What is the Point of the Sims? - Series History & Design Retrospective - Complete FULL DOCUMENTARY

I want you to think back all the way to the ancient year of 1990 and 9. The Game Boy Color has been out for a year Napster launches in June and Beanie Baby Mania is still somehow gripping the nation in the middle of all this sits one of the most highly anticipated yet baffling computer games of all time the Sims Maxis was by this point a household name among PC Gamers giving the world SimCity and a host of other simulation games all of which had easy to pick up systems and their own quirky sense of humor but the next game from Will Wright and his wacky Studio of designers was Raising some eyebrows it wasn't trying to simulate a city or a planet or an ant colony it was trying to simulate us real Everyday People it seems like such an obvious concept now but I want you to put yourself back in the 90s mindset of cosmic carpets dial internet connections and AOL Instant Messenger ah and you had the best dork sound effects the Sim City games were huge exploding in popularity a decade before but they were part of a vibrant simulation genre SimCity Roller Coaster Tycoon Transport Tycoon and a hundred other tycoons already proved the genre could be a reliable Money Maker but in a pre-animal Crossing pre-stardo Valley world the idea of a virtual dollhouse was a new one and the genre wasn't the only reason to be skeptical Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in 1997. now back then they had not yet earned their reputation for sucking the lifeblood out of companies but they were known as a commercial entity making yearly installments of games like Madden in FIFA it was unclear how they were going to merge this commercial sensibility with the quirky analytical Minds over at Maxis SimCity 3000 already in production at the time of the acquisition was released and finished under EA's ownership and launched to a mixed response I personally love loved that game but there were many fans of SimCity 2000 who thought the title was a step in the wrong direction made to appeal to the masses a criticism that gets thrown at popular series even today we here in the future of course know how this story ends The Sims launched in February of the mythical year 2000 to huge critical and Commercial Success and is currently one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time moving some 200 million copies that date and being an instantly recognizable household name so I got to thinking the other day what is this series about I remember the Sims 1 having a motivation of a wealth in the Sims 2 being about family but I for the life of me couldn't remember what the Sims 3 and 4 were about what are these games trying to say what ideas and motivations do their mechanics enforce so let's take a look back at the entire Mainline base game sim series to see if we can't pull back the curtain on their design and figure out just what is the SIMS about today's video is sponsored by me the script for this video is over 29 000 words and took well over a hundred hours of gameplay capture writing recording and editing that effort is completely unsustainable without your support so consider helping out on patreon or picking up one of my many books good okay roll the intro [Music] thank you [Music] the original Sims was a massive success right from the start earning strong critical reviews and even stronger sales becoming the top selling PC title for both 2000 and 2001 moving over 3 million copies in just those two years it is difficult from our modern lens to see just how strange of a leap this was at the time as popular as Tycoon games were life Sims weren't really a thing Animal Crossing did not exist c-man had only been out in Japan for a year Harvest Moon looked closer to Zelda and was described as a farming RPG not a life Sim the closest things people could get to simulating life were virtual aquariums and Tamagotchis now as we mentioned in the intro Tycoon games were well established going back to the earliest days of video games with things like 1973's lemonade stand but that's because business and industry are easy to gamify just look at the Modern stock market industry has a win state unlimited wealth and a lose State bankruptcy there are challenges to overcome along the way in basic well understood economic principles that are easy to adapt into mechanics this directly led to maxis's first big success SimCity a game meant to simulate and gamify principles of urban planning the game has three basic components of residential zones commercial zones and Industrial zones with public services and infrastructure filling the spaces in between building zones brings in taxes and building one type of Zone will increase demand for the other two as zones expand they need infrastructure and public Support Services which in turn costs taxes it's a very stable but very satisfying gameplay Loop but how do you take that simple idea which by this point Nexus has already translated into a SimCity card game holy didn't know that existed and ant colony a skyscraper and an entire planet and somehow apply it to Everyday Life how do you translate those simplified gameplay Loops to something as complex as The Human Experience how do you make this game work here in the dystopian nightmare of 2022 it isn't easy at least it isn't easy if you're trying to download the game the legal way see I have the super special tier of Game Pass that gives me access to EA play EA's own subscription service so naturally I assumed I could just download it from their back catalog no fuss no must nope only Sims 3 and 4. alright no biggie I'll just buy it on Steam nope only Sims 3 and 4. okay fine I'll open EA play and buy it directly from them nope only Sims 3 and 4. alright maybe it's too old and I have to buy it off Gog nope no Sims at all even going to EA's own website leads to a broken button that doesn't actually allow you to buy buy the thing so one quick trip to the high seas later and we can finally look at a game nearly as old as I am and sure maybe I could have like found a used copy on eBay but a no and B my computer doesn't even have a CD drive and you want to know what the real kicker is that pirated copy worked immediately with a single click no cracks no updates no patches the only thing wrong with it is the music files are missing for some reason and the game really doesn't like it when you alt tap as we go through this game I want you to think about two things two Central ideas to keep in your head first I want you to think like a player back in the year 2000 a player who had never seen this game before who had never heard of The Sims and was going into this thing blind second I want you to think like a designer what experience do the designers want the player to have what mechanics presentation and goals are they going to give the player in order to push them towards that that experience got that frame of reference awesome let's fire up the Sims and see what happens [Music] normally I skip intro cinematics in video games as they end up being little more than trailers for a game I'm already playing but as we try and get into the mindset of people coming to this game for the first time I think it's important to pause for a minute to look at this one this intro will be the first thing the player sees of the game outside of a few magazine screenshots in the back of the box it's not only there to get the player excited it's there to introduce them to the experience they're about to have to the fantasy they're going to be living before they even get to a menu and right away we can see three major thrusts to this intro the first and most obvious is one of economic progression not only in the house constantly getting bigger but being filled with more furniture of a higher quality from bigger TVs to pool tables the second is one of social interaction making friends getting into fights and even romance and the third though this one is more implicit visit is showing the player all of the things they'll get to do to interact with ordering pizzas painting skinny dipping and hot tubs overall this does a pretty good job of showing the player both what this game is about and the things they can aspire to do within it the intro cinematic ends and we're dumped right into the neighborhood screen there's no main menu like in a traditional game presenting us with a new game or loading a save here the neighborhood screen is the main menu and a relatively Sparks One at that we see a tiny neighborhood with a big red arrow and an obvious economic delineation and to make no mistake this layout is no accident there's a great YouTube channel called strip panel naked that more people should watch I'll link to it below one of the things he talks about is how the layout of comic book panels are intentionally designed with the reader's eye line in mind this simple neighborhood screen is doing the exact same thing we hit that big red arrow first and foremost but then the player's vision is naturally drawn to this mansion on the hill because well damn that's a big house and because of the contrasting neon blue of the pool in the Terracotta orange of the a roof juxtaposed against the static green and deep blues of the river and grass our vision then slowly drifts back down the hill from the mansion in the top right to the tiny house in the bottom left descending from Ultra Rich to the mostly Rich middle class and ultimately poor Lots the player will start in this plants an early seed in the mind of the player from the very first screen boy that big house sure does look cool get enough money and it could be yours the tutorial is in many ways indicative of its era introducing the player to camera controls and then asking them to click on each element to continue this annoys our modern sophisticated sensibilities but I want you to think like a designer especially one from that era personal computers were still a new thing in the 90s to a lot of households and this game had unique potential to appeal to players not only new to this genre but new to two video games as a whole the game shows us how to interact with objects and then introduces us to the needs system the Bedrock of the Sims moment to moment gameplay Sims have eight needs Each of which slowly Decay over time interacting with relevant objects like taking a shower increase their relevant need in this case hygiene this is an expansion of but similar system to virtual pets feed it when it gets hungry let it poop when it needs to poop from there we get a quick introduction to buy mode where players can buy objects to fulfill those needs and then a run through of the personality traits and how this affects the Sims limited free will notice the difference between the explanation of the needs and the personality the needs were written in maxis's humorous style but from a generic outside POV and yet the personality explanations are written in the first person from Bob's perspective trying to set this up as a real person and not a virtual doll the tutorial then adds an extra Sim so that we understand we aren't just playing Bob and telling his story we'll be playing the household the tutorial proceeds through social interaction effectively using another person as an object the SIM can interact with and an explanation of how relationships progress a positive interaction will make the meter go up and unlock new interactions a negative interaction will make the meter go down and limit what Sims can do we're shown how to get Bob here a job and are pointed towards skills but not shown how to get them for example they make us use the shower to fix hygiene but not work out to earn the skill point and that's it that's the whole tutorial this may seem like standard stuff but notice the things we don't see the game doesn't even bother showing build mode even though its controls can be the toughest to work your head around and something thing they directly highlighted the possibility of in the intro cinematic they give the player no Direction outside of hey maybe get a job talk to some people and either create a character of your own or you know just continue rolling with this one compare that to an RPG like dark souls or Skyrim they don't give you some pre-generated already in Progress character in case character creation scares you those games just dump you in and expect you to figure it out while this game gives you a regenerated setup making no assumptions as to the motivations or skill level of its players this is a growing Trend we've seen in the ttrpg space where it's becoming increasingly common to see starter kits or other packages come with pre-generated characters to help players get going alright now that we know how to play Let's Make a Sim of our very own the character generator is bog standard indistinguishable from hundreds of other games with the only real difference being personality points instead of attributes or ability scores and a fun bio window where we can type up a backstory for our Sim players are able to spend personality points freely out of a specific pool pushing their character in certain directions this is one of the first major instances in The Sims of separating those looking for a purely role-playing experience making a Sim that might be sub-optimal because it fits the character they want and those who are going to dump all of their points into neat outgoing