I Can't Play The Sims 4 on Consoles
The Sims 4 is coming to consoles in November, and I'm probably going to keep myself from playing it.
I love loot games. I will happily play a Diablo, or a Borderlands, or a Path of Exile, or maybe even a Destiny for hours on end, doing the things and getting the stuff. I try to set some gentle limits on my time playing loot games so that I just don't play them forever.
The only genre I love as much as or perhaps even more than loot games....is The Sims.
I know that The Sims technically isn't its own genre. But I love its compelling mix of leveling up characters, unlocking and customizing things, and the endless delightful situations that can result from the slightly random and haphazard nature of its underlying simulations.
I loved the first game quite a bit on release, and spent a bunch of time in my sophomore chemistry class in high school discussing The Sims instead of discussing chemicals or whatever.
I didn't really play the second game.
It was the third game where these things became...a problem.
The Sims 3 added a dynamic city to the game. Before, you were basically dealing with one small instance full of virtual people at a time. But The Sims 3 turned the game into a more complicated Animal Crossing, with a fully simulated world/town/land you could explore and fill with little digital people.
This had the small drawback of hampering the performance of the game, a bit. But I found it endlessly compelling and playable. So I had to kind of stop myself from playing it.
This same game came to consoles in a slightly reduced form that I played for a weekend with a good friend before deciding that it was still a little too interesting for me to keep playing safely. He had the exact same reaction. So we quietly banished it from our lives in the name of productivity.
That reduced form inspired the basic design of The Sims 4. The graphics got better but the simulation got a little less complex, and that caused a big divide within the hardcore Sims community. At least, as I understand it. I don't really participate in this community because of my impulse control issues.
I should mention that The Sims 4 has a vast community around it, that rivals that of some of the biggest games of all time. It is a quiet sales monster, and it probably pulls in enough money to keep EA afloat all on its own, before you've even factored in all of their other successful games.
I'm sure that The Sims 4 will be great on the modern consoles. The sacrifices they made in the name of performance seem like they'll make it work perfectly on the current machines. And I'd really like to see how the game turns out.
But I'd also like to do other things with my life, thank you very much!
The Sims 4 is a really amazing and fun game, and I don't think you should play it unless you have incredibly good impulse control.
It's so fun you guys.