Some time ago, I mentioned I was going to give The Sims 4 more of an earnest go. At the time, all I was doing was building and making sims, I wasn't actually playing the game in any sense of the phrase. Well, since I said that, I carried on building and making sims as normal without actually playing the game all that much. I did decide to conduct a routing test to see if the furnishing style I tend to use in my buildings will actually work by building a very small house and putting a sim in it. It seemed to go okay, insofar as she didn't have any problems navigating around her house, despite its insanely small size (a 6x6 square), but I found another thing I wasn't prepared for: the game's free will AI system (unrelated to generative AI, I might point out) has essentially made human control obsolete. All the way up to The Sims 3, you could let go of the reins every so often, but sims had a difficult time understanding how to plan for their future, so they wouldn't detect that one of their motives was about to go into the low range until it was almost too late to do anything about it. In TS4, sims are constantly aware of their own needs and will use variables based on their traits to decide how to proceed. This made Tammy's house feel much too cramped, I don't know why.
That was last year sometime that I actually played. I sent Tammy to the Gubler-Dochney Branch Library, had her visit the Gazebo Park, and certainly tool about the house a lot. I decided that her house was an obstacle for me. It was just too small. It didn't feel right to kick her off the lot and start again from nothing, so I just quit. I recall around about the same time, I also moved a household of 4 men into Tract-o-Rama (you know, before I decided that the Fairisle family would be better off in that house). I decided to only control 1 of the 4 sims, whose name I can't recall offhand, and let the other 3 control themselves. They just weren't compelling enough to carry on with, I'm sorry to say, and I abandoned them.
Yesterday, for whatever reason, I decided to reload Tammy Rosenberg's house, deciding that she absolutely needed a larger house. So, I moved her deck chair onto the lawn and had her sit in it while I emptied the house's contents onto the lawn and rebuilt the house. It still isn't great, but it's better than a 6x6 square. I like Tammy as a character. She's compelling enough to put into the new story. However, I simply didn't like playing the game. It feels like the game has decided that I'm going to play it wrong, so it's playing itself for me. I grew up with The Sims 1, right. I have major control issues when it comes to The Sims, and to have the game decide it's better at making decisions than I am is more frustrating than I thought.
I guess, the worst part of this is, The Sims 4 is an 11-year-old game! For some people, it's the only exposure they've ever had to The Sims, now that there's no unique home console version anymore. Let's not skip over that bit: the GameCube, PS2, and Xbox did have a game that was called The Sims, but it was not the same as the PC version. What you see on the PS2 longplay is not what the PC version looked like. In fact, until The Sims 3, none of the console versions looked like the PC version. The Sims 3 was a watered-down version of the PC game by that title, with ugly graphics and uglier object design that didn't let you build houses. What I'm getting at is, by having The Sims 4 be your only exposure to The Sims, you'll be accustomed to the game making your decisions for you. You won't develop that feeling of being God that is so integral to The Sims experience. Sure, free will can be turned off or throttled, but why do that? I don't know anyone who does that.
There's one other grievance I've wanted to air about The Sims 4 for quite a while: it keeps track of small, stupid things, including how many times a sim obeys "Go Here" commands. This makes a certain kind of player unwilling to tell sims to "Go Here" at all, so it's no wonder why storytelling has dropped off. I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who has a problem with that. But, all things considered, it feels like The Sims 4 is an attempt by a giant multinational corporation to get consumers to accept things that they don't need to accept. Not just content-wise (don't get me started on how much The Sims 1 core game had that you either had to pay extra for or live without in the entire expanded Sims 4, we'll be here all day), but in life. By controlling your sims' every move, you were able to play in the game. Not just "play the game", but "play in the game". As one would play in a sandbox, you play in the game. You were afforded a level of control that should be expected of a videogame. However, by letting the game tell you to sit back and let it make the choices for you, it's grooming you to accept decisions made by others in all other facets of your life. It's grooming you to accept the decisions of AI, to accept things won't happen like you want them to. By counting the number of Go Here's obeyed, it's grooming you to accept that all your actions are being monitored and there's a database somewhere detailing everything you do every day.
Basically, The Sims 4 isn't The Sims in any way other than name. Whatever "Project Rene" ends up being will be a disappointing genAI-driven lootbox shitfest, and The Sims will die.