and nice to make an easier time of it in some sense that this screen and the personality points allocated are the closest thing The Sims has to a difficulty slider the game is a lot easier when your sim picks up after themselves enjoys talking to other people and is easy to get along with and it's a lot harder when they're grumpy isolated and filthy okay that's tutorial and care character creation out of the way let's get into the game itself each freshly made household in The Sims starts with twenty thousand simoleons regardless of how many people in the household there are this is all they are given to purchase a lot with either an existing home or room to build one for themselves I remember thinking as a kid how that seemed like a staggering amount of money but according to Google the median price of a house in the United States in the year 2000 was a hundred and twenty thousand dollars that seems like a pipe dream and the dystopian never-ending hellmouth that is 2022 but it is far in excess of the standard Sims 20 thou so this game is intentionally going with this number not to model realism but to fit the game they've built the balancing of that must have been really tricky and I'd love to know how the conversations between item costs salary levels and starting cash all played out foreign ER in this character has a house let's pause a minute to look at how this house is set up as it is the one newly created characters are most likely to buy it is very small little more than a one-bedroom apartment with a patio it is sparsely furnished but look at what they chose that furniture to be a bed a fridge a toilet and a shower all required to fulfill a Sims basic needs but crucially items to fill the fun meter are missing this sets up the player to interact with objects and make sure the Sim neither starves to death or wets themselves but forces them to check out the buy mode and buy a TV or computer if they want to progress also notice that these are the cheapest versions of all of those items and they look like it no one is going to be impressed by that fridge or that cot this goes back to the opening intro cinematic and the ideas they are passively instilling in the play here a small house needs to be expanded crappy Furniture needs to be upgraded in order to do any of that we'll need money and for money will need a job as someone who's played these games more times than I care to remember I know how to get a sim a job right away but remember this was one of the few things the tutorial specifically called out so it's something players are likely to do even if they skip the tutorial the limited scope of the game means a player will likely stumble upon the newspaper sooner or later with Sims starting their existing standing next to it and a new one getting delivered each day let's take a breath to look at presentation before getting into the deeper gameplay stuff love the sound design and even though this version doesn't have music it isn't really needed we get the chirping of the birds the muttering of the Sim the squeaky clean of the sink in the open and closing of doors even some background noise once we buy a TV the Graphics are very basic though not bad for the era while polygons are limited to simple shapes the objects are clearly identifiable the texturing over various surfaces including the countertops carpet and wallpaper all help to sell the individuality of the space animations are pretty Limited in comparison with few frames of action helping to add to that paper doll feel of these virtual characters while appearing stilted it does help to remember not only the limitations of the era but just how many animations the team would have had to make there looks to only be one animation rig shared between both the male and female models but they need to come up with custom animations for every object The Sims can interact with from showering and reading to cooking dinner and watching TV it must have been an enormous amount of work with the variety helping us to forgive the otherwise stilted animations The Sims has one last trick up its sleeve to nudge the player along like trying to get a toddler to take its first steps and it's one of my favorite events in the series each Sims game starts with a welcome to the neighborhood where other Sims will come knock on your door and introduce themselves in some ways this is a result of a technical limitation Sims can't visit other Lots in the original game and can't call someone on the phone until they've met at least once so the game has to have some way of getting the Sim to actually meet people but I like the wholesomeness of other Sims welcoming someone into town while simultaneously thrusting the player into social interaction whether they like it or not Sims will also occasionally happen by providing the player with a steady opportunity to meet new people foreign now that we've got all the tutorial stuff out of the way the player is free to engage in the game's basic gameplay Loop you have a character and that character has needs you have a house full of stuff and the stuff helps fill those needs every few days the mailman will bring bills the amount of which is determined by how big of a house you have and how much stuff you've filled it with you pay those bills with money needs must be maintained in order to get skills make friends or perform well at a job performing better at the job gets promotions which brings more money more money means nicer things which fills needs faster nicer things plus more space means bills are higher these are two intersecting gameplay Loops that support one another overlapping gameplay Loops are one of the strongest designs in gaming and where we get the one more turn Syndrome from games like Civilization in Civ the player has a series of short-term medium term and long-term gameplay Loops that overlap like links in a chain in the immediate a player needs to decide where to move units how am I going to kill this Barbarian what response am I going to give to this Diplomat then there are intermediate goals like what building should I build next what technology should I research and they have distant goals like founding new cities going to war or pushing towards a certain Victory this is also one of the reasons we've seen a deluge of sandbox Survival Games starting with Minecraft and continuing all the way to the present with things like vaultheim these games have short-term goals consisting of needing food or crafting supplies they have medium goals like getting rare materials making equipment and building structures and long-term goals like fighting bosses getting much rare equipment or building super impressive structures the key to these Loops is that they overlap and see if you don't spend several turns moving units and then another few turns building buildings and then a dozen turns Waging War you do all of these things at once with the game's interface guiding you from action to action decision to decision okay qmt what are we making next uh let's see I need a warrior to get rid of that Barbarian camp but I really should get started on a granary but oh a library would help me get to discovering iron working faster not only does this expand this space of decision making but it keeps the player playing let me just kill this Barbarian and I'll quit for the night oh but my tech will finish research next turn Okay one more turn cool that text done so I should save and well my settler is almost to the place I want to make a new city so man just one more turn and oh hey Gandhi declared war on me all right well let's move my armies East and then I'll stop for the night oh that building just finished getting built okay let's build another Soldier next thing you know it's four o'clock in the morning and you're getting nuked by Gandhi Sim City uses a basic loop as we discussed at the start of the video buildings requiring Services requiring taxes taxes requiring buildings but that doesn't overlap it just is stable and fun but easy to pause and come back to later The Sims has the basic needs that are always ticking down blades that need to be constantly spun these needs are needed in order to progress in skills an intermediate goal overlapping with the short-term Loop those skills in conjunction with satisfying needs are required to advance in a Sims career promotions allow the purchasing of better items to better satisfy needs which allows more time for building skills the same is true for friendships also needed for advancement and money is needed to add on to a house to have somewhere to store all those new items each of these goals and loop intersect in a dozen Myriad ways that keeps the player thinking about the next goal in front of them the next thing they want to do as their real life hours bleed by the one off ramp as it were is the day night cycle this should give players a good place to stop in real life to save the game and pick it up later but now we're right back to one more turn because of the same psychological tricks that cause you to just eat one more potato chip or just watch one more episode of your favorite streaming show and one more what could be the harm it only takes 15 minutes to go through another in-game day and then I can turn it off for the Knight Q looking up and realizing it's four in the morning this is something that games like heart space shipbreakers and a dozen roguelites have benefited from Gamers of yore might have grown up with one more turn but Gamers of today are growing up with one more run I think we should also take a minute to go over the games but failure State the game over if you will the Sims is a difficult game to lose individual needs have failure states such as wetting yourself or passing out and friendships have a failure State and no longer being friends but the game itself is difficult to end without deliberately trying if bills accumulate long enough the game will warn you complete with a adorable ticking clock sound coming from the bills themselves before they literally explode Repo Men will then come to take your stuff in exchange for bills not being paid eventually this will result in the loss of your refrigerator and you will no longer be able to eat food the game will still try to bail you out to giving you a lump sum of cash for no reason and a new job is always a newspaper away if you ignore all of this and willfully spend your money on nonsense the Sim will eventually starve to death but it takes a long time day after day in Sims time all of which give you a chance to turn it around [Music] we started this video asking about motivations what experience are the designers trying to push us toward what goals are they trying to give us you could say that this is a Sandbox game and the player can do whatever they want but sandboxes have borders they have shovels and buckets defining their actions tools toys and walls defining their space so what is the SIMS pushing us toward the first and primary motivation of this game is wealth this started back on the neighborhood screen with the big house on the hill and it continues to the starting house with its cramped layout and cheap furniture the player is naturally going to want more stuff if for no other reason than to get those needed skills that means building additions and buying new things all of which costs money even without these gameplay motivations the primary action a player can take in this game is clicking on an interacting with objects in order to keep the game interesting the player needs new things to click on the player has a constant need for more money even if the goals of what they want to spend that money on changes but that Bedrock of ever draining needs also feeds into this one of the most brilliant aspects of the Sims design is that even the cheapest items in the game will fill a meter in a reasonable amount of time if your sim sleeps all night in the game's cheapest bed their energy meter will still fill cooking on the game's cheapest stove will still make them full even if it catches on fire roughly every six seconds but more expensive items will fill these same meters faster the player doesn't have to get better equipment but better equipment means less time on needs and more time to seduce the neighbor or learn a skill or get that big promotion which leads us back to wealth acquiring wealth for the Sim means more varied interesting and Visually appealing interactions for the player but it also means a more rewarding life for the Sim their needs satisfy it faster and more completely allowing them to pursue longer term goals with greater ease and speed it's the same motivation in gameplay Loop that gets us to go in search of better armor or feel excitement when we find a better sword these are now basic principles of game design but which lead to a simple but addictive play experience wealth may be the game's primary motivation but it's not the only one a huge part of the Sims fan base comes to the series not for the virtual dollhouse but for the virtual dolls entire YouTube channels and twitch streams are built around the idea of these Sims and their wacky dramatic escapades but what people may not realize is social interaction was a central pillar of this series design going all the way back to the original remaining in equally rewarding and demanding part of the game social interactions starting with the welcome to the neighborhood event