Alright after having played it for a day, here's my thoughts. I haven't read any reviews or forums or any of that stupid bullshit so this is 100% my experience. I may be wrong on some things cause of that.

Overall this is pretty good for a base game. They have the tone set up and, most importantly, they made the basic things fun. Once they start adding more features with expansions, I think it's gonna turn out pretty great. They're still greedy money whores for leaving things incomplete for the sake of selling expansions, but whatever. I'm not going to cry on my keyboard about not being able to swim like many others are. And I'm more than likely going to ARRRR them all anyway so it'd be silly for me to pout over stuff like this.

There's a LOT of shit I haven't touched yet either like the room creator or anything in build mode really. Mainly cause I've heard build mode is what causes the most amount of crashes right now so I've been avoiding it (:

PROS

- Multi-tasking. Probably the best feature in the game by far. Makes interacting and talking way easier than ever before in the series. Usually when you wanted to build relationships you had to drop everything so that you can use all the different chat options. In this game you can pretty much talk to anyone while doing something. Saves so much time and makes social interaction much less of a chore, which it should never be.

- Create-A-Sim is very advanced and everyone actually ends up looking different, including NPCs, which is a first. Also black people actually look like black people for the first time in the series. Hooray.

- Emotions. Not sure if it's something to hype the ENTIRE GAME over but it is a very good feature to have and keeps things interesting, especially on the social aspect of the game which has always been so repetitive.

- Binned families appearing in the world as townies. There has always been "homeless" Sims, but it's always been premade EA townies. The ones we make only appear when they live somewhere. This is actually pretty huge for me because I like having full, lively towns filled with people I make as opposed to the randoms. But I don't ever intend to play as all of them and don't exactly want a town filled with houses I'll never touch. So to be able to virtually make a full bin of people I only intend to be townies is awesome. Especially to make up for the lack of actual houses in the game.

- The removal of the "x thinks y is being z" bar. I don't know what it was officially called, but basically the bar that wouldn't allow you to do certain interactions until you did a certain combination. For instance you had to do a bunch of romantic stuff before you could do Woo-Hoo which was pretty fucking stupid for married couples. It would always take a few hours of talking to be able to do anything worthwhile on the social aspect, even with friends.

- A separate bar for romance from friends. This actually makes wooing people challenging. Previous games everyone was a giant slut once you were friends with them, even unflirty ones. Now a friendzone actually exists to a point.

- The removal of car pools, school busses and other such things. I'm positive many people are bitching about this but I am in love with it. One of the most annoying things dating all the way back to the very first game was that mad rush to get everyone out the door and into the car pool or school bus and people stamping their feet when they couldn't figure out how to accomplish this task when someone was in the way. Not to mention the constant BEEP BEEP for an hour each day when I didn't want to go out right away. Now all they do is walk out the door and disappear. Much better. Is there really much novelty to seeing people enter a car and drive off? One of the prime examples that realism =/= fun.

- All the different towns being able to be accessed and interacted with in the same save. Not such a big thing now but once expansions start rolling through it's gonna be great.

- High bills tbqh. Another thing a lot of people are surely bitching about but seriously, the game needs to be hard again by keeping us in check. There's a sense of strategy here now which I really like. TS3 was ridiculously easy. Literally every household I played could have a dream house mansion built for them within a few days. And even then, the bills were but a drop in the ocean every time. Especially after the super cheap no bills ever aspiration reward.

CONS:

- Tiny ass world. There's two areas and both of them fit entirely on the screen. With the removal of open world, I figured they would replace the huge area dedicated to rabbit holes with more options for residential and community lots. Nooope. There's only a couple of blank spots to build on and there doesn't seem to be any way to make other areas of the city playable. Very disappointing.

- No color wheel. I bitched about this already. Why?

- No age modifier. WHY the fuck would you remove this?! Especially with global aging turned off, it makes zero sense to make it so we can't edit how long the life spans are. And now they've made it Short-Normal-Long. I personally find the gap between them ridiculous. And now that they decided to scrap Toddler for no obvious reason, I foresee some serious leveling issues with aging. I wish we could fine tune it how we want it.

- Clothing choices are an absolute joke. I like how in hat options, one of the style filters looks like a beanie and then there isn't even a beanie that's available to wear.

- A measly three radio stations and they all suck. I usually like having the radio blast as background noise. Not in this game. The Sims 1 had more choices in radio stations. C'mon.

