Don't buy The Sims 4.

[mike9606]

And now the arm-twisting begins it seems...

sims 4 developer warns there wont be a sims 5 if this one doesnt sell

So it seems that EA is forcing people to buy the Sims 4 -A downgrade from the Sims 3 basically- if they want more Sims stuff. I'm not really that surprised honestly.

[Godot]

Honestly ... AFAIK SIms 3 with its Sims store and lots of EPs and SPs was a cash cow for EA.

EAs own fault if they make a Sims 5 dependant on how well Sims 4 sells.

As for Sims 4 itself ...

According to this sourse: http://ts4news.com/post/94541924952/89-features-missing-from-the-sims-4

Sims 4 doesn´t contain story progression of non active households.

Reason enough for me to not buy Sims 4 .... without story progression I can as well play Sims 2, as I haven´t read about anything in Sims 4 vanilla that would let me prefer it over Sims 2 or Sims 3 with all of their Expansions.

[Thomas988]

EA used to be awesome when I was a kid! SimCity 4 was the BOMB! What happened? Why must their games be so awful now?

[Kryten]

SimX games were developed by Maxis, not EA. EA bought Maxis, but they stayed a separate studio at a seperate location until 2004-SC4 was the last game they made. Now it's just a husk, with the IP of maxis but none of the original employees.

[Aningaaq]

I've been disappointed by many games and Sims 4 isn't one of them so far. Worth the cash? I guess that depends on you. But then again...this is coming from someone who only played the original Sims game and is now playing 4. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing but...I'm having fun. Better than the cash I wasted on a game like DayZ.

[Whirligig Girl]

Someone ought to make an open-source sims-ish game in Unity.

[Kinglet]

EA used to be awesome when I was a kid! SimCity 4 was the BOMB! What happened? Why must their games be so awful now?

Because caring is a non-rewarding human behavior. There is no real reason why you could not just make terrible games to make money.

[Randox]

I think EA got stuck between a rock and a hard place.

A sizeable portion of the market is still using 32 bit systems that can't possibly run a 64 bit program, which means Sims 4 will only have the benefit of more powerful processors and GPU's, not more RAM. The problem is that Sims 3 is already bashing into that limit head on, and to make Sims 4 a prettier game than Sims 3 will require larger assets that require more RAM, which EA doesn't have. So, there are a bunch of features, like the open world, and apparently water (actually does make sense. Water is expensive for computers), that had to go because they needed to find a way to free up RAM.

Other limitations are probably a result of the rampant bug issues with Sims 3. And I do mean rampant. The bugs in that game will literally errode the stability of your save files over time, and it takes a suite of mods to both combat the effect and deal with the damage to keep older save files from crashing all the time. I still move from town to town via clipboard from time to time to get my families into new, clean, and stable save files when the hours start getting to them.

So they have found themselves stuck between market share and a feasible system on which to create the game, and it's a problem I expect to see more of over the next year or two as people finish moving over to 64 bit systems, and hopefully getting large SSD's for their games (I've not donethis yet) to avoid crippling loading times.

Edited September 9, 2014 by Randox

[Kinglet]

I think EA got stuck between a rock and a hard place.

A sizeable portion of the market is still using 32 bit systems that can't possibly run a 64 bit program, which means Sims 4 will only have the benefit of more powerful processors and GPU's, not more RAM. The problem is that Sims 3 is already bashing into that limit head on, and to make Sims 4 a prettier game than Sims 3 will require larger assets that require more RAM, which EA doesn't have. So, there are a bunch of features, like the open world, and apparently water (actually does make sense. Water is expensive for computers), that had to go because they needed to find a way to free up RAM.

Other limitations are probably a result of the rampant bug issues with Sims 3. And I do mean rampant. The bugs in that game will literally errode the stability of your save files over time, and it takes a suite of mods to both combat the effect and deal with the damage to keep older save files from crashing all the time. I still move from town to town via clipboard from time to time to get my families into new, clean, and stable save files when the hours start getting to them.

