Leaving CASt out of the game is a really stupid move. I want EA to give me a good incentive to purchase a base game Sims 4. Right now, I have TS3 with 9 expansions ... full CASt, pets, seasons, a million career choices, vampires, mermaids and (buggy) houseboats. Why the heck would I want to trade all that for Sims 4 if they won't even bother including CASt in it? They need to give me an incentive for buying beyond saying "But they have more EMOTIONS!!!" I really, really wanted to be excited about Sims 4, but if there is no CASt, I won't buy it at all.

Agreed. Leaving out CASt would be one of the biggest and most stupid move EA could make. We need to be able to customize our simmies clothes without having to go back into Sims 2 style aka seperate custom files. Same goes for furniture, etc.

Of course they did. They needed the time and resources to work on the "majestic peeing" or whatever crap that was. I'm really pissed off.

How would CAST work with a game slated to be MMO? I'm guessing they just don't have enough time and budget left to work it in for a single-player game.

I never really tried out CAST very much since I just never got into TS3 but I can imagine the frustration and letdown, like I felt when I saw what they did to my favorite life stages (infants thru teens). Seems CAST was a major attraction of Sims 3 like genetics and family play were in Sims 2, so it makes perfect EA-sense to drop it. It seems they are marketing the latest installment to a much different audience and for some reason they assume this means dumbing down and watering down all the coolest features.

I don't really care either. Like LittleMrs I find the tool overwhelming. I find it a pain to use. And honestly, I hate TS3 so much that I'd rather nothing in TS4 remind me of it.

*ducks the rotten vegetable projectiles*

BUT!...

If it were up to me, I'd put CAST in, and I think it's RIDICULOUS if they've actually gotten rid of it because it was such a popular feature and allowed almost limitless customization. A lot of people love CAST and expect it now, so why the fuck would they remove it when you're trying to improve on what they're given us in the past? But, I guess that's EA for you. Full of the worst ideas.

Didn't think they'd be so stupid as to not give us proper genetics or one-sided relationships from TS2 in TS3 either.

I agree: an answer as to WHY would be nice, but I'm sure we'll just hear some BS about how there wasn't time to add it as much as they would have loved to--typical EA garbage excuses.

Anyway.

This isn't exactly a confirmation that CAST won't be in the game. "At the moment we are not planning to..." doesn't mean, "It's not happening." It doesn't bode well, but I clicked this thread thinking there was a new statement saying "CAST WILL NOT BE IN THE SIMS 4." I've already read the "not planning to" statement and I wouldn't call that a definite confirmation. Supposedly Sims 4 is in super dee duper pre pre pre alpha and they're listening to our outrage and doing their best to appease us.

Riiiight.

While I agree with the entirety of your post, those are also BS excuses. Not enough time? Then delay it. It's not like we will disintegrate if we don't get the sims 4 in 2014. GTA5 was delayed for 6 months, and I bet you that that game will still sell like hot cakes. As for budget, I'm inclined to call BS too, since they charge a ton of suckers 40 dollars at the store for a premium world with the sims 3 already. And even if so, they can easily make 5 times what they invest into it if the game is just decent, this game's fanbase is huge. So if they need a bigger budget, then get it.

But we know EA, they just want to release another version of their cash cow as fast as possible because they know that even if the game is the most horrible thing to ever disgrace the world with it's presence, there's still enough rabid fans to make a profit off of it. Of course, that will ruin profits for expansions and the sims 5, but who cares about the future. Who do you think EA is, a business?

What makes me mad is, if this was intended as an mmo like everyone keeps saying it was, then just complete it and release it like it was planned. Just call it the sims mmo or whatever, and then go back to making the real sims 4 for us players that want the sims to be a complete offline experience.

Maybe there were people who complained about how long it took to load all the patterns? Or maybe some saw it as a waste of time?

CAST was overwhelming for me to use at first (so many patterns, so many colors!) but after using it for a while, I realised you could literally do whatever design you wanted. You weren't stuck having to choose between three or four kid's wallpaper for that baby room you made, or keep using the same generic baby blue for boys and pink for girls. You want to make a goth/punk rocker teen? Go ahead! Make their bedrooms full of dark colors and skulls and crossbones.

I doubt that TS3 was so buggy because all EA focused on was CAST instead of gameplay design. Maybe it was due to the majority just not liking the option? Afterall, EA probably mostly listens to people at TS3.com instead of us here or every other site dedicated to the sims. Remember guys, we're the "hardcore players" of the Sims fanbase which probably assumes that most people are casual players who want simplicity, not depth. (Not that there's anything wrong with that)

I think the majority of people who actually stuck with Sims 3 liked CasT. A lot of the comments here come from people who continued to play Sims 2, which is perfectly fine, but they did not use the tool as much as some of us did. I realize that some people do not like CasT or simply never really needed to use it, but for many of us, it is a very important tool in Sims 3.

I honestly wish they would just scrap the entire fricken EMOTIONS idea and redesign the game so that it doesn't end up STUPID. I'd happily wait another full year or more, if it meant we'd get the perfect game they claim they so much want to offer us.

It was the first thing that drew me into the game - it's like having a magic coloring book.

I'm curious, what would you rather they put in if they didn't put in emotions?

Sims have always had emotions. The only difference now is listening to violin music will drive them to cut themselves. This was a stupid selling point from the start. Compare it to the others in the series:

The Sims 1: Create your own families and houses.
The Sims 2: MEGA improved graphics and now your sims can age from baby to elder.
The Sims 3: Open neighborhoods and the ability to recolor and re-texture clothes and items without having to download custom content
The Sims 4: ....your sim's bedroom is red....that means they're mad....oh and you can drag and click body parts....I guess that's a thing now too....isn't that awesome?

Anything would have been better than the focus they're putting on these stupid emotions! A built in CAW would have been a nice selling point. Even if the world isn't open anymore!

It's actually pretty funny when we're all like "Oh, it's EA, they'll get much smarter when releasing TS4. They will hear everything we say; there'll be no EPs, all the options we'll ever want will already be in the base game, and everything will be magical."

After a few weeks after the initial rumours we're suddenly shocked by the game's design... it's either too cartoonish or too real or too... TS3-like.

Then the real shit starts where EA either starts cutting off features we liked or they start adding features we'd never use; or even they start ruining the game that looked perfectly fine before. Of course, they start doing that after the preorders.

Soon after that, the initial doubts that there will actually be some EPs comes up. We're starting to give up from all the happiness we had back when the initial rumours about the base game started, and we start to worry whether we'll buy/enjoy the game at all.

Finally, a few weeks before the actual release of the game, we're all "EA, screw you. You will not be getting my money, simply because you release half-baked games and its features."

Once the game is out, we buy it and mod the shit out of it, and after that we've come to the final quarter of circle of EA. During that final quarter EA will be releasing more and more EPs, ruin our high-end computers more and more, and the entire community will put pressure on mod creators more and more.

At the end of the circle, here comes another TS game. Aww.

... Just so you know, when you hold shift while typing ts4 you get TS$. Lolz.

Me, I'd like them to include all the best features from each game and improve on them. Keep the cartoonish look, because at least it does away with the pudding faces and is lighter on system with low specs. And then, make the thing stable and actually work, not filled with bugs and glitches that you leave the modders to fix or just call it a "feature", or make stupid excuses for them.

The Sims 4: Everything you've ever liked on the series in this one game, improved and actually working!
Not too bad of a slogan.

Nobody on this forum has EVER been that hopeful lol



If there's anything those graphics have been accused of, it certainly wasn't of being "too real" or too close to TS3



Unfortunately, I completely agree with you on that, only because it's happened before. Without mods, The Sims 3 was totally unplayable. But once Twallan came into the picture, the game became just as addicting as The Sims 2. I'm hoping our modders can do that again for TS4 but at the same time I hope they don't. If the TS4 mods are good enough to get people to buy the game then EA wins yet again and they'll be free to fuck up TS5 all they want. "It wont matter" They'll say "Those fantastic modders will just do the work of making a good game for us. Meanwhile we get all the money and credit for their hard work. Everybody wins."

I'm mostly a TS2er, though I did play TS3 for a while, and CASt is the only I really miss about TS3 (there are couple of smaller things that would be nice to have from TS3, but they aren't major to me).

Woah! Whoever thought any of that?



Hahah, I thought the SAME THING earlier when posting in this very thread. I accidentally typed TS$ and I thought, yeah, makes sense. Almost left the typo there.

I know for a fact that there was many people who complained about the Sims being like robots and having not enough emotion. Heck, I was one of them. Imo, instead of going forward in Sims 3 with this we went backward. Actually backward with emotion/interactions/details but forwards in regards to open world and CAS.

So, I think about what else they really could've done to bring the next level into the series. Emotions, interactions and multi-tasking does seem like the logical step to me. Now whether they will deliver is a whole other thing.

Maybe he was talking about the people from the official sims forums?

CasT is the number one reason I could not go back TS2. I love making period worlds and it was so much easier when I could paint a bathtub to look like wood or a sink to look like tin. It was so easy to grunge up stuff. I could even take a fridge and make it look like a cupboard with the right patterns.

lil bag2, I haven't only been making references to TS4. I was also saying how we were while TS3 rumours were around (though, I only joined the forums back then, so I've might exaggerated a little bit). :P

Okay yeah. The Sims in TS3 were about as emotional and lifelike as my pet rock, even with moodlets and free will turned all the way up. I'll give you that. But that doesn't warrant the decision to focus solely on emotions in the next installment. Give them the same liveliness they had in the first two and then move on to real gameplay mechanics. Don't make emotions the whole point of your game and then omit things that the fans actually asked for. Or, in CASt, case something that you knew the fans would throw a shit storm over.

Like many people here, CASt (and the Supernatural EP) are the reasons I switched over to TS3 in the first place. It's helped me out soooooooooooo much with building houses and creating families. To see the one mechanic that really made the game stand out among its predecessors be thrown away without a valid explanation is just....crazy!

I'm willing to bet a kidney that the moodlets were the reason that sims were a glorified statue in the sims 3. Why bother animating emotions when you can just have an icon on the UI that tells you how your sims is feeling? Seriously, I'd rather see humiliation on my sim's face than have a moodlet that tells me that.

I admit, I squealed when I saw the gameplay and CAS demos for the sims 4. I was just so happy to see them with the old charm again, I don't care how cartoony they have to look for it. But then I looked closely at what they were offering (or not). Part of the reason I am so mad at this is because I see the amazing potential it has to be awesome. I hated the sims 3, but I knew it was crap form the moment I saw it, so I never bothered to get this worked up about it. But I see the potential the sims 4 has to recapture the old magic and to see it wasted away because of stupid design decisions is painful.

I'm in love with you.

This is a most accurate comment about TS3. To me the base game, or vanilla version I think it's called, is simply a casual, "make pretty-pixel-people do stuff" kind of experience. Unengaging, and full of underlying glitches. Mods made it playable for me, and mods have a much greater contribution to TS3 than they did in TS2, where the focus of modders is in custom content mostly, although I do use gameplay mods for it too.



And this is also true. Off the shelf Sims games can't satisfy everyone anyway, so mods are the solution to a problem, namely people who want their Sims game tailored for their particular interests.