- Origin having to be left on when it's already a RAM eater is annoying as fuck.

- The tutorials are annoying. I can understand giving me a tutorial when a certain situation happens. Fine, whatever. But I was playing as the Goth's and like a day or two into their playthrough the game suddenly decides that it's going to teach me about needs. Cause obviously playing a full day with them, I haven't figured out they need to sleep and eat. But they don't just tell me that I need to take care of them, no, they decide to completely lower Mortimer's hygiene stat while he was in the middle of writing a book so that they can teach me that he needs to take a shower. Just... no. Stop it.

Build mode causes crashes? That's upsetting :( Building houses is one of my favorite parts.

I might arr this soon now that i've read all this.

btw were there at least other clothing choices in the full game than there were in the cas demo?

I'm interested in boarding a ship bound for plunder.

Could you PM me a link KC?

I would also like to partake

Unfortunately the one I got was already deleted. It was originally a sketchy polish one that I had to translate. I think the current ones that are up now are working. They're just a pain in the ass to get working due to all the extra shit we gotta do to fool Origin to look the other way.

And build mode crashes in pirated versions from what I understand. I just remember seeing comments from people bitching about placing doors causing an immediate crash. I've since built a terrible house since then and I haven't crashed once. I haven't even noticed a bug of any kind thus far. On that note, the floor options are a joke. There are a total of two textures for carpet with 8 colors each. Nice. Also they've seem to have gotten rid of auto-roof for whatever reason which has been a nightmare for me.

And I have no idea. I already uninstalled the demo so I can't double check. It does seem like there is more. More hair too I believe.

Ah, that's fine. Maybe it's for the best, I'm sure I would be one of the ones that experiences a crash anytime I breathe in the general direction of my PC.

I'm going to have to arr this as soon as possible. Most of what I've seen is a bunch of people bitching about pools and toddlers and then they refuse to talk about what's good because they're so convicted it's an evil game.

I got a cracked version installed, but when i try to play, it prompts me to put in the activation code on Origin. Did it do that to you, KC?

Moose @ 8/9/2014 18:44

I got a cracked version installed, but when i try to play, it prompts me to put in the activation code on Origin. Did it do that to you, KC?

You gotta open up Origin and turn it offline

KC @ 8/9/2014 7:50

- High bills tbqh. Another thing a lot of people are surely bitching about but seriously, the game needs to be hard again by keeping us in check. There's a sense of strategy here now which I really like. TS3 was ridiculously easy. Literally every household I played could have a dream house mansion built for them within a few days. And even then, the bills were but a drop in the ocean every time. Especially after the super cheap no bills ever aspiration reward. .

Perfect example of this:

There's this family of five, including a kid and two elders, who live in the biggest and most expensive house of the game. And not a single one of those motherfuckers has a job and their skills are all laughably low. Normally there'd be absolutely no point in playing with these people cause their large income would make them set for life, job or no job. But bills will keep the rich in check so if you have money but no income, it makes this family by far the hardest family to play with in the whole game as it's impossible to turn a profit right away.

This is going to make dynasty games a bitch, but so much fun. Usually once I got the dream mansion built, the kids who grew up never really had to work again as there was nothing that could take their house away. Now the trust fund babies have to actually live up their parents reputation or they will lose mommy and daddy's fortune within a few weeks.

GOOD

Though I've always sucked at making money if I had to do it legitimately and not just abuse one of the broken systems from the expansions (like consignment and Midas potions and Tiberium mining and it with the gem cutter)

That's going to be really interesting when I play as a sim working from the ground up. Literally. I like to start out with nothing and have my sim work for everything.

Yeah the side money-making stuff might be necessary in this game. I was kind of baffled why Artist and Writer were an occupation at first but now I understand it as there's probably no way to survive off simply painting and writing books like you could in TS3.

Moose @ 8/9/2014 21:12

That's going to be really interesting when I play as a sim working from the ground up. Literally. I like to start out with nothing and have my sim work for everything.

I do the same thing. Bills don't seem to be too bad when you're poor. It's income and asset based. So if you're rich but keep a cheap house, your bills stay reasonable so long everyone in the house is contributing to the income. It's when you start going all out on big screen TVs and party rooms when things get crazy.

I'm still gonna wait until there's a sale or something, but the game's starting to sound slightly less shitty.