So they have found themselves stuck between market share and a feasible system on which to create the game, and it's a problem I expect to see more of over the next year or two as people finish moving over to 64 bit systems, and hopefully getting large SSD's for their games (I've not donethis yet) to avoid crippling loading times.

Most video game developers need to stop supporting 32 bit. It is getting way too old already.

[Godot]

...

Other limitations are probably a result of the rampant bug issues with Sims 3. And I do mean rampant. ...

The sad thing about this is, that a single modder, Twallan, managed to fix more issues and add more features in Sims 3,

than the Sims 3 team was able to

(unfortunately he quit modding due to personal reasons, so he won´t be around to fix issues Sims 4 may have (or add new features))

[Randox]

The sad thing about this is, that a single modder, Twallan, managed to fix more issues and add more features in Sims 3,

than the Sims 3 team was able to

(unfortunately he quit modding due to personal reasons, so he won´t be around to fix issues Sims 4 may have (or add new features))

For sure. Twallan is the only reason my primary game hasn't long since folded in on itself as a mangled pile of bugs and crashing (my primary save is 200+ hours across 4 save files and growing), and a lot of the features he added are fantastic.

Oh, and I tallied up the Steam Hardware Survey results for August. 64 bit systems account for 76.01% of windows operating systems surveyed, which does leave a massive market chunk out of the picture. I do think though that with SSD's becoming cheap and large at the same time, now would be a good time to get more 64 bit games out there. I think without the cheap SSD's it was always impractical because of the absolutely crippling load times you would get with large games, but I think all the technology is in place now.

[Capt.Joseph Kerbertson]

Coming Soon* DLC content from EA for Sims 4. Pools. Yes that's right.

[StrandedonEarth]

Water is expensive for computers

Oh man! Did you ever see the water (or at least the rivers) in Star Wars Galaxies, when it was first released? It was simply gorgeous, so much so that I wanted to dive in! Too bad Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) totally borked that game and destroyed many players' hard work and achievements (including mine). They must have been hanging around the EA studios too much.

[GreeningGalaxy]

We had a thread about this a month or so back. I posted that same list if missing features. Screw EA and everything they stand for. There the scum of the video game industry. What would it take for a significant boycott?

It would require people to stop liking their games. Which is impossible, because although they do so in the stupidest way possible, they do put out some rather good ones. The worst companies in capitalism (besides the obvious answer of ALL the companies) are not the ones that sell bad products, because those just don't get any customers. The worst ones are the ones that sell good or absolutely necessary products, but make you suffer excruciating pain in order to get them. See: EA, banks, the entire USA health care system, oil companies (which sort of fall into this list, but are mostly evil for a whole different bunch of reasons) and cell phone/internet service providers.

[Randox]

Small digression...

Throw Ubisoft on that list. Ubisoft is unfortunately an incredibly talented game developer, and I am 100% convinced that the company has never done anything that wasn't backed by a positive cost benefit analysis. In particular, they are notorious for not even acknowledging bugs in their game once the initial sales boom dies down (and I think banning people from their forums who get too insistent that bugs do infact exist). Once you give them your money, they are no longer interested in any kind of customer service, yet they still make piles of money because they are consistently a top developer who turns out nothing but top notch games.

I never even heard of Star Wars Galaxies until after Sony was done destroying it, though I did find a screenshot of it, and it looks pretty nice even by modern standards, and incredible by the standards of the time.

[GreeningGalaxy]

Ubisoft... are they the ones who made up bullsh[ ] excuses for not making it possible to play as a woman in Assassin's Creed?

Yeah, there are a lot of crap companies out there like that. I'm not really keeping a comprehensive list of every awful company ever, because there are probably too many to count. But I mean, yes, Ubisoft sounds/is terrible.

[DJEN]

Indeed, communication and respect are key to making good games.