to get a feel on how you've set things up, even though I'm leaning against jumping into the game right now.

Twenty families are not nearly enough for me
I agree with Jo. The families are the town. Empty buildings are not.
My first hood grew to more than 200 families and I played all of them. I hope to achieve the same with my current hood!

Too many families, not enough time.

No need to hurry The game is not going to end.

If you get into the game, go bug some giants.

You won't regret it.

I love playing both ways...rotationally in the Sims 2, with more than 20 families, going one at a time, and in TS3 just focusing on one family through the generations. I love to go through the generations in both games and don't find it a pain in TS2 with all the families, they aren't going anywhere.

That's a song title - oh, don't get me started.

I don't know either. I love FO4 to the bottom of my heart but it's the only one I've played so I have nothing to compare it with. A lot of established FO players don't like 4 much and complain it is a lesser game than the earlier versions. I see support for both FO3 and NV. From the sound of it, some of their criticisms are well-founded but there's a lot of love for FO4 too in the fandom. I think there is a tendency in fandoms for earlier iterations of games to be more highly valued amongst a vociferous minority and with some justification in many cases. I myself am highly sceptical about Mass Effect 3 and the upcoming ME Andromeda (well, I'm more hopeful about that last one) but then I'm a confirmed ME-o-phile and have been playing since the base game. The original game was such a lovely surprise and such fun (despite its shortcomings) and I think you tend to hold on to that and later iterations compare unfavourably in some ways.


I wouldn't worry about that, you can completely ignore it. I still haven't finished the main quest (I'm with Nick in Far Harbour atm) and have long forgotten who Shaun is.

Gameplay before the war is very limited.

I think you're over-thinking it. It's just not much of an issue if you ignore it. I would guess it depends on how much of a role-player you are. Me, I like stories but getting into a character for the sake of it, is not so important. I like good characters (Nick, for example, is a great character) but I like plot and stories more. My story with the game is rebuilding the Commonwealth and improving peoples' lives.

I play ME so this is a non-issue for me since it's always been that way round (mind you we had Jen Hale as Shepard). But people can approach the game in different ways which is one of its strongpoints I guess. I find the female protagonist voice to be fine.

Yes, I'd be the other way around. I would say though that I appreciate your concerns but I suspect you would find them less of a concern if you tried it. The alternative strategy might be to finish the main quest as quickly as possible and then set out to tell other stories. With this version of FO, you can play beyond the end of the main quest resolution which, I understand, is not possible in some earlier variants of the game.

Nope - s'all good. Passion about games is important.

I bought it last night. Will do. I don't think my system is up for Fallout 4.

Well, what I found to be interesting way of playing the sims 3 game is kinda both rotational play while all of the sims still age and the rest that I don't playe are still affected by story progression.

I use Awesome mod (I did not like Nraas's story proression, too fast and violent both for me and my PC), so I can set certain households to be unaffected by story progression but are still affected by supreme commander (autonomy system), so when I switch households I find my sims in unexpected (though autonomy works based on traits, so it is a bit expected) situations.

That way I can play certain number of families like I play rotational play, but the time is still passing. And the rest of the town is going on it's own.

I heard that there are mods for Sims 3, of course. Yet I have played Sims 2 - just the base game and later basically the whole set - without any mods for years.
I did not know about mods back then.
In the vanilla base game, I could not even get the son to get married - all his girlfriends moved away during the night, one after the other. So generational play never happened.

Sims 3 seems to be built almost like a single player, offline MMO. It's task orientated, like MMO quests. You're supposed to focus on one family at a time. Other sims exist independently and you can write NPCs in or out of your story. You can explore the whole world and find that other characters really are living their lives alongside while you do that.

It definitely helps to see TS3 as a totally different type of game. And it can be fun. I own it and a couple of expansions, and I tend to create my own "custom MMO" by a couple of different methods. The first method is worldbuilding. I'll take a world that I know fairly well, say Harry Potter. I'll recreate the characters (and this is fun for me) trying to approximate their personalities as closely to how they are in the books. I stick the lifespans really long and I make them match up to human lifespans in terms of proportion. Then, I'll pick one who I want to follow/control for a while, stick Twallan's Story Progression in so I get updates on everyone, I use other mods to prevent immigration and emigration (stop messing with my gene pool, dammit!) and I wait and see what happens. It's really funny and interesting to see who hooks up, what careers everyone gets, how they interact, what community lots they hang out at, etc. When I get bored of following the family or if someone else becomes interesting, I'll load them instead. Something I haven't tried yet is mashing several fictional worlds together, or adding/creating a world with real life people that I know in (is this evil??)

Another way I've played it is to build up in stages so I "know" all the sims in the hood. One neighbourhood, I used a die to create households full of young adults, pretending these were friends who had rented a house together. I rolled to see how many sims should be in the household. Then I rolled for sex. Then I used a random list thing to generate a key word, and all the sims in this houshold had to be "themed" around that word. I remember I had a household of geeks, a household of homemakers, a household of politicians. Sometimes they'd have a lot in common (the politicians were all in the same career and quite competitive) and sometimes they'd be totally different - I remember the geek house having one guy who was obsessed with the latest technology and had to have the most up to date things and one who I tried to approximate asperger syndrome, who ended up married to one of the homemakers and they had the strongest marriage in the whole game - he was SO loyal. Every few days or I can't remember the exact interval, I'd add another themed house and play them for a while while waiting to see what happened with the others and occasionally switching to them to see what was going on. Of course, they'd slowly trickle out of their shared houses into married couples, and sometimes I'd intervene and move out a single sim who seemed to old for a house share.

But TS3 requires a lot of set up for me, and I find it unplayable without mods. I can just jump into TS2 any time. I should try TS3 again now that it's complete, because the thing which bugged me the most was having to update my mods every time I played because there'd be a new patch out, and if you forgot it would break your game. That didn't happen with TS2 unless you installed a new EP.

I will keep this in mind for the future. I do have a tendency to overthink things. Perhaps I will give FO4 a chance...



What I find creepy/cool is that a lot of that lore is based on our own world's lore... Like the daedric lord Molag Bal being based on both Ba'al and Moloch, two extremely evil figures that are heavily involved with rituals of child sacrifice...among other dark things.

Any form of media that opens your eyes and makes you curious enough to research stuff is a pretty wonderful thing in my book.

I don't really know how this thread ended with me buying a completely different game, but Skyrim is fun, so far. Thanks to the folks who mentioned it. I like the amount of freedom it has. Although, the game apparently let me kill a good guy. In my defense, everyone else up to that point had been hostile. He was so devastated as he died, too, lol. Sorry, Talsgar. I didn't know.

Oh that guy. In one of my previous saves, I guess I hit him one too many times by mistake because every time he appeared he would chase after me and try to kill me.