are Beyond Simple relationships often kicking off with a single talk option with simple icons to hint at what the conversation is about and little pluses and minuses or Hearts to let the player know how the conversation is going no Direct Control is afforded the player aside from canceling interactions or deciding the general thrust and tone of conversation and yet this simple model forms the backbone of Sims Social pillar the wealth motivation in The Sims is nearly all carrot but the social motivation is mostly stick true relationships have their own meter to fill and there's the same intrinsic motivation of having things for your Sims to interact with that applies to the varied people and their personalities as it does the game's many different objects now it does sound gross to describe people as objects but from a design and interaction Point within the game they're nearly identical the only difference being that people can initiate actions with the player where objects cannot the game's primary motivation for interaction with its social systems is not a reward but the gate they provide to progress careers will allow a Sim to get promoted simply for being in a good mood or having all the requisite skills at the lower levels higher levels of promotion require the player to have a certain number of friends in order to progress thus at least in The Sims 1 the social game becomes a track in parallel to and reinforcing that of wealth the treadmill of bigger wealth leading to bigger houses and more furniture stops until the player engages in a little social engineering The Sims does pay off that extra work however some of it is in the little things like how doing group activities such as talking while watching TV boost more than one meter at once just like better Furniture leads to filling moods faster filling the fun and social media simultaneously is a good way to manage them all while building the relationship with the SIM being talked to further maximizing the use of their time the biggest reward however comes with convincing a sim to move in usually through marriage though it is possible for friends this is much easier to do in later games but is actually a significant challenge in the first game getting a sim to move in not only requires a high enough relationship meter but they must also be in a good mood this is tricky as the player has no direct control over the other SIM they have to make sure there are fun objects to interact with in the House serve food to ensure the other SIM isn't hungry and rely on a bit of luck to make sure they have a good time and say yes to the proposal the reward for all this work is staggering not only does the other SIM move in with a huge lump sum of cash but it provides an entire second Sim to interact with this is more than just something for the player to do a second Sim means a second income without an increase in bills just like in real life couples are able to earn more wealth as a household than they can individually more interestingly the social requirement for promotion isn't per Sim it's per household the friends of either Sim count towards the total making it easier for both to get promoted you could even power couple it having one sim staying home and playing social butterfly full time to grind out the requirement while the other one gets promoted to higher and higher levels of the career track how very 1950s foreign and that leads me rather neatly to how this game has a wonderful if sometimes unintentionally hilarious way narratives emerge within its sandbox design way back in character creation I put all of my points into neat because I played these games before keeping a tidy house is a lot easier when the Sim themselves likes things neat and orderly I spent the rest of my points in things that would bolster social interaction for similar reasons leaving nice is something of a dump step this in turn led to an interesting side effect during the welcome to the neighborhood shindig where the Sim made some small talk and then went inside to watch a horror movie okay little strange but the real kicker was how he reacted to said horror movies with laughter the sound effect is of a woman's screaming bloody murder in this sociopath of a Sim I created just thought that was hysterical I guess it was only fitting as he was entertaining the Goths the unintended side effects of modeling Behavior doesn't end there like the time I needed to grind friendships in order to get promoted which led to the sin ignoring their bodily needs until they crashed in exhaustion I lost several days to self-care just to get them back on an even footing all the while watching those hard-earned friendships Decay or how a sim won't go to work if they're unhappy unless the player forces them or my personal favorite when I needed to make more friends in order to get promoted but the game doesn't ship with enough friends already in the neighborhood you have to create them making friends so that you can make friends so I made this hell Barracks full of generic people who could be my friend only the game doesn't let you visit their lot you have to call them over which would be fine if I had remembered to buy them a phone so I had to been there a lot buy them a phone then load my normal save also I can make a few friends it's like a weird fever dream of a relationship before we wrap up the Sims 1 I wanted to mention some other random bits I couldn't really fit anywhere else I find it funny how few food options there are compared to the many different stations on the TV and radio each with their own sound and visuals it seems like an oversight that cooking and repairing objects doesn't boost those skills though they will fix that in later games no days of the week in this game means no days off you have to work every single day not that I would know anything about that this game is so old there's no social functionality to the computer nor can you order Services through there you can't even have a conversation on the phone you can only use it to call Sims over to your place also like real life the newspaper quickly outlives its usefulness and piles up his trash on your lawn on and finally I think it's cool that alternate sources of earning income like painting which would become a major focus in later games were here all the way back at the start of the series the original Sims is a weird game it's this dystopian hell grind of work social relationships and bodily needs where one is constantly struggling to buy a bigger TV or get that next big promotion or buy a bigger house and a nicer part of town though it should be pointed out this is only if one wants to advance if they have ambition so long as you don't burn to death or run out of money there is no failure State no ticking clock of age like life it's only a grind if you want it to be in the real kicker intentional message or not is that their great big mansion you are working towards isn't even that great so it's got a fireplace and a pool in some large rooms big deal honestly you could build a bitter mansion in the time it took to earn up enough money to move into it like life the game's biggest challenge isn't in the slow accrual of wealth but in the forging and maintaining of new friendships as an adult and just like life when your sim finally dies there is no great cut scene no awe-inspiring animation there's just an empty death and a pop-up asking you to load your last save the house continues on cold dark abandoned waiting for someone else to get on the social treadmill of wealth until they too can climb to the big empty house on the hill I was pretty surprised how much fun I had playing this game even in such a primitive form while Limited in many respects it held up far greater than I expected ultimately the original Sims remains in odd Curiosity on the one hand it seems like the simplest idea in the world a virtual dollhouse this was in an era where everything had a virtual counterpart from aquariums to cities to the virtual library of Encarta 95. on the other hand it is a profoundly strange game a funhouse mirror to view ourselves and our motivations through a game which could only have come from the Absurd comedic simulationist Minds at Maxis the game feels like something that should have been forgotten that should have been remembered only as a cult classic to trigger Nostalgia and not the billion dollar Juggernaut it ended up being right from the start foreign [Music] I was personally excited for the original Sims before it even released having been a big fan of the SimCity franchise and though the Sims ended up being a colossal stratospheric success right out of the gate it wasn't until the Sims 2 that I remember the game reaching an escape velocity level of popularity within months of the Sims 2 coming out many of my friends which were predominantly male teenagers suddenly got very deep into games intended as virtual dollhouses for casuals The Sims 2 captured them in a way the original never did so what changed between these two games what took this series from an oddity of an experiment to an experience so rich players were treating it like the latest RPG one word of warning before we begin this game is a total to get working these days like The Sims 1 there is no legitimate way to buy it but unlike the Sims one there is no one click in the game launches download in order to get this game running I had to Pirate two separate copies one of which had a key gin but no patch and another that had a patch but no key gen okay it had a key gen but it was a Trojan so obviously I didn't use it it was only by combining these two versions that I was able to even get the game to install the game still wouldn't actually run until I went to some random website to find this four gigabyte patch then I could get the game running only for it to crash anytime I made a Sim I had to download an entirely different Graphics patch to get the game fully functional and keep in mind I'm used to wrestling with old games to get them running on Modern PCS and this was still a pain in the ass these are the links I go through for you people and for the record I would have been more than happy to throw 30 bucks at EA to not have to deal with any any of that at least the Music Works in this version this game shows us its Brilliance from the first possible moments the big change this time around is the addition of time a topic we're going to be touching on a lot in this section what better way to show that to an audience than keeping the original town from the first game only Advance the good 15-20 years into the future it helps drive forward the themes of the game while being a fun nod to fans returning from the original this version of Pleasant View lacks the clear visual design of the original but it also has more than three people living in it so I'm prepared to cut the designers some slack there's an introduction to the town not only displaying some of the new characters but teasing us as to what their story and relationships might be there are Community lots and a mansion that is far more impressive and expensive than the previous Incarnation even if this one isn't on a hill character creation is is also far more robust featuring actual faces this time around and even different outfits for different situations there's a new aspiration system which will dive deeper into later and our personality points which while still here make their negative side more explicit to the player being a sequel the game brings a host of General improvements such as the terrain elevation tools being easier to use and the build mode finally having an eyedropper tool chairs now slide under a table and different meals each have individual options complete with their own animations and you can chat with Friends by phone or computer instead of always having to invite them to a lot the TV is no longer static images but full video and you can improve your new cooking and cleaning skills by doing those activities overall it's an impressive Technical and graphical update from the Primitive original a reflection of the four and a half years that passed in between the games releases the player is now required to buy groceries rather than being charged for individual meals this might seem strange to call out but consider how the series has never once required you to do laundry making the player buy groceries is a specific decision made by the designers of which chores to include and not include even though this series could be described as a chores and obligation simulator I suspect this was done to provide incentive for the player to actually go to the grocery store in game now they're Community Lots exist odd that when the game came out ordering groceries seemed like a futuristic luxury but here in the kovid timeline it just seems normal foreign as fun as the addition of community lots are and don't worry we'll get back to them the two biggest changes to the Sims 2 are the additions of the aspiration system including once and fears and the addition of generational time each Sim is given an aspiration back at character creation or becoming a teenager which is kind of like character creation if you think about it hard enough aspirations come in one of five flavors fruit punch lime green blueberry lemonade and strawberry Wait no that's not right uh oh family fortune knowledge popularity and romance yeah those are way more