Why the Sims 4 don't have universal release day for all?

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I download The Sims 4 Sims (legally, of course, by Origin because I bought a gre before the premiere:-)) I wonder if I'll have to wait until 4 that, in order to play it?
If so, then EA should be accused of breaking the European Convention of Human Rights, and specifically ban on torture:-)

It's cruel and unusual punishment especially for nerd like me
I love sims, i pre-order some time, i not know why the heck i boy it( i have financial slight problems i spend a loot during vacation) and i get my state university scholarship (social and for disability due AS in October when academic year start) but what it's done it's done i love SIMS.

I hope EA does not screw my up in A (i would use stronger word but i don't want be punished WP by admins LOL ) like they did with SimCity over year ago, I wonder why EA screwing the gamers they could to make the game accessible to all on September 1, and treat everyone with the same brush, or to make the game for all players on September 4?

Why are they doing this?

I have a question for those "lucky ones" who can play The Sims 4, how you judge this game from the perspective of the entire series?

I've been wondering myself how this one came out.

I very specifically DIDNT pre-order it though.

Why? The SimCity fiasco. THAT game was a freaking disaster, and it was all because of EA's greed. And it tainted Maxis' reputation forever.


As such I'm not getting my hopes up on Sims 4. I'm told that apparently the Sims community overall has not been very pleased at all over everything that has been shown about it up till now; supposedly it has less features than the base version of Sims 3 had, and is just outright missing some things that SHOULD logically be there from the start just so EA can sell them to you seperately later. Sadly, it's EXACTLY the sort of thing they would indeed do.

But we'll see. I'd love for it to actually turn out to be good, but.... eh. It's EA. Right now, they could screw up anything.

Haha no one is lucky to get this half-assed downgrade of a game early, I don't know how anybody can still be excited for this after all of the things they have taken out that were its game-making features.

I'm curious, what exactly is known to be missing from this one? I aint heard much in the way of specifics.

EA staggers a lot of their games (as do some other publishers). It's due mainly to commercial regulations where releasing games on specific days is intended to increase footfall in shops on a given day of the week. I *think* the US day is Tuesday, and UK Friday. The UK is (annoyingly) usually the last to get it.

My partner went to the game reveal by invite of EA at Redmond Studios in LA (we both make a lot of Sims custom content and are both well known in the community for that). She mostly loved the animations and the much improved character design tools, but it appears that the colour Create A Style tool we're now used to will be gone, replaced by fixed pattern swatches. There will be no large worlds (I think my partner said there is a maximum of 6 lots per 'base'. There are NO terrain editing tools. So forget trying to make urban worlds or anything else. Pools and toddlers are of course gone (this is well known). Lots now export as 7 individual files and it appears these are designed for direct export to the infamous viper's nest "The Exchange" (now to be called 'Gallery').

On a brighter note, EA will be supporting modding and files (from the Create A Sim demo) are being examined. It appears not too much has changed so custom content and mods should be available pretty quickly but, as the demo files will not be usable (the game content has since changed), it's unlikely that decent content will be available on launch day.

Personally, it looks disappointing to me. My guess is that EA is (again) gunning for a mobile version with hefty in-app purchases so the entire game has been downgraded in readiness. I may retire from content creating because I won't be able to make the zones I wish to make (industrial etc). I'll check out my partner's game (she has it for free from EA but it won't unlock until release) and make up my mind then.

Disappointing isnt even the half of it. It aint just pools and toddlers that are gone. Noooope. That wouldnt be EA enough.

There's a reason why I'd been holding back on pre-ordering this game myself, and why I've been constantly advising others to do the same, which is because I know full well just how far down the rabbit-hole of jackassery and greed goes with EA.

Allow me to present you with The List: http://ts4news.com/post/94541924952/89- ... the-sims-4


That's not just bad: That's downright pathetic.

