I know that it seems like the pastime of the Sims community these days is complaining about The Sims 4 and EA, and believe me, there is a LOT to criticize about EA. However we can't deny the fact that theres's something that draws us back to The Sims 4. Something that keeps us playing it despite all the complaints that we have about it. To me, as someone who's been writing SimLit since he was in high school, I find that TS4's sandbox-esque nature, decent looking sims, and various mods make this (in my honest opinion) a better storytelling tool/machinima maker than both TS2 and TS3 combined. But of course, that's just me personally. What about the rest of you?

Oh, my! You have opened up a can of worms, and TBH honest at the wrong place. IMO each version has had good and weak points. 3 is my fave but I do own some of 4 and have played it a bit. Nowhere near as much as I played the prior versions. I am not going to list my pros and cons for 4 as that has been done by me and many others many, many times already.

Put on your armor and get ready.....

Oh my goodness can we PLEASE not turn this into another thread where people rant on about how rubbish Sims 4 is. We have plenty of threads for that and it's really tiresome to have to keep scrolling past them in the recent posts feed.

I really like how they are still making content for this game, the new horses pack seems to have pleased a lot of people and opens up for some different storytelling. Although I'm not a fan of the art style, I have to admit it's all consistent and very colourful and clean. Players seem to love it!

The Sims 4 is the great-grandpa you're obligated to see a few times a year at family reunions. He's nice enough and offers you cookies but there's always this distinct awkwardness about him accompanied with the smell of urine.

On its merits are two of the best implementations to the franchise, that if the game over all was at least equal, dare imagine better, than its predecessors, it would make TS4 highly remarkable. Of course there's the multi-tasking, which really has set it apart from previous iterations. From release I absolutely loved this element, and that still holds true to this day. Mostly. The other implementation, not so well maintained as a "next gen" game feature, and so has become more of an annoyance, a real piece of shit, than the par excellence it could have been if Maxis gave it the respect and attention it deserves. The auto-solve buttons for each of the motives. First time for the franchise and a wonderful idea, - at the beginning - but since Maxis have not maintained it very well, by making sure the correct motive tabs are on the correct interaction xmls, it has steadily fallen into shit over the last nine years and is mostly chaotic, unless you actually enjoy watching your sims do the utterly wrong and unhelpful interactions to (not) solve their low motives. A genius thing, that could have evolved further - (With things like a memory inventory for dragging preferred motive solving objects into each motive "button" to really personalize it for each sim.) but turned to crud due to modern Maxis' sloppiness. That's Maxis, I guess.

I'm sure there are other noteworthy merits to mention, but it all gets lost in the hazy, shallow sloppiness of nine years of Maxis and monthly half-arsed patching - the patching being the most un-meritorious factor of all. Looked good on paper, and could have been genius in the right hands, but again, that's Maxis, I guess.

At least soon we'll get to see how other devs manage same thing, to see if it truly is as hectic, unmanageable and as detrimental to the game as Maxis made it. Perhaps Maxis did the best that anyone could have done. We'll soon know, if LBY and Paralives has anywhere near the same amount of growing errors as EA Help, after a couple of years of patching and DLCs, then I'll be the first in line to make an apology to Maxis. (Or more likely the first in line to start berating LBY and Paralives for same.)

It can make a good game for ASMR purposes, if you turn off/mod out most of the stings. I can't tell you how many times it made me pass out, especially sounds of the vanity makeup table in particular.

I agree. If TS4 was really as rubbish and terribad as people say it is, the community would have died a long time ago, but TS4's modding and CC community is bigger and more united than when TS3 was brand new. There's something that clearly makes TS4 tic for the sims community, whether its the sandbox nature of the game, the interactive drag and drop sliders, the ability to create a wide range of sims with different body types, the fact that it was made with Python to make it extra moddable...

Younger people and those who are new to the franchise seem to love it. I'm old and hence I have no idea what they see in it, so I just sit in my lawn chair and keep my mouth shut.

I will not say much, but I do like being able to move a whole building. I do like to be able to place a sconce at the height wanted or a window. I love some of the architectural components and wish some would be converted to 3, such as the New Orleans style items. And I love many others. I love the item then lose my patience with no CASt and things that do not match. OH, and I love to be able to resize things.

I like the graphics overall as I like them in 3. One is an apple and one is an orange. I like the expressions of the Sims in both games.
I will cut this off at this as both games have been compared a million times already. For me, each has some merits and each has some problems.

Yes, the resizing is something that I really like. Very useful and fun. I also like the CAS controls, dragging the face and body to sculpt seems quite intuitive. We don't have that in Sims 2!

I still like the way CAS is done better in 3 in some cases. There are things I can do in 3 and not as well in 4. But overall I like both systems.

Things I like about Sims 4:
- the way CAS, buy and build content is categorized, I like that there's one outfit/object shown and clicking on it reveals the other colors, that saves so much space compared to Sims 2 where in CAS you can have page after page of recolors of certain thing. It's genuinely my most wanted feature I wish could be modded in Sims 2.
- And while Sims 3 also had bodysliders I just like them more in Sims 4. (for face I liked the sliders from Sims 3 more though, it's sometimes hard to understand which direction something can be pulled or what part exactly you're affecting with your edits like, I keep trying to edit eyebrows and instead I'm accidentally changing the head size/shape -_- )
- Not to mention since the neighborhoods are premade and filled with set dressing it's extremely easy to just open the game, create a sim and hop in the game without having to build a whole neighborhood for it yourself. (Though the other side of the coin is that if you wanted to build a neighborhood of your own you can't and that sucks for all the builders)

Nowadays if I want to play something I just open Sims 4 since I don't need to think how to start it or what to do, just cause random chaos in the game and have fun with it. I used to hate this game and still dislike the art style but honestly, it still looks fresh and not outdated while many other as old games that went more realistic way look downright awful now.