marketable these aspirations in turn fuel the new ones and fear system each Sim gets four once and three fears that are always active these ones and fears are influenced by a variety of systems including the aspiration systems skills the Sim is pursuing and the status of their social relationships with the aspiration being the primary driving force a want May be as simple as getting a promotion or talking to someone they fancy and fears include things like setting yourself on fire or having to use a public restroom though some fears are common to everyone I mean who doesn't avoid a public restroom at all costs the majority of a Sims once comes from their aspiration with knowledge Sims craving skill points and family Sims wanting to get busy and make babies once in fears we'll cycle in and out depending on what is going on in The Sims life with a neat little slot machine animation and players can lock in one of these wants or fears to keep it around completing once rewards the player with points that can be used to purchase aspirational rewards while suffering fears will cost those points the rewards range from items that give money to those that make it easier to learn skills or even extend their lifespan there's also an aspirational meter in addition to the needs meter that goes from red to Green to gold and ultimately white Sims need to be in a gold aspirational state in order to safely use these reward items using them in a lower State risk the item backfiring causing it to have the opposite of the intended effect like shortening a Sims lifespan rather than lengthening it this ensures the same using it has some positive momentum going in their life and prevents players from having one sim earn the rewards but another Sim use them I never liked that aspect of this mechanic it feels weird to me to have a secondary requirement on something given to the player as a reward but that's the decision they went with this once and fear system not only adds flavor to a Sims motivations and actions but provides direction to the player it represents a shift away from the the purely monetary and social design of the original game and towards the individual goals of the Sim crucially these wants and fears add on to and further enhance the existing structure of interconnected game Loops established in the first game providing additional incentives to the short medium and long-term goals of the player The Sims 2 May motivate the player with the aspirational carrot but they've added a pretty big stick to go with it thanks to the introduction of a fourth dimension time the Sims have now been cursed with their own mortality aging through the various stages of life until arriving at a natural death staying away from fires and pools without ladders are no longer enough to guarantee a Sim immortality the Grim Reaper eventually comes for them all this simple difference changes in recontextualizes all of the Sims systems from skill points to social relationships and climbing the corporate ladder moment to moment gameplay is now filtered through the lens of an Ever ticking clock pushing the Sim to complete their goals before they run out of time in the original Sims it hardly mattered if you wasted three days building up your mood or grinding out the next skill point or working towards the next promotion because every Sim had an infinite number of days ahead of them it didn't matter if you spent a few days ignoring your kid because they were never going to grow up you could always play catch tomorrow but here in The Sims 2 those few days can represent the child's entire childhood it cannot be overstated how much this changes both mechanically and narratively it is the single biggest change the series ever makes even though it seems like the most natural thing in the world every other game mechanic every emergent narrative will forever be filtered through the shape of an hourglass because of this one tiny change with an unknowable number of ripples all right let's take a break from the loftier thoughts and anchor ourselves back on the material plane by discussing the revamped career system the addition of time in a scale greater than minutes and seconds means Sims now get days off vacation days and even maternity leave these days off provide not only a break to the player they provide one to the sim a chance to catch up with chores around the house pursue the next stage in a social relationship or finish getting that next skill point it's like a downtime session in a ttrpg I mean they are both literally downtime but you get what I'm saying Sims now eat lunch and use the bathroom at work helping to stabilize the hunger and bladder meters through the day although social still degrades I guess no one in The Sims 2 talks to their co-workers promotions now progress much faster with Sims getting promoted after a single day at work provided there in a good mood and meet all their requirements this is likely another ripple from the time Dimension as Sims need to find their career before they die working now also brings a chance for these random FTL or Stellaris style chance cards the player is given a little bit of narrative in an arbitrary Choice their SIM can make in response to some event with the correct answer being entirely random winning one of these events can result in a boost of performance or bonus cash with penalties for failing them being largely the same I'll bet in the opposite direction choosing incorrectly can result in the loss of an entire skill point which initially seems quite harsh but skill points are gained far faster in The Sims 2 making this less of a big deal the real reward from careers now comes in the form of well career rewards getting to the top of any career track now Awards the player with a unique item that can only be acquired in that way these are skill building items that build skills are faster than other objects in the game and directly corresponds to the skill most needed to advance in that career so the military gives an obstacle course that raises body and politics gives a teleprompter to raise Charisma giving the Sim an item to raise a skill they've already maxed out seems odd it reminds me of getting the great deity mask at the end of Majora's Mask an item meant to reward completion of the game but which has no purpose because the game is already completed but again we have to remember the addition of time in The Sims 1 careers only served as a method for generating well promotions a means to generate wealth faster but the Sims 2 doesn't have individual well it has generational wealth getting to the top of a career path brings more money sure but it also means unlocking a powerful item for the children in of that Sim helping them to raise their own skill points far faster than the game's normal items and thus able to progress in their own careers far faster than their parents and it's this again somewhat obvious seeming change that caused all my male teenage friends to get into this game back in high school how many friends do you have grinding out armor sets and an MMO or fancy guns in Destiny 2 or a fancier weapon in Fantasy Star online being a virtual dollhouse was not enough to get my friends into these games they needed goals they needed loot when my friends and I were playing this game back in the day we did it following a family from generation to generation buying bigger and bigger virtual houses with the end goal of unlocking all the career rewards sandbox games are endless you can keep building block after lock in SimCity you can build Base After Base in games like Minecraft and sure they added a dragon Minecraft at some point but that was never the purpose of Minecraft and they largely added it later for just this reason some players need an end goal they need credits to roll to tell them that they've completed the experience the ride is now over please exit towards the lobby and come back some other time adding career goals in the progression of generational wealth provided a framework that these so-called hardcore Gamers could Now understand it gave them an in get resources for better equipment earn skill points to improve your character get to the ultimate equipment at the end of the game indistinguishable from any RPG or MMO [Music] the social pillar of this Series has also been improved though mostly with a range of smaller improvements rather than the ground-shaking alterations to the formula the addition of time largely takes care of that for them far more conversational options are available and friends are now much easier to get with frequent visits from passers-by and co-workers coming home with a Sim after a day of work friendships are much easier to maintain in The Sims 2 thanks to meters building faster decaying slower and being split into two versions a short-term and a long term in The Sims 1 simply maintaining friendships took real effort often at the cost of building skills or maintaining a Sims needs the faster gain and slower rot of friendships in The Sims 2 gives the player a lot more freedom to bounce around without worrying about losing their hard-earned progress the game game also goes to Great Lengths to make it easier to meet people in the first place for one the neighborhood actually ships with more than three households so no more building of Hill Barracks just to make friends those friends are far more likely to stop by call the chat on the phone or to bump into them around town the aforementioned bringing a friend home from work may not seem all that strange but again we have to think like designers this action was made with the clear intent of helping a Sim not only make friends but make new friends on top of it co-workers start with a boosted Affinity making it easier to convert them to long-term friends again seems logical but consider that these people are acquaintances at best and borderline strangers at worse which friend are you more likely to invite over after work the guy you've had one conversation with or someone you've had lunch with a few times and really gotten to know the game inverts reality having the player bring home someone they're less acquainted with rather than more in order to help them make more friends it's like the AI is arranging a play date for you the biggest single change to the Sims Social gameplay has to come with the addition of not only children which were in the first game but with children who are born grow up become adults who have to get jobs like everyone else and eventually die of old age the game now not only features friends and families but entire life cycles from start all the way to the Finish now I am single and childless and if there's a merciful god it will stay that way so take everything I say about parenting with a grain of salt with this edition of children that can be born raised and eventually begot children of their own radically Alters the flow and the feeling of the game not only are sims pressured to settle down and have kids early in order to avoid getting old and missing their chance or not having enough time to raise that child but so they can assure the Min maxing of that child's life right from the moment they're born after a brief three-day introductory period normally called being an infant Sims are allowed to continue on to Life's orientation phase AKA being a toddler tiny Sim toddlers are able to build skills like learning to use the bathroom learning to talk and figuring out bipedal motion all of which is done through the same interface as adult skills as a side note potty training is way easier when you can see the baby's poop meter in real time I mean I wish I had a poop meter not that I need one seeing how I'm so full of where were we not only can toddlers learn these basic everyday skills but they can learn the actual in-game skills as well toys allow a toddler to build their love logic Charisma and creativity just like adults can and they can add cooking once they make it to kid age these skills which can be easily picked up in the early stages of Life directly carry over into adulthood at a one-to-one ratio every skill point earned as a toddler is a skill point they'll have as an adult the little bastards even have their own wants and fears and this is the second answer to our riddle of how a bunch of teenage boys got so into these games because they could min max their characters like it was an RPG build career rewards given in-game goal but toddlers are the secret of how you get to that goal a newly created Sam be they adult or child starts with zero skills in every category a created adult Sim has to spend much of that adulthood grinding out those skill points I suspect this is why they added the young adult stage in later games to give new Sims more of a chance of getting ahead before they get a coffin children however through the clever abuse I mean encouragement of their parents can get a Sim to nearly maxed out stats in many a category for example Sim Jr here was born with zero skill points but by the time he reached adulthood I had logic completely maxed out at 10 points six points and cleaning and five points and all the others and that was without using the aspirational skill boost reward or career rewards both of which would have raised his skills faster having all these skills and household social relationships right out of the gate means a Sim can rise through the ranks of their career much faster thus