It really was a treat. It felt like they made content they put some effort in to. Things that mattered felt crafted with grace, while side content was still reasonably well made.

It feels like Redwood Shores made content because they have to. They focused on the technical aspect of the game - adding in big features, but visually, left much to be desired.

This level of detail from Salt Lake was down to the lord they built, which were typically well decorated and normal looking with a basic understanding of architecture, terraforming, color theory, cheats, etc.

Redwood Shores STILL cannot produce good looking homes.

Gameplay trailer:

WOW

WE CAN COOK NOW

NO, YOU CAN ALSO GARDEN... AND THERE'S MIXOLOGIST BAR WITH NPC INCLUDED TO FILL IN THE TIME FOR THE TRAILER :O

Other pet peeves: the commentar boast about how these so called pets are confined to their owm special animal house (*cough* and yet dogs still get theirs in their own pack ), and we got burglars.... except they are CHICKEN abducters/killers and come first before household possession thiefs

Welcoming addition: sewing thing and more pets to your game I guess (the sighing part is that it be underwhelming or overshadowed by other disappointing content overwheighing it). Oh, but I'll admit: grim taking llama is kinda cute. Oh and at least we can ponds (even though it's no good for the pack if it's patched in or under paywall)

At least I wasn't annoyed by the narrator this time. But... this honestly feels like a Game Pack. There is not enough gameplay to justify an EP price tag (like with Island Living and Snowy Escape).

New crops and recipes do not impress me at all. There's already an insane amount of these things. I don't see how it enhances gameplay in any meaningful way. New food recipes and crops should NOT be a MAJOR gameplay feature in an EP. They're EXTRAS.

I wouldn't brag about animals being confined to a tiny space if I was them, but I'm not a marketing person so what do I know?

This is such a cheeky trailer. Bovine buddy, keep their 'moooo'd up... Har! Har! What's up with the size of the eggplants. What is Maxis trying to say exactly? They're eggplants on steroids. LOL

Every day is Cottage Living at Redwood Studios; they always have a cock and bull story to tell.

The textures are all so blurry!

Lmao what did I tell you guys? I 100% called that the gameplay trailer would have some dumb narration, and of course they had to make it extra dumb by making it a British llama LOLZ SO QUIRKY XD

But on a side note, I do welcome the addition of children helping cook.

Honestly, the fact they include "hurrdurrr u can cook" and the various recipes in the pack is a horriawful red flag suggesting the pack lacks content.

The only way they could save this - which is entirely possible but unlikely given their track record - is if each jam recipe/milk variant had an interesting gameplay effect and each fair competition had a unique, worthwhile unlock/reward.

Given that the trailer here already has a huuuuuuuuuuge red flag by selling new recipes as a feature, I sincerely doubt the various jams and milks do much beyond awarding various moodlets, maybe with one resetting sim age or their other standard go-to effects.

The Sims 3 Supernatural came with 10 new recipes, a bunch of new harvestables and ingredients and I don't remember it being mentioned in any of the trailers. World Adventures and University Life also came with a ton of new harvestables and recipes. They're supposed to be extras that you discover while playing. Trailers are supposed to show major GAMEPLAY FEATURES.

What we learned from The Sims 4 Cottage Living’s Gameplay Reveal
The trailer makes me feel there is nothing in this EP. Where is the surprise?

Well, there's a fox in a sweater. So there's that...

Bruh... Literally a base game object in The Sims 3 and they didn't even do it right. What's the point of a picnic basket if you can only use it on tables?

It's such a featureless EP they have to literally bring attention to the most trivial objects because they don't have many major features to show.

What makes this even worse is all the comments I keep seeing on Twitter and elsewhere that this is the largest EP and full overhaul of the entire game. WTF? This EP is even smaller than Island Living!

The whole world.
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/n...iving-town-blog

The world looks nice but like every TS4 world is all set-dressing. Probably 5% of the entire area show in those pics is routable. Nice as a background for pics, but really boring to play in.

What I love even more about that first part is them trying to sell picnic baskets as a literal new feature of TS4, being able to take your food with you that is. When that's literally the point of sack lunches from Parenthood. If that's all the effort they were gonna put into it, why bother?

Say it with me.

RECYCLED, RECYCLED
RE-CY-CL-ED
YEAH THIS SHIT IS RECYCLED. WOOO!