+ special mention:

I do like the search. Miss that when in 3.

To everyone voting disagree, don't get it twisted, I still think there's a lot of valid reasons to criticize TS4 and EA as a whole. I'm just simply trying to find out on an individual level why people come back to TS4. I have my reasons, and others have theirs.

- Swimming pools don't look half bad.
- Aside from lack of customizability, base game streets look not that half bad.
- How you can filter and search up items in CAS and B&B without having to navigate through them.
- Water and electricity being shut off (although inclusion of repoman would amplify the consequences more imo) when you don't pay bills.

From my position outside look ing in(as I've never played Sims 4), it does seem to have some nice quality of life improvements that you'd expect from the 4th installment in the series.

Build mode seems like it's really easy to work with functionally. It may not necessarily have all the freedom of Sims 3 (like placing a lot anywhere, making your own map + neighborhood, the freedom to color objects, walls, and floors any texture you want, building more freely over water, etc) but being able to put a foundation on after you've already started building or picking up the house and moving it where ever is heckin cool. I've seen Sims 3 modders playing around with the functionality to be able to do that in Sims 3 so I'm quite looking forward to that.

The CAS seems intuitive too. I kinda like the sliders more because I can see the exact value or tweak exactly what I'm trying to tweak without hovering around and messing something else up, but the dragging system is still cool nonetheless.

Since I don't play the Sims 4, I know very little about Sims 4 mods. But I know the community is huge so all the power to them like, I'm glad they're able to make the game be the way they want it to be. I disagree with the sentiment that the community is so active because Sims 4 is overall "good". I think it's more like a Skyrim situation in that there's so many bugs and lacking features that modders are inspired to make the game playable and fun to play. Sims 4 is an awesome base to work with, moreso that Sims 2 or 3 probably? So it's no surprise that people who probably weren't even simmers before Sims 4 has gotten into it because it's more of a tool than a game.

There's no doubt about that that Sims 4 has polished up many of the tools introduced in Sims 2 and Sims 3 and I guess that's the nicest thing I can say about it overall.

I do not really think it is a matter of coming back to it. Most people did some research before they got it. I sure hope so. And then they like well enough to keep or they uninstall. As said, there is a large enough community to have kept this going all these years. A game with no merits would not have survived this long. It is a playable game and we can make what we want of it. Is it WOW??? IMO no, but is good enough to be fun for short periods. And gives us some variety vs. the prior versions.

Devil's advocate here, but when people complain about Skyrim I understand yet I also can't. In its vanilla state the game is so in-depth with so much coding and gameplay that it offers countless hours of enjoyment. The bugs are a pain but I understand how they snuck in there. The majority of the game is absolutely playable in base state. The game is also HUGE. This applies to most Bethesda games. They offer a massive world and a unique experience that varies so much from player to player that, to this day, I still play Oblivion – warts and all – and find new things in it. As a result I understand and am more tolerant of the coding hiccups involved. (I also adore Fallout 4 so I'm very accustomed to being set on fire for my opinions.)

Not to say Skyrim doesn't have problems either, but I feel like it's a different beast and should be treated as such. Down to its creation, launch, and subsequent modding scene.

The modding scene of Bethesda games are mostly built to embellish on features already there, rather than include things that SHOULD have been there to begin with. Here in lies the difference with The Sims 4.

The Sims 4 went through a troubling development process to say the least and doesn't even offer a quarter of a butt cheek to what Skyrim does in its base state. Of course, it's not fair to compare. But even with all the expansions, stuff packs, what-have-you, it's still a barebones-feeling experience and a struggle to find any kind of meaningful gameplay. It's restrictive, unintuitive, and relies on modders to fix basic things like washing dishes in a sink other than a bathroom. Not to say it doesn't do certain things really well. But I don't get the lack of chill around it. Why should we be grateful to EA/Maxis for giving us an interesting social experiment rather than something that gives us more enjoyment than frustration in our lives?

I.E. the definition of a video game. And this is coming from someone who loves games and does have a love-hate relationship with The Sims 4.

It's okay if you love it, and it's okay if you hate it. But I think it's damaging to everyone when we try and cover our eyes and pretend a company that focuses on doing nothing but the bare-minimum for its consumers is doing otherwise.

Ah, don't take any notice of the voting buttons in Sims 4 threads! Whenever there are disagrees I press the other buttons just to even out the colours a bit (and hopefully stop people from being upset).

Thats why I honestly think that creating The Sims 4 with Python was entirely by design. EA made TS4 extra moddable in order to get away with doing the least amount of work with each pack because "why should WE do it when we have a dedicated modding community doing our work for us?" And despite the fact that it's clearly lazy game design, the premise worked. TS4's script mods are absolutley insane compared to TS2's mods, literally adding major core gameplay elements, immersive gameplay changes, and hell Tmex is even working on TS4's equivalent to Create-A-World.

I also do it to annoy the people who take the buttons seriously. Feel free to click as many buttons as you like on my posts, it's all irrelevant.

I wish the site did not even have them TBH.

Amen! Can you say this louder for the people in the back?

There are plenty of threads on here which are dedicated to complaints about EA and Sims 4. For example, Why is EA so bad tho? and Why is Sims 4 getting so much hate? I think OP wanted to start a thread about the good things in Sims 4, rather than the bad. If anyone wants to talk about how crap the game is, they can go to one of the other threads.

More like a try-hard "hip with the kids" middle-aged aunt who insists on taking you shopping but rarely gets you what you want