unlocking all those career rewards faster meaning the next born Sim will have an even easier time of it each Min maxed Sim and unlocked career goal allows successive generations to gain skill points and promotions faster like some kind of Dollhouse been a Jesuit program it allows not only an explicit goal in the form of rewards but an exploitable strategy for achieving that goal within the wider sandbox context of the game and that's why it uniquely appealed to a generation of so-called Gamers that might have otherwise ignored it [Music] and that leads us back to emerging narratives a central pillar of this series that can't be ignored the addition of time and of generations of aspirations goals and systems all crash against one another spawning countless narratives with very little effort from the player for example it tells us what a pleasant neighborhood this is where someone can meet a stranger on the street and invite them in for lunch without anyone getting murdered or like how I got into a relationship with this co-worker that came over convincing her to move in with me and start a family she just happened to be the richest person in town not that her wealth was a factor in the decision this is true love I assure you being co-workers we were by definition on the same career path which meant we would have unlocked the same reward at the end of said path so I just selfishly changed her entire career from science to cooking and for those wondering why I went with cooking it was because I wanted medical and it wasn't available and I chose was to change hers instead of mine because I was already at a higher position not for any weird sexist reasons I don't know why I'm defending the Life Choices of virtual dolls but here we are and if you think that's messed up you're really not going to like how I changed her hairstyle because I don't like pigtails or how I moved us into the house across the street from her parents because I liked the layout better this emergent storytelling can quickly spiral out of control in the best way possible like the time she got home late from work so I thought I'd have the guy make dinner while she took a nap only to catch the house on fire or how it turned out she was secretly engaged to someone else the whole time which I only figured out because I couldn't get the proposed options to pop up so I had to force her and her secret fiance to argue constantly to break them up like some cruel God destroying this innocent man to life meanwhile the main character is off making sandwiches for someone including said secret fiance now this virtual doll had no intention of doing that he's just program to put out a plate for every person at the house leading to a hilarious intersection of systems and narrative all of this transpired in Rapid succession so I could have the two sims get married that very same afternoon a whirlwind Blitz compared to the slow relationships of the first game it was like one of those rom-coms where the new guy moved into town and ruins everything only I was that guy not all of these stories are happy funny Tales like how this scientist character never found time to finish his novel or how social interaction between husband and wife plummeted because they were on separate work schedules leading them to try and find Social connections online isolated and alone or how I had to get them moving on baby making because these Sims weren't getting any younger both of them finally had a day off together so I made them spend it in bed trying again and again until I got the adorable lullaby sound effect that plays when a Sim gets pregnant not sure if it works that way in real life but what do I know I'm not a doctor [Music] interesting in isolation but it's the combination of these things that created a game that was far more mechanically and narratively interesting than its predecessor it wasn't just bigger or prettier like a lot of sequels are today it strove to make the game a mechanically deeper experience the combination of Rogue Legacy esque dynasties and clear in-game goals not of some mansion on a hill but real tangible objects that directly benefited gameplay took a game focused on making money and influencing people and turned it into something more than a virtual dollhouse something Gamers could really get into all the while being less of an endless grind that the first game could turn into the second game is light and Breezy by comparison to the slog of the first this seems almost contradictory the first game required the constant spinning of plates so shouldn't removing that mean this game has been dumbed down made easier for all those casual players well there's a difference between helium and difficulty between options and trivializing gameplay something the soulsborne series continues to struggle with in the original Sims the player was constantly trying to stay afloat spinning plates to keep them from crashing over needs have to be maintained to do anything social relationships are constantly decaying skills have to be earned and promotions gained stopping any one of these plates for too long requires the player to start the climb Again The Sims 2 being easier to manage both in need spilling faster skills earning faster and social relationships decaying slower frees the player to engage with short-term medium-term and long-term goals at their own discretion it's the difference between something like banish in something like Civ and one you're just trying to stay alive but in the other you're trying to build an Empire or in The Sims case a dynasty I think back then I was surprised to see my friends get into these games because it didn't fit with the traditional power Fantasy games often marketed to that demographic but this game is still a fantasy not one of big muscles and fighting monsters but of independence of personal professional and financial progress of homeownership and raising a family back then we wanted that fantasy because we were teenagers eagerly awaiting the freedom of adulthood and it's a fantasy we still want today because of the stresses of adult life and the never-ending imploding of our economy but there's something to be said for play Styles too my friends and I played this game focused on meters and skill points rewards and unlocks rather than the Legion of fans who only get into these games for the storytelling for the role playing and yet I distinctly remember us making each other in our own games if you pulled up one of our houses we had digital copies of all of our friends as roommates we'd show each other the people in the neighborhood they ended up marrying or ask them what career path we should put their Sim doppelgangers on the original Sims struggle to tell these stories often feeling like a Clockwork diorama of stilted dolls a curiosity rather than a rich narrative unfolding before you the Sims 2 really nailed both the mechanical and storytelling directions without sacrificing wider gameplay elements in a way that is impressive from both a design and Commercial standpoint one last point I want to make before we wrap up the Sims 2. I find it endlessly fascinating how point of view figures into these games especially with the addition of families and the passing of time I always thought of one sim as the main character but more importantly I thought of them as me I did those things I made those choices now this is not unusual in the realm of gaming we often talk about the exploit of our characters as things we did like the time I killed Vivek and Morrowind and walked around with him in my pocket but what makes it specifically interesting in the context of the Sims is how I the player am always in 100 control of the entire household in Civilization I only control one nation and Skyrim only one character but in The Sims everyone in a household is controlled by me but I only think of one one of them as I as the self and here in The Sims 2 with the addition of time this point of view changes generationally once Junior reached adulthood in the original Sim became a tired old man I stopped thinking of him as me my POV shifted down to the kid so here is where we leave James failing to hit on an immortal maid climbing the corporate ladder in the medical field his mother never got a chance in trying to write the novel his father never finished the Sims 2 is about family and aspirations and achieving one's goals the original Sims gave no mechanical benefit to role-playing outside of getting enough friends to get promoted The Sims 2 by comparison uses its once and fear system to push these interactions and rewards the player both immediately and long term for engaging with them this in turn leads to romance and the encouraging of a player to have children in order to continue their Dynasty there is nothing preventing you from playing a character until they die and starting a new one but this would erase not only their money but their promotion rewards the game pushes the player I'll bet gently toward a dynastic playstyle to keep the game going it's no coincidence Sims start dying off right around the time their kids reach adulthood The Sims 2 at least for me represents the first high water mark for this series where the mechanical complexity and emergent storytelling found a balance that not only made both halves work but actively reinforced one another to elevate the whole let's see how the Sims 3 tried to elevate it even further [Music] the original Sims was a massively successful experiment with the Sims 2 proving it wasn't a fluke turning the original game into a lucrative series The Path forward seemed clear for each subsequent installment update the graphics throw in some additional mechanics enhance the foundation that was already there but the Sims 2 while being an impressive update had an easier Hill to climb the first game was so primitive that even simple graphical updates would convince old fans to buy the new version and though the addition of time deeply enhanced the game it did so off existing structures already established in the original so now the designers have a problem five years and eight expansion packs later how did the designers convince players to abandon all of that content of the Sims 2. in favor of purchasing a newer more limited set the graphical update between Sims 2 and 3 isn't a big enough leap on its own and let's face it Sims 3 is by far the ugliest in the series they've already brought in the addition of time and lifespans what other big back of the box feature could they Implement to get fans coming back to the Golden Goose all the while making the gameplay familiar enough to not alienate anyone now I played all of these games contemporaneously to their release but was really struggling to remember how I felt about the Sims 3. I didn't have all those warm fuzzy memories of playing with friends or the novelty of a new game to help me remember what it was like to play it so even though this game was newer in some ways I was going into it more blind than the previous titles fortunately for me this game is still supported by EA and was relatively simple to purchase and play Unfortunately they no longer sell the base game in its original form only this starter pack that includes a bunch of other stuff because this is a discussion of the base games I really wanted to replay them in their original state but no biggie I'll just ignore that stuff and stick as well as I can to the base game or so I thought starting the Sims 2 for the first time immediately put a smile on my face as the nostalgic music and interface kicked in and I was hoping for a similar experience when firing up the Sims 3. nope instead I got a huge tunnel Whiplash ripping away the fun and dropping me head first into a sea of microtransactions advertisements and requests to share my game on social media The Sims 2 felt happy joyous in jovial but the Sims 3 first impression was depressingly corporate now both Sims 1 and 2 were made under the Larry Probst era of EA the guy that took them from a fledgling Studio of software artists to the Juggernaut known for the battlefield Madden FIFA and Medal of Honor series but by 2009 and the release of the Sims 3 we were well into the riccatello era you know the guy who looks like Darth Sidious and is currently running Unity into the ground now riccatello has sort of a mixed reputation because on the one hand he pushed EA to create new titles leading to the creation of things like dead space Mirror's Edge and Mass Effect but on the other hand he slashed 17 percent of the company's Workforce and personally put a bullet in the head of Mythic visceral and pandemic Studios so it should come as no surprise that the Sims went from a wacky humorous experiment to a pre-packaged consumer good doing its best impression of a Twinkie the commoditization of the Sims is inescapable and soured many of my early moments revisiting this once beloved game even the music a historical strong suit for Maxis feels overly produced like a generic soundtrack stolen from a maid for TV movie the game bombards us with microtransactions from the very first menu replace the loading screens with ads and has this clippy ass micro transaction light bulb it's not just gross it's absolutely omnipresent in every aspect of the game but okay let's try and look past all that and create our first character young adult has been added to the stages of life you can pick from a wide