I know I said I was going to wait until 5 unique creators put Sims 4 lots onto MTS before I upload anything else, but that was in August and, in the intervening time, I've built 7 new lots that are completely upload-ready and all I have to do is press the button. Plus, the Gubler-Dochney Branch is a library, not a house. It's been my experience that Sims players will built a thousand houses before they build 1 community lot—probably something to do with the immediacy of a house; it's only a step away from occupancy—but they'll want to round out their neighbourhoods before long and, let's face it, the stock lots are just bad. It's been like this since The Sims 2; the developers make lots that are more ornamental than functional—which, I might point out, is completely antithetical to Will Wright's original design document for The Sims—which you have to be completely desperate to use at all, and even then, you'll probably spend about 2 hours of your life correcting their mistakes... I still have nightmares about the Bridgeport Public Library from The Sims 3: Late Night. The GDBL is a library that looks like a library; the kind of thing you want to put in your neighbourhood and you want to send your sims to. The Bridgeport Library was an interesting case, because it looked like a library from the outside, but when you got into it, it looked like some kind of fucked-up farmhouse or something. Turned wood, portraits of the aristocracy, and Swedish chairs do not brutalism make. Fortunately, even though it took me 8 hours to fix the thing to my liking (it's still lacking in certain things, but so is the game), I could save it to the bin so I could always have it to replace the stock building with when I made a new savefile. Whereas, the GDBL looks from the outside the way it looks inside. It's a plains modernist building, built in the '50s and modernised in the '90s. You can see that by just looking at the outside.
So, that's why I uploaded that lot. It's not a house, it's a type of place you want to have someone else build for you, and it looks good inside and out. Maybe I should just focus on community lots from this point. It's like I said, everyone builds houses; it's a core function of The Sims; but building good-looking community lots is a pain in the ass. On that note, there really does need to be more community furniture sourced from the '90s and the millennium; as it stands right now, you can only build that new-age gentrified shite in The Sims 4. It's not like it would be particularly difficult to just go back to The Sims: Hot Date and look at the downtown furniture, then replicate it for 4, or even have a look at the 1990s tags on Pinterest and Tumblr to see how things genuinely looked back then, and then make that. No offence to littledica, whose generosity with new furniture puts EA/Maxis to shame, but the Greasy Goods Stuff roomset is the only one that doesn't break the microcosm and is geared toward American-style fast food venues, and its aesthetic is exactly what I would expect from this new school of Boring Design. Where's the appeal? Where's the colour? What about this design could possibly appeal to children and families? I don't disagree with the overarching premise, but the colours and shapes are about as boring as my Neocities code editor. I've often considered that a 3D artist making stuff for The Sims 4 could just boot up The Sims Classic and go to town on it, making everything in the Newbie house, for instance, then moving on to the Goth house. Just, basically, rebuilding everything in The Sims from scratch for The Sims 4; not just the residential stuff, but the House Party, Hot Date, and Livin' It Up stuff, too.
As you can tell, I've spent a lot of time over the past couple months getting back into The Sims Classic, and it's such a better game than The Sims 4, it's unbelievable. For a start, it actually feels more like a game, less like a reality simulator. The Sims 4 tries to do too much and it ends up failing at everything, where The Sims Classic, by technical necessity, can only be one thing: a dollhouse. Players have to use their imaginations to infer more complicated social interactions when there are none. That's what made The Sims Story Exchange so popular; players had to use a combination of custom content, photo editing, and opportunistic screenshotting in order to create a story that made the game look far more complex than it was. As opposed to now, where the game is so impossibly complex that players don't even bother recounting their stories anymore. The Sims 4 doesn't even have an integrated story maker; EA arbitrarily decided that "oh, people don't do that kind of thing these days; they'd rather read a tweet." Now, obviously, that's patently false, but we'll just give this to The Sims 4 for the moment, as it really is not relevant here. Another problem with The Sims 4 is that the developers overestimated how much time they would need for motives to decay. Under normal circumstances, motive decay is nearly static; taking even a single snack acts upon Hunger like a full meal, sims are never sleepy when it's time for bed, and even the cheapest of televisions sends the Fun score skyrocketing to the point it doesn't need addressing again for a full game-day. The Sims Classic's motive decay was frequently lampooned for its tendency to empty the Bladder and Energy scores so frequently, all you seemed to do was use the loo and sleep on repeat. Obviously, then, as now, software updates occurred every time you installed a new expansion pack that would address motive decay, fine-tuning it to a more realistic level. There's another bit about Classic that was never translated to any other game in the franchise; more of an exploit, really: if you went to a community lot, went on holiday, went to Magic Town, or something, your home lot would freeze in time. You could stay at, say Barrett's Boardwalk (because I've been going there so much I've actually edited it to make it more suitable to my needs) for as long as you needed to raise your lagging social and fun motives. You could even take small junkfood meals there, like pizza and hotdogs, so you could stay there longer. And then, when your social motive was full, you could return home and it would be the same moment you left. This allows players to go to work, burn out, then go out on the town for 18 hours and still be able to go back to work the next day. I remember people complaining about this as unrealistic on the Sims BBS back in the day, but now, we take advantage of it, because we've all had our fill of realism in the intervening time.
Socialising is not as much of a problem in Classic as it is in, even, The Sims 2. In Classic, sims don't have memories. Not like "Just Moved In!" or "Met Mr. Right!" or something, but like "I had a bad conversation with Mordechai Townie and he doesn't want to talk to me anymore". The only blockage one has to socialising in Classic is one's own memories as the player of seeing sims socialise badly. Obviously, if you make smalltalk with someone frequently enough to see they always end the conversation prematurely because you're boring, you can infer these sims have nothing in common and you need to talk with someone different if you want to raise your social score; but, beyond that, sims will always be open to interaction with each other, regardless of what happened the last time they tried it. Again, the player's imagination is moving a story along that doesn't exist. 2, 3, and 4 try to make their own inferences and force story progression along where you may not necessarily need or want it to. I really don't care if River McIrish has a crush on my sim, I just want to raise my social score. I don't really care if Bob Pancakes caught me having a sapphic moment with Eliza, I would rather talk to him because he's got more interests in common with me than Eliza's got. See? It's a game!
Anyway, so I'm not interested in earnestly playing The Sims 4... there's about a million other people on the planet who are. Despite this, I will readily admit that I enjoy building in 4 much more than any other installment. So, I'll carry on building; but when I say "I'm playing The Sims", I'm talking about The Sims Classic.
--22 September 2023--