I mean... good grief. Some of the things that are in there.... no cars? Though I guess there's NO OPEN WORLD to use the cars IN (and that's one of the worst ones).... no newspaper? What? The newspaper has been a game mechanic (for getting jobs and other stuff) since the very first game! EDIT: (Yay, nearsightedness! Originally I mentioned "no dishwashers", but I'd just read that one wrong on the list....sigh) No comfort stat? ........... I cant even manage a "what?" for that one. But I think the "no open world" bit and the problems with lots and assorted things in general are by far the worst.

It just gets worse and worse the more you read into it. And hell, some of these I hadnt even noticed originally... I'm looking at a few streams of the game very carefully to see if I can now spot the lack of certain things, and.... yeah, they're missing.... dunno HOW I'd missed the comfort-stat bit before.

THAT is why I didnt preorder. After the absolute greedsplosion that was Simcity 4 (which went right through "terrible" and out the other side), it had become clear to me that the original, wonderful developer that was Maxis was no more, having been replaced by a purely evil, zombie version of the corpse of that original development studio. All thanks to EA.

In other words.... if you want a good Sims experience.... it's already there. Sims 3. Grabbing number 4 looks to be just pandering to EA's foul greed.

NOTE: I should probably say this other bit here: My point in all of this isnt to try to tell you what you should or should not buy. My point is to try to help prevent people from buying into this, thinking theyll get one thing, yet ending up with something that doesnt match up to what they wanted.

And also, I try to encourage people to research things before purchasing. If you're interested in the game, look into it before buying, instead of doing what I did with SimCity and just grabbing it, expecting to be amazed without even REALLY looking into it. If you do look into it, and feel that the merits outweigh the problems, then by all means, go ahead!

And to some degree, take my negativity with a grain of salt. I'm aware I can come across as seeming to hate damn near everything and can be overly negative on some things, but.... well, there's reasons why I call myself "Misery", hah.


If you DO get the game, and have your own experiences with it to share... and particularly if you have experiences that somehow contradict the things in that list.... then by all means, share those too!

Well, because of my extremely random whims and mood swings and absolute inability to resist buying things at random, I decided to just get the blasted game to try it for myself. Particularly as, despite that list, I keep reading all sorts of very conflicting info and opinions on it.

Better to just have a go and see for myself!

I havent gone particularly far into it yet. It's a bit late in the.... day? Something. Nocturnal schedule here, so it's near bedtime for me. It downloaded quickly but I'd started the download a bit later than I should have.

Didnt help that I spent about 5 million years in the create-a-sim bit to put together a starting family. They got this part right, I can say that much. Creating the overall look of your Sims is pretty easy. It's also where you come up with personality/traits, which is somewhat similar yet still a bit different than the way Sims 3 did it. Alot of options for this part. And of course you can do things like create specific outfits for specific uses like formal, athletic, and whatever. It seems you can create new categories beyond that, but I'd already blown enough time on those as it is, so I didnt do that.

The "neighborhoods" bit is.... not at all what I'd been told. The bit about "5 lots"? Yes, that's true. What it's not really telling you is that it merely means it's 5 lots loaded at once.... and typically a bit more than just that. The word "neighborhood" is rather misleading. The overall "world" is kinda similar to that of Sims 3 (though alot less extraneous space), except that it's loaded in specific chunks like that. This bit, I understand: Sims 3 was very good but.... it was about as well optimized as something that broke before it was ever actually used. Seriously, that game CHUGGED. Chugged hard. For the most part, NOTHING runs slowly on this machine. Except Minecraft at times, which can be a buggy game. But the one that really stood out for that was in fact Sims 3. Granted, it was worth tolerating, but still, it was there. So THAT part, it makes perfect sense to me. You have the load times between specific sections of the area (or between different areas entirely, which the game calls "worlds" for some damn stupid reason, and which your Sims can travel between. You still have other buildings like a museum or gym or whatever. The one thing that seems to be a problem is that I dont think you can alter/build the non-house lots? I'm not sure about that bit. Didnt try it. All in all, there's definitely less space, but there's still outside places for your Sims to explore and interact with in alot of the same ways as before (such as wandering through nature areas looking for random things to pick up). There seems to be more random Sims wandering around than before. Even in just the area around the house, there's lots of Sims wandering around and doing who knows what.