variety of skin tones including blue and green and there are different sliders to customize body type foreign s so many micro transactions we can't even pick out a hairstyle without someone trying to sell us something but you know this is the starter Edition after all so let's just ignore it and focus on our character we can now choose body hair and get back tattoos still no henleys in the shirt selection but not everyone can have my impeccable fashion sense now I'm not one to normally obsess over character creation because you barely see the character up close anyway but I'm kinda into this Clark Kent Peter Parker mashup we got going here although can someone explain to me what this smudge is supposed to be is it just like a glitch or is it the Sim version of a hickey button the biggest overhaul in character creation comes from the abandonment of the personality points from the previous two games instead of trying to figure out how naughty or nice a Sim is characters can now pick up to five traits for their sin picking freely between positive and negative traits this is an interesting interest section of the system we normally see in hardcore games with the morgue sandbox nature of the Sims trade systems have appeared in many and RPG but usually have a trade-off in the form of buying points normally in these systems a player must take negative traits to earn points they spend on positive traits balancing the decision of the player and preventing them from creating something too overpowered Stellaris is a good modern example of this but the Sims is an entirely non-competitive Sandbox game one that doesn't really have to get worried about things like balance so they just let you go nuts picking as many positive or negative traits as you want aspirations are now back now called a lifetime wish and we can see the series fully embracing alternate sources of revenue like painting or writing by dedicating an entire aspiration to it and finally Sims can now further differentiate their personality by choosing a favorite color type of food and genre of music at long last we escape the tedium of character creation and step out into the new map for the first time it is a much much larger than the maps that came before it dwarfing the original Games map to an almost comical degree there are multiple big mansions on a hill not just one and multiple different Community lots and public spaces all with an icon to show the type of property they are this is our first indication of the game's Focus Community not only does the map point out all the places you can visit but the neighborhood gets its own button in the UI and the game now saves the entire neighborhood when playing the game not just the active lot a household now starts with sixteen thousand five hundred simoleons instead of the standard 20K you can buy houses furnished or unfurnished and there's a difficulty indicator though strangely as far as I can tell this isn't actually a slider this isn't something you can choose or change when making a household some conversation online seems to suggest this difficulty indicator is a black box filled with the number of Sims their ages and traits all coming into play but I wasn't able to verify that I'm more interested in why it isn't a difficulty slider I mean the games already let you adjust the specific lifespan ranges of each stage in life why not just give you an easy medium or hard starting cash option like the SimCity games do unlike the neighborhood Maps the individual lots are the same size but the square density is multiplied by four allowing you to place items more naturally within a space larger Furniture can be placed on half squares and decorations can be placed within a variety of positions and God this microtransaction stuff is inescapable it's in every menu it has literal pop-up ads the shop menu even glows until you click on it not only are microtransaction items not not sequestered onto their own tab as they should be but they put the real money items at the top of every list the entire game is infested with this crap thankfully and by a sheer accident I found the hide microtransaction button perhaps now we can you know focus on the actual game like with all sequels there are a host of generic improvements family inventory and personal inventory allow you to store things when moving animations are more involved across the board especially things for like cooking and you can buy cars which while available in earlier expansions make their first and only appearance in a Mainline game individual Sims also have their own cell phones to avoid a Reliance on landline telephones and it only now occurs to me that the Sims earlier games are going to evolve into this weird historical simulation of what life was like in earlier ages like seriously who has a landline telephone anymore or a CRT the newspapers are still a news sense though I guess in this instance that's a good thing because I joined the journalism career path and the girl will stop delivering them if you make a newspaper anti-summoning Circle outside Sims can upgrade objects to be more better or ER and there is a notification system that while initially very annoying due to advertisements is actually quite useful once that stuff is disabled the fit fat meters from Sims 2 are also gone in that game your sim got chunkier if they ate a lot and didn't exercise I hilariously only noticed this was removed in The Sims 3 after I bought this treadmill had a Sam use it exactly once and then totally forgot it existed just like real life all right so that's the little changes out of the way now we can get to the cow portion of the video with the game's biggest mechanical change in the form of moods and moodlets the standard eight needs from previous games have been reduced to six cutting comfort and environment from the equation these have now been replaced with moodlets little temporary Buffs and debuffs to a Sims overall mood that are caused from certain actions social interactions items or surroundings for example pretty artwork might boost a Sims mood due to Pleasant surroundings or how sleeping in all the way provides a Sim with a bonus moodlet that they'll miss out on if they jump out of bed early this helps to provide a small bonus incentive to certain neglected activities or provide reason to clean a messy house outside the limited effect on the mood meter while I'm tempted to describe this as the game being dumbed down I ask actually see the case for it comfort and environment regularly impacted anything directly instead being relegated to secondary effects the Comfort level of a bed only mattered when someone was sleeping in it to recover energy and the Comfort level of a couch only came into play when someone was watching TV to boost fun it didn't really serve a purpose as its own meter with no activities directly targeting comfort and environment they were often ignored really only serving as indirect incentives to buy better furniture or purchase decorations so getting rid of them just seems like smart streamlining rather than cutting down for the casuals and I'm probably reading way too much into this but after all isn't that why we're here but notice how the mood tab is now last rather than first I mean that's probably so it's easier to find but it seems weird to me that the supposed core of the gameplay managing a Sims mood is put at the back of of the UI The Once and fear system introduced and two has also been overhauled now simplified into the wishes system wishes pop up randomly in a special box based on a Sims skills traits career and relationships up to four wishes can be locked in or promised and completing said wish grants points just like once in The Sims 2. notably only wishes locked in can be redeemed so the player is incentivized to keep a close eye on it and think about which ones they want to promise fears are entirely gone and what is probably a good streamlining of the earlier system fears while adding moment-to-moment interest felt like they were primarily there for role-playing reasons it seems weird in that context to punish a player for actually having that activity happen while I think the Sims 3 system is better the presentation does feel sanded down lacking the tech mixture of two's implementation a thing that Sims 3 seems to struggle with across the board what is unquestionably better are the rewards two had a really weird dichotomy in its reward system where rewards were only used for short-term benefits like extra money or boost to skills or expanded lifespan at the highest tier but these rewards could only be safely used when a Sim was in a gold aspirational state on a meter that decayed over time Sims 3 smartly dishes the whole aspirational meter while keeping the wants and points for completing them points can now be used to purchase additional traits over and Beyond the initial maximum of five chosenic character creation these are pretty big boosts aiding a Sim and everything from Gaining skills to making money or altering personality and are permanent unlike the earlier reward the highest end of these rewards are special items like the food replicator that duplicates cooked meals or the teleporter that allows a Sim to teleport to another lot rather than calling a taxi while these are certainly cool they seem to have replaced the excellent career reward items from the Sims 2 which let's face it we're better the addition of moodlets and smooth lining of the wishes system may seem like simple refinements but they actually intertwine in clever ways to motivate the player towards certain behaviors reinforcing the mechanical and role-playing aspects of this series in equal measure the Sims as a series works best when its mechanical systems and emergent role-playing driven narrative intersect and these systems give us a great example of how when life is going poorly for a Sim once stop being lofty goals of promotion or getting better at a skill and are instead replaced by simple things like taking out the trash or mopping up a puddle on the floor making an interesting F unintended commentary on struggling through basic tasks when dealing with poor mental health or depression wishes can help Propel shy Sims out of the house or incentivize a player to spend time furthering a relationship they even reinforce the economic progression of a Sim with mundane activities like washing dishes by hand causing a Sim to daydream about buying a dishwasher this is further expanded by the moodlet system which continually incentivizes the player to go beyond simple actions a Sim can cook bread and jam for a quick breakfast which is both fast and cheap this meal fills the hunger meter just the same as any other but offers no moodlet making a full meal however often prompted by a wish not only fills the hunger meter but provides a positive moodlet for going through the extra trouble these moodlets in turn help a Sim maintain their High mood which accelerates everything from promotions to gaining skills this combination of moodlets and wishes puts a greater emphasis on the individual actions and activities of a Sim rather than gamified meters skill prerequisites or social requirements it Bridges the gap between stilted virtual dollhouse and the imaginative life players are trying to Envision for their Sims foreign s aren't the only thing to get overhauled in a more naturalistic Direction either careers have been significantly overhauled drawing them away from the mechanical grind of earlier titles in the original Sims job performance was a simple rating from dismal to excellent a Sam needed to have met this skill point and family friend requirement in order to be eligible for promotion with a good rating giving a small chance of promotion and an excellent rating giving a bigger one in The Sims 2 the social and skill requirements are still there but performance is displayed by a meter instead of the rating in effect it works the same way as Sims go to work in a good mood the meter goes up and the higher the meter the higher chance of promotion provided the other requirements are met in both the Sims 1 and Sims 2 these requirements were hard barriers to progress and a Sim often needed to be in the higher best performance category to get promoted not so in The Sims 3. performance in The Sims 3 is marked using the familiar green bar the level of which is determined by several meters corresponding to different requirements of that job the more you fulfill the requirement the more its specific meter goes up although in this case the meter is actually a set of disturbing emojis look it was 2009 Emoji Tech hadn't come that far at the lowest level of a career path this may be only two requirements like the ever present mood or a skill like writing while at higher levels this can include mood writing Charisma and activities such as the journalism career track requiring the writing of news stories and reviews but unlike past games not only is there no social requirement the rest aren't hard caps Instead The Sims 3 uses a weighted system across all of these meters each sub meter can go from horrifying a negative three to a neutral zero and up to outstanding a positive three so long as the average of all these meters is in the positive the overall performance bar goes up and a Sim can still get promoted this is a radical departure from earlier games and fundamentally changes the player's relationship to career advancement in The Sims 1 and 2 requirements were rigid barriers if a job required you to have three skill points in logic Four Points in Charisma and have two friends it didn't matter how good a mood you went to work in you were never getting promoted similarly it didn't matter if you maxed out logic and had nine friends without those four points in Charisma you were stuck in that position but in The Sims 3 those hard caps are gone if a Sim has three points and logic and no points in Charisma they can still get promoted provided they've bolstered their performance through mood or other activities more crucially having higher points in logic above the requested amount will offset those missing Charisma points I can make a Sim with 10 logic and Zero Charisma and still get promoted just as fast without ever having to look in a mirror this provides the player an enormous amount of Freedom both in the gameplay and in the narrative allowing them to get promoted their way in the same way games like Hitman let someone take out a Target however they want the game adds to this complexity by telling them who their boss is so they can schmooze their way to higher performance and even adds a new drop down menu to allow a player to determine their Sims Focus while at work players can choose if they want their Sim to work harder increasing performance at the expense of mood socializing if they want to make friends or even focusing on improving skills careers feel easier and more vibrant thanks to this system where overall performance matters far more than some arbitrary line that needs to be crossed it draws them away from the mechanical grind of previous titles and towards something that feels both more natural and rewarding for making gameplay in player perspective again one could decry this as yet further dumbing down of a series reducing the mechanical difficulty of the game in favor of the more social role-playing crowd but I think it does it the opposite the flexibility not only gives the player more options it enhances the mechanical aspects rather than hurts it in the original Sims there was exactly one way to the top max out skills and make more friends than you know what to do with there is only one build for your character in order to get promoted to the top as if if an RPG was forcing you to dump all your points into charisma at the detriment of all else thanks to the removal of hard caps players can now climb the corporate ladder in the way that best supports their play style those who want to only engage in the social side of things can skip weeks spent playing chess matches alone and focus on rubbing elbows with their co-workers or seducing their boss while players like me can avoid making friends altogether it maintains the strictly gameplay-centric goal of getting promoted to get more money to buy more things but gives players more routes towards that same goal for their preferred play style it's a really smart Improvement that maintains the strengths of both aspects of the Sims mechanical and narrative this skill system has been similarly overhauled but to a more mixed result the original Sims had six skills cooking mechanical Charisma Body Logic and creativity with this sequel adding cleaning for a total of seven The Sims 3 expands this to 11 in the basic game dropping cleaning and breaking creativity out into writing painting piano and guitar as separate skills skills no longer appear in the skills tab until a Sim has learned them preventing inexperienced players from even knowing they're an option this is matched by an expansion in the books available to a Sim gone are the days of a bookshelf containing the three options of cooking cleaning and mechanical with bookcases now acting as containers that can hold dozens of different books these books not only represent certain skills but skill levels you can't just read one cooking book over and over now you have to graduate from level 1 books which confusingly covers skills points one through three level two covering four through six and so on requiring players to read at lower levels before moving on to the next book and this is the part where I have to ask why like I see the case for breaking out writing and painting and musical instruments from the generic creativity but do we really need separate skills for each musical instrument in real life sure playing a piano and a guitar are completely separate activities but this game has never been won for realism in the books what is gained from breaking those out what fantasy your gameplay challenge is being invoked there of having to go buy another book and it doesn't stop there one of the cool changes from The Sims 1 to 2 was that an increase in cooking skill allowed Sims to make different foods rather than being stuck with the generic options of breakfast lunch and dinner Sims 3 carries this over but adds an additional barrier of requiring some recipes to be bought or traded for and again I struggle to ask why how is this enhancing gameplay is there a whole section of culinary Sims fans who wanted to add a collection mechanic it certainly additive but is it effective on the flip side the social requirement for promotions hasn't been eliminated so much as it has been moved the charisma skill now locks advancement past a certain point if the same in question doesn't have enough friends that's a weird design choice but I think it's kind of neat you can also Now train Charisma just by talking to people passively learning it in the same way cooking worked in The Sims 2. and finally The Sims 3 adds skill trainers allowing you to pay to have a skill increase like you can from trainers and Morrowind I always found that as an odd Omission from the previous games with its focus on wealth why not let you use some of that wealth to gain skills faster get promoted and keep the money treadmill going and that leads us rather nicely to opportunities which can also reward skill points for completion what are opportunities you ask well they're one of the most interesting additions to the series because it's damn near a full Quest system yeah in addition to having different character builds and unlocked abilities The Sims now has quests it makes me wonder if there's a ttrpg out there whose sole purpose is to replicate mundane domestic life because that would be cool Sims ttrpg anyone opportunities in The Sims 3 pop up seemingly at random and can come from community events skills a Sim possesses or even their career the player is given a choice to accept or reject the quest in question and then given a certain objective to complete finishing the objective rewards the Sim usually with money but occasionally with new social connections or even skill points this moves away from the random FTL style chance cards of the Sims 2 and into something closer third of what we would expect from normal video games the only real difference between this and a full-blown Quest system is there's no way for the player to initiate no golden exclamation mark to click on I think it's in moments like these where I find this series so fascinating these opportunities are there to break up monotonous gameplay into push players towards certain opportunities just like the wish system it is a strictly mechanical gamer system one that should appeal to hardcore players trying to squeeze every bit of mechanical complexity from this series and yet it directly enhances the social and role play aspect of the game and does it so seamlessly that I bet most players hardly even notice it like a lot of aspects of the Sims 3 it represents a deeper maturity in the designer's understanding of their own series The Chance cards in Sims 2 were fun but they were random with rewards and penalties handled out in equal measure entertaining but not engaging the opportunity system of the Sims 3 directly expanded on that system and did so in a way that gives the player more Authority this even bleeds back into the skill system where skills now have little sub quests in addition to raising skill points Each of which comes with a reward for that skill such as higher payouts or being able to complete activities faster this is a really smart way to add goals and complexity for the mechanical players who want it without bogging down the role players with harsh requirements that block further progress more carrots less sticks in the same way that adding age to The Sims 2 created ripples throughout its design the addition of traits moodlets and Community Lots send shock waves through the Sims Social gameplay giving it far more versatility than earlier games traits not only affect a Sims personality it grants Sims special interactions and connections with those that share it for example a bookworm SIM can talk about books and doing so with another Sim who shares that trait will help them to quickly hit it off and become fast friends moodlets can be triggered from both positive and negative interactions providing further incentive to pursue positive social relationships in the same way the game pushes players to buy higher quality items but the biggest Shape Up comes from the new way community lots are handled while introduced in The Sims 2 Community Lots were very primitive comprised of few locations Sims could load into as Standalone Lots this allowed them to purchase items meet new people and exist somewhere outside of their own home but the locations were limited in the interactions often felt unnatural sure you could visit friends at the arcade or buy groceries but these felt like tacked on experiences rather than being fully integrated into the main game The Sims 3 however provides a neighborhood that can be freely and easily traveled from the map screen rather than having to call a taxi and provides players with ample encouragement to leave the house meet people and engage with the community around them there's parks and grocery stores fishing spots and movie theaters complete with Real showtimes Sims can not only buy Goods at these properties but buy the stores themselves for added passive income and The Sims 3 a player doesn't have to settle for buying the biggest house they can just buy the town a host of other improvements have also been made there's now a new hangout feature allowing Sims to hang out around town or even go on dates with a little meter popping up to let you know how the outing is going Sims will react based on how much fun they're having further incentivizing Sims to meet up in the cool places around town instead of their cram to run down homes these Hangouts and group activities help keep Sims together and wider open environments and make it far easier to coordinate larger groups than existed in previous titles Sims can now interact with each other right from the social tab which is a nice ease of use feature the game has dropped the long-term social meter from The Sims 2 and Community Lots now contain random items that can be collected to further incentivize exploration including rocks bugs and every video game's favorite side activity fishing there are some hitches is in the get along for instance it's weird that once you become friends with someone it doesn't show you their work schedule leading to a game of invite roulette there also seems to be a dearth of public restrooms and places to cook in the public Lots unlike their wider availability in The Sims 2 making it a little more difficult to manage mood meters while on the go but the faster loading in and out of lots largely remedies this as it's much faster to go to another lot or pop back home for a bit and while I do appreciate the grocery store which did exist in The Sims 2 all bet in a limited form it's a little disappointing that these buildings can no longer be entered like they could in the previous game the Interiors have been replaced in Sims 3 by a simple menu another Oddity is the removal of the option to buy groceries from Home Instead the refrigerator just charges the Sim as they prepare each meal like it did back in The Sims 1. what I find strange is the prices between in the fridge and the grocery store are the same while this is undoubtedly a kindness to the player it seems weird that they wouldn't also use this to encourage the player to get out of the house perhaps by adding a small surcharge or delivery fee to things purchased at a fridge but maybe they thought that would be too unfair [Music] The Sims 3 as far as I can tell is generally remembered as the best in the series not for any one thing but how all these things come together featuring an impressive set of mechanics interactions and improvements that feed into the role-playing and emergent narratives the series is known for the addition of generational time greatly enhance the storytelling potential of its predecessor but the Sims 3's combination of traits moodlets and Community Lots takes it to an even higher level leading to memorable character stories that cause players to have such affection for the game look at what happened to our Thrice resurrected Sim here having remembered a past life in which he married a goth and the large Dowry it brought he rushes to introduce himself to this newest incarnation of a past love she however was far less interested this time around probably from remembering the difficulties of their previous marriage ruined relationship change in career and being forced to live across the street from her parents heartbroken