The mechanics and the gimmicks they use, especially for EPs in The Sims 4 ,have become so tiring.... They make it look exciting and pretty for the trailers but when you actually get to "play" the game you realize how disappointing and re-hashed everything is.

Those comments from sims steam discussions.
I found those are hilarious.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1222...=1_2108_9__2107






Where is my pronoun?

Even those sack lunches were sorta overly fussy, especially with sim routing. Didn't you have to click them one by one to either pack them or unpack them, and watch your sim twirl around the kitchen picking up and placing down bags?


It feels...very boring, and is not helped by the increasingly dated engine. I honestly wish the sims team would try to use some different world palettes and daylighting. The same blue-aqua-green color palette combined with the recycled assets just feels too similar to a lot of the other worlds.

Secondly, for a world that's supposed to be representative of the British countryside (I guess they were going to the Cotswolds for the town), there sure ain't much agriculture going on!

I live in the Cotswolds and it doesn't look anything like this! Seems like a lot of people like the cartoony-cute style though.

There was that, and when your Sims took them to work or school apparently, which I'd imagine is what most people used them for, they wouldn't even actually eat them unless they went basically starving at the start of the day. Otherwise, it just sat in their inventories and spoiled.

But this, the picnic basket, shows just how truly broken TS4's engine is. They're seriously not able to program it to be used on open terrain? Y'know, the way most people have a picnic. But no, it has to be on a surface so in that respect it's literally no different than Walkby Sim #743 who just decided to grill some hamburgers at the park and placed them on the table.

But what do I know?

It's just sad that people think going from THIS...


To THIS is acceptable. Even though it's a small thing, these small details keep piling on an on and end up making the game really lackluster.

That neighborhood is not English. The individual cottages might have been, but our stone cottages have inset windows because they have thick walls. The type of village that only has detached cottages doesn't have them laid out in streets like that, they'd be strung out along just one road. By the time the village had grown enough to have roads off the main through road, you'd begin to get semi-detached (duplex) and terraced (row) houses. So this just looks like American suburbia with stone instead of clapboard.

It does not look like an American suburb either. It just looks like a Sims 4 world. Tiny one, as always.

I agree with Daisylee, this doesn't look like a American neighborhood either, especially one with 'waterfront'. The term 'waterfront' in the Banana Republic can mean a river, ocean, ect... To make my example simple, I'm going to make up a imaginary neighborhood with a river.

While the following example does not apply for all waterfront property, this is how it usually works. There are the people that buy / build on the immediate river waterfront. They have the best and clearest view of the river. These homes can be 1 to 2 stories tall, many of them have decks, docks for things like canoes and small boats, blah, blah, blah.

The people living across the street decide that they don't like something about the neighbors property directly ' in front' of them; something blocks their view of the river, so they build a second story so they can have a unobscured view. Rinse, wash, repeat this process over and over again. Just a bit further from all of this BS comes a contractor armed with cash because they have Wall Street investors funding them. They buy a big piece of land and plunk down a bunch of cookie cutter houses that they will turn around and sell for anywhere from 899k - over a million with the selling point that said homes have "waterfront views". If they don't build houses, they build condos.

What started as a quaint area with trees and property becomes a congested hot mess where the houses are built so close together that if a person farts loud enough, the neighbors can hear it if the windows are open. Builders are not opposed to putting a 5000 square foot house on a quarter acre of land because there are plenty of people stupid enough to pay for that kind of crap. No new build is made from stone, although there are houses made from stone. Those can usually be found in 'historic' parts of any given neighborhood. This alone brings a whole other set of issues and nonsense. When a person gets into these areas, the people that live in these areas in some cases have town meetings over what color lights can be used on a Christmas tree that can be viewed from the street. I know of a town that does exactly that.

If anybody questions what I've posted, spend some time Googling images of Cape Cod. I don't mean places like Nantucket although I'm sure building is just as obnoxious there, I mean plain ol' places like Provincetown, Brewster, Hyannis and places like that. If anybody wants a even better feel for what it is like, go any real estate website of these places and look at things from that perspective. If you don't like Cape Cod, then Google whatever state on either coast that suits you and look at what their waterfronts look like.

It seems to be me that Maxis picked a bunch of different things that they like from various places and slapped them together.