Build mode you've probably already seen, easier to just look at videos than to have me explain it. It's very similar to how it was in 3, so no issues there.

Buy mode, there is no "create a style", which is an odd omission.... said to be due to quirks of the game engine (so says the devs anyway, that one cant really be proven). But most objects have quite a lot of different preset colors and patterns to pick from, more than 3 typically had, to balance this out a bit. Lots of your typical sorts of objects, though as with 3 some categories can be oddly barren, at least for now.

The mood/emotion system is the biggest change so far, and seems to affect every other aspect of the game. It's hard to explain just how it works, but it's alot more complicated than before, and very different. It's also MUCH harder to just outright control. Previously I found it pretty easy to keep Sims in moods I wanted them to be into. If I wanted them happy and social, easy to do it. Not so simple now. As such interactions between them tend to seem alot more dynamic. They dont always play out like you think they will, and it's all based on context, current emotions, traits... and so on. Sims might get into arguements, for example, and if you want to get them out of it, figuring out just how isnt so easy anymore. Interactions you choose could just make it worse, or just not quite work. There's really alot to this part and I havent entirely grasped it yet. I think it's good, though. They were right to emphasize this. You'd have to really see it for yourself though, I'm not good at explaining this one I think.

Buying "inventory" items is now totally different. In the last game if you wanted books, your Sims drove down to a bookstore, and you'd buy them there. With some of those buildings (like the supermarket) being the "rabbit-hole" type that you couldnt actually enter as a normal building. In this one, you just buy them in a very similar way to buy mode, though done by interacting with related objects. Bring up a list of things you can buy, be it books or food ingredients or whatever, and you just purchase and then plop them into the world (or into an inventory) as you do with buy-mode stuffs. This particular change, hmmmm.... on one hand, it's less time consuming. On the other hand, having Sims actually GO to the stores to buy items of this sort was a nice feature of the previous game. So this one, i"m not sure what to think on. Some will like it, some will hate it. It is, at least, perfectly functional.


That's as much as I've been able to experience so far. Too much time making the Sims and then arguing with build mode, and learning the basics in general. I will say that the game engine is less.... clunky. I aint noticed any glitches yet, but that doesnt mean there are none, of course. All in all, there's good parts to it, there's bad parts, there's bits I'm kinda neutral on... but it isnt the horrid disaster that had been described to me in absurd detail. That list up there though, is mostly accurate, even if some things arent quite right. Still, I've enjoyed my initial session with it.

It might have some real merit afterall. I am surprised.

Sounds much like real people in real life. I think I will buy the game just for the feature. Sims having emotions and acting differently in different situations? Isn't it a perfect tool to practice social situations and facial expressions for people like us? You can play the Sims and see what they act in different situation and then translate it to real life, real people. Sims are simplified version of real people so it could work. I wonder how accurate they made the artificial emotions... and if I would be able to create an autistic sim. It could be interesting to make one and try to get him into the simal social life.

Well this is the third game this year I was really excited for and lost all consideration of trying after seeing how disappointing they look. Minecraft for playstation 4 came out today and it still does not have dedicated servers. On the ps4. Yet the world is 36 times bigger than the ps3 version. And only 8 players in it. Booooorrringgg.

I'm pretty sure there was a thread from a while back about what we were going to think was going to be in this game. A couple people had rather... unenthusiastic comments about it. if I wasn't so lazy I'd go back and find it just to bring it up again say how bad it is now. And believe me, it is bad.

I just tried the demo...
Holy crap... what did they do? Where are all the good clothes? Why can't I modify color? My favorite part of creating a sim in Sims 3 was making unique clothes for her! Why do I have to choose from limited color range? Why black hair are not real black, just very dark gray? Why can't I make my own hair color? Why eye colors are so light? And why the sims look so ugly compared to the Sims 3? LOL I feel almost as if they returned to Sims 1, just with 3d. The characters and clothes look like made of plasticine. Sims3 dolls looked almost like real people compared to this.
I'm not buying it...

The "create a style" thing is what you're looking for, and that was removed.

Engine issue, I'm told. The previous game had about a bazillion things that were dragging it's already funky engine through the mud, and that's one of them. There'll still be community-made stuff and mods. I've nothing to say about it myself, I always ignored that feature in number 3. There was 10 bazillion different pieces of clothing and whatnot made by the community as it was, so seemed little reason for me to use effort, haha.


As for the look of the Sims themselves, that one seems to be very subjective. Some seem to really like it, some seem to really hate it. Me, I'm neutral on it. This style and the previous style seem equally good to my eyes.

sims 4 was pirated due to my gaming newsfeed announcement. shame. that game looks to cartooned. what is up with the cartoon look? sims should be basic designed like in the last games.

Sims 3 is still the best.
Sims 4 is more like Sims 2 in the way that traveling works, and it's annoying.
Create-a-Sim doesn't have color wheels anymore.
Create-a-Design is gone as well.
In order from okay to greatest, it goes Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 4, Sims 3.

I also would like to create an autistic Sima:-)

Sims 4 are good, though Sims 3 are in some parts better.
I ordered the game some time ago, now have some regrets because now I have no money, plus I play Sims instead write my master's thesis.

Now I wonder what will be the first DLC for The Sims 4, I'm sure EA will try to reinvent the wheels, and we will try to sell us crap that it is super modern

As I mess with it more I'm finding that the travelling part isnt even close to as much of an issue as it sounded like.

Why? Because the loading times are insignificant, but not just that. They're pretty much no longer than the amount of time it takes for a Sim to travel to... well, anywhere.... in Sims 3. Particularly when you consider that 3's engine would inevitably start choking on it's own pathetic existence as you moved through the world. 4's load times are.... very fast, actually.

So far, I'm quite enjoying the whole thing. The missing features arent nearly as bad as I had heard they would be. Typically, things that arent there that I'd gotten used to in the previous game are things that were actually from expansions. Most of the things from the base game are still around. Some are simply changed. Like the lack of a "comfort" stat in the Needs panel. It turns out it's actually still there... but is alot more complicated now, and is tied into the new "moods" system. Previously, the only true thing that actually mattered with the comfort stat was comfort scores on various objects such as chairs and beds. That's no longer true. Those things can still affect this (and ones that can cause it will say so in the description for the object; cheap beds, for instance, can give Sims back pain).... but so can WAY more other things. A crappy conversation can put them into an uncomfortable state, for instance. Or things like embarrassment, bad days at work/school, and all sorts of other things. Whole moods system is pretty complicated. Combined with the enhanced social interactions and such, that aspect of the game is turning out to be really as good as the devs kept saying it would be. Very, very good. The "comfort" change is a GOOD thing, not a bad one. Much to my great surprise.

There are two standout things that are missing for me: Number 1, not quite enough public lot types. Now, again, there are some that existed before that seriously just arent needed now. No supermarket, for instance... which is fine, as you still buy stuff like that with pretty much the same interface, just done at home. Which isnt any less interesting, since the supermarket wasnt a place you actually interacted with or went inside of anyway; it was just a big building that in reality had nothing inside it and was just a way to access the "buy" menu. But there's still some of the non rabbit-hole type buildings that could be added. Though the ones that are there are pretty good. And 2, not quite enough career choices. Needs to be more.

Previously I would have said "no cars" being an issue, but.... yeah, I'm sorry, but this method of travelling is just much less irritating, at least for someone as impatient and easily aggravated as I am. HOWEVER, the actual method of travelling is.... well, it makes no sense. I would have at least wanted to see a car come pick up my Sims from the house, as in previous versions, but instead.... they walk out, stand on the sidewalk, and.... teleport? They just fade out of existence. Or at least, that's what happens when they go to work/school. You dont see them do this if you are directly moving them to a different area in the world. But yeah, it looks bloody strange when they're off to work and such.


As for OTHER stuff, particularly at home there's plenty for your Sims to do, so that's not really a worry.

Also... the game engine JUST FREAKING WORKS. No chugging. NO CHUGGING. I'm almost in a state of total disbelief over this one. I'd gotten so used to Sims 3 nearly choking itself to death so consistently that it NOT doing it is a massive difference. It doesnt slow down, it doesnt randomly cough, it doesnt take 20 years to load, and things like that. This is a MAJOR improvement.


So far, actually pretty good, though there's definitely spots that could use working on. Overall though? I dont regret the purchase. Glad I decided to just give it a try myself instead of listening to all of the gloom & doom from many who hadnt actually even tried it...

Well, I was not planning to buy it but I still ended up with a copy - my mom seen the TV advertisement and decided I need the game (the emotion thing) so she gave me it as a gift...

As I supposed I hate that I can't create a style. As you might now I am obsessive with red-black color combination so I was always making my favorite sim clothes and room in this colors so it is a issue. Now I can't because the choice is limited, most red-black stuffs looks ugly and have parts of other colors, including blue, I hate blue. Btw. Is it me or the lightning in the green part of world got too much blue? The river and sky seem fluorescent blue and grass is too vivid green. Also, what is supposed to be white is light blue. Its unnatural. I wonder if it is the game feature or there is something wrong with my computer(but other games don't have so vivid colors...). Also, the Sims out of neighborhood range seem to wear only pants and bras, they get clothes once they enter the range. That's sick, lol.
I'm going to install new graphic card drivers today(they are a few months old), hope it helps.

The loading mechanism is also frustrating. I could deal with it if it was just for neighborhood but apparently every lot got its own loading too. I sent my sim to visit his neighbors house, boom, loading screen, bu the time it was loaded the neighbors apparently left the house (the game seems to play a few seconds in background while the loading screen is on). So I sent him back home. He went back, stand in front of his house and... boom, loading time. What the hell? I hope there is a way to create a mod for this. All houses in a neighborhood should be accessible to a sim there, not just the current lot and street...

But I must say one thing - the game is addicting. I don't like the graphic and gameplay but I still spent 8h playing straight yesterday (since I installed it till late at night) and today I woke up early thinking "I wanna play Sims4!". LOL Perhaps I want to find more weird features. The game is totally messed up.

Yesterday I created a family - nature loving mother, hot head father and loner child. At first I forgot to change relations of them and ended up with 3 "strangers" at home, I realized it once the "wife" refused to sleep in one bed with her "husband", went outside and didn't want to enter the house despite the fact she was sleepy, hungry and needed to pee. She ended up sleeping in front of the house, on her knees, with face on floor...

I decided to start over. I returned to main menu and created the same family but with correct family relations this time. The game told me there is a desert like part of city so I moved there - the colors were fine, good blue balance. And I got to play. It was fine. The family seemed quite happy. I bought a telescope (dame developers - what kind of idea is it to make a telescope bigger than the home?!) so loner child started to practice her mental skills while parents were doing whatever they wanted. They were multitasking. I honestly have no idea how it is possible to read a book and talk with someone at the same time but they were doing it... Oh well.

So their life continued for a lots of sim days. But then the woman got into argument with her hot head husband and went to bathroom to take a shower. At the same time her loner daughter decided she needs to pee. So she entered the restroom. She left as soon as she realized someone is taking a shower but she didn't seem bothered much. But the mother got mortified. She ended the shower and went to the garden, she started to harvest a plant. And then grim reaper appeared. Daugher and husband come to see whats going on. I was like "wtf?!". I made the husband beg the grim reaper for the woman life but he refused. Then I ended up with grave in garden and a mourning guy, crying like a baby wherever he went. And the kid? She didn't give a damn, no negative emotion at all. More - she got happy... She went straight up to the grim reaper and started to make friendly interactions with him, despite being a loner. Now she has the grim reaper on her cell phone and she can talk to him anytime.
Honestly... What a messed up game. Mother committing suicide by eating some weird plants because her socially awkward, child age daughter seen her naked when she was taking a shower...