and seeing a notification of a book sale the Sim decides they'll go down to the local store and pick up some skill books to drown away Sorrows he sees a pretty lady exit sent bookstore and figures they probably have a thing or two in common he breaks the ice with a little book-centric conversation and the two quickly hit it off now this is still the Sims so our lucky Bachelor comes home and immediately sets the oven on fire only to get a phone call from the new love interest asking if he wants to come over something the series has never done before unfortunately he has to decline so he can replace the now smoldering oven and get some sleep love will have to wait until another day and you don't have to be a writer to draw all these threads together the game does it all on its own using its varied mechanics to spin effortless narratives of humor romance and heartache but like The Sims 2 these added mechanics can lead to a narrative dark side in the case of our two lovebirds their courtship thankfully proceeded undaunted What followed was many a pleasant date in conversation at the town's best restaurant and several invitations back to his place but again this is the Sims so one of them ended because there was nothing fun to do thanks to that new hangout meter and the other was interrupted by the oven catching on fire it's here where the relationship stalled for even though they were madly in love I the player couldn't figure out how to get the new sim to move in it took me so long to figure it out to have my sin get over this apparent fear of commitment that by the time she finally moved in she was only two days away from turning into an elder I needed this Sim to have kids for this video and two days ain't enough time for that so this dirt bag of a sim took all her money kicked her out of the house and then gossips about it to a New Lover interest like a right bastard [Music] as fun as this narrative is it directly ties back to the game's mechanical systems the reason I had difficulty getting the sim to move in was because the Sims 3 handles Social progress differently than its predecessors dropping the long-term social meter in favor of a new system of momentum the social momentum only counts in the moment in the actual interaction happening rather than persisting across multiple visits as it did in the past Sims gained social points when interacting with another Sim showing their relative affection toward one another but bigger interactions like moving in proposing and marriage are locked and hidden from the player until sufficient momentum is gain this proceeds along two tracks one friendly and one romantic controlled by their respective category of social interactions I was having such trouble getting the love interest to move in in because I was trying to play it like past games we had a maxed out relationship meter but that wasn't enough in order to get the move-in option to appear I needed to chain together enough friendly interactions in a single conversation to build sufficient momentum for the option to show up I ran into the same problem with the second love interest or I couldn't propose because even though we were living together and had a kid I hadn't chained together enough romantic encounters to get the option to show up the system isn't terrible once you know how it works but the game never really explains it to you but there's a deeper fatal flaw in this momentum system that undermines it and I think it's why they did away with it in later games the momentum along friendly and romantic tracks does not happen in parallel and past games friendly interactions boosted social affections and romantic interactions boosted romantic affection and you could hop back and forth between them without penalty that's still true in the long term in The Sims 3 but it is a disastrous in the short term friendly interactions build this hidden momentometer but switching to even a single romantic interaction will destroy any friendly momentum and vice versa moving in is a friendly request according to the Sims with proposal and marriage being romantic so on the back end what was actually happening is I kept switching between romantic and friendly interactions trying to get the SIM to like me enough to move in but in reality I was shooting myself in the foot because every time I switch conversation type I was destroying any progress I had made on the one hand this helps avoid the married in a day problem The Sims has always had where Sims can go from meeting each other to getting hitched as forever soul mates in an afternoon but on the other hand it's a little too obfuscated too difficult to Intuit to figure out on your own perhaps a better use of the conversation meter or more clear prompts would have helped smooth this over the Sims 4 does an interesting thing here of having said options grayed out until they can be unlocked so the system is salvageable with a little work alright on the babies Offspring can now be born at hospitals thanks to the community map and how well the pregnancy went determines the number of traits a baby gets to pick when born the diaper changing station and bathing babies in syncs are things of the past which honestly is a little disappointing I always felt the diaper changing table really helped the baby's room feel like a baby's room but I suppose streamlining here is understandable given babies only exist for three days the more interesting aspect comes and how babies and toddlers interact with the new systems babies start earning life lifetime points the moment they're born but don't get wishes I find this super odd especially for toddlers The Sims allows toddlers to be trained in special skills including potty training talking and walking fuels like a missed opportunity for toddlers not to start with these wishes skills for toddlers are also handled different and no longer are earned one to one like they were in The Sims 2. and they are capped at three points per skill completely hampering players abilities to min max their toddlers into super soldiers this is counteracted by giving kids far more robust lives than in previous titles kids get to choose a lifetime achievement when aging from toddler to child can ride bikes around town instead of having to rely on taxis and can play with other kids at Community lots and will even get invited over to a friend's house after school skill bonuses earned from work done as a toddler don't reveal themselves until a kid does the related activity for the first time making it unclear which actions as a toddler resulted in which bonus this further discourages the Min maxing of toddlers however kids can earn and spend lifetime points Shifting the focus of squeezing everything out of a lifetime to the child phase of their lifespan The Sims 3 represents a clear shift from the purely mechanical nature of the Sims 1 and the goal-oriented focus of the Sims 2 to something more free form closer to the narrative sandbox reputation the series has always carried the game represents a distinct shift from the internal to the external less about the Sims themselves and how those Sims interact with others in the world around them in a lot of ways the Sims 3 feels like some strange Paradox the game is less focused on mechanics than ever but has the most systems keeping the mood high and getting promotion seems easier than ever yet climbing economically feels harsher than its predecessors have it been this focused on upgrading toilets and showers or worried about the oven Catching Fire since the Sims won even though there are far more routes for making money a spirit of the law or someone to do a video on the relative spending power and economies within each Sims title the game makes a very poor first impression thanks to the numerous micro transactions and general blandness of the presentation From the Muddy Graphics to the Hallmark movie soundtrack and yet the designing decorating and interacting with the world feels more organic than ever of all three games so far I felt real world hours slipping away the fastest Sims 1 and 2 were easier to walk away from to play for a few hours at a time and then take a break but I felt like I could spend days in The Sims 3 not necessarily happy or having fun but they're nonetheless in The Sims 2 I wanted to see the child grow all the way through their lifespan to get a full sense of the progression but in Sims 3 Once the kid came of age I just kind of lost motivation so we leave the family here working on their projects and continuing through their lives largely free of tension or Challenge Sims 3 started off leaving such a bad taste to my mouth that I thought I would never play it again I was so disgusted with all the micro transactions being rammed down my throat I didn't even want to touch it but once I actually gave it a real chance I found a deep and enthralling game that helped explain why Sims 3 is many people's favorites in the series the combination of dropping the oppressive social requirements adding the early game grind for better items the freedom of exploring town the game presents the player with this wide open Vista of exploration that was not yet seen in The Sims games though I love Sims 2 The Sims 3 was quickly surpassing it which brings us back to our lovely little family and their big house buying up the town rich and effortless and the game just kind of lost its luster there's no real end game with the Sims no final boss to beat the game is continued by the player and the stories they want to tell I guess I just ran out of interest in the story of these individual characters one of the things I like to do most in Minecraft is explore I'll find a location for a central base and then I'll expand out in all directions finding cool little spots to build outposts to Aid me in my travels then when I find plants or animals I don't have I'll bring them back to that Central base like the fun parts of the age of Discovery and exploration before colonialism ruined everything eventually I do get bored of this and put the game down for a while but in Minecraft whenever I come back to it those Horizons are still there to explore complete with their own challenges but in The Sims what is there to come back to I could make a new character maybe or have this character move out and start over with them but with that next run be any different one of the reasons Rogue likes and lights are so beloved by modern gamer is because they're quick familiar and always different from net hacks yet another stupid death to a bad jump and Spelunky or a rough encounter in FTL The Sims very quickly runs out of that challenge and lacks their Randomness to keep me coming back at least from a mechanical perspective from a social perspective there's no shortage of it just consider the life of this guy Caesar goth tries to marry her only to find out she's taken meets a girl at a bookstore struggles to get together with her finally gets her to move in only to realize she's two days away from oldsville meets another character outside the grocery store who also happens to be a bookworm they hit it off and live happily ever after very random very fun I suspect Sims 3 is the major point of Divergence for fans of this series where the mechanical players like myself missed the goal-oriented nature of Sims 2's career goals and found Sims 3 to be more flexible But ultimately less rewarding as we left only the social players remain let's see how that affected Sims 4. [Music] at long last God knows how many hours into this thing we arrive at the most recent of Sims The Sims 4. we can see right away how far the series has come from its humble origins The Sims 1 opened with a slick intro in A Primitive neighborhood screen The Sims 2 opens with a selection of neighborhoods with the Sims 3 combining those approaches so how does The Sims 4 grade us with a giant billboard of ads ain't progress Grand at least they've added little scenarios gamified challenges with specific conditions a la civilization that's neat and whatever you know the drill by now let's create a character the character creator has a clean visual aesthetic which I like and a point-and-click driven interface that I do not it should would be easier to navigate but just isn't not only does it take several clicks to get anywhere but every accessory and item needs to be picked for every outfit and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change eye color clicking on the eyes doesn't do it the face doesn't do it the Sims just not have eye color now really the only interesting thing is we're back to having two sliders for fit and fat highlighting the series continued struggle with representing different body types oh and there are options for teeth now like getting rid of eye color kind of makes sense I mean how often are you looking at a Sim's eyes so why the teeth also you can give your sim a creepy walk okay what else we got aspirations are back and you can pick between a whopping 12 of them Each of which comes with their own subclass leaning even harder into the aspirations as player class idea and Sims can now pick up to 20 likes from a wide variety of choices including color food and music alright let's find this doofus so where to live the map screen is radically different no longer featuring one big neighborhood a la Sims 3 or a large number of lots a la Sims 2. now each neighborhood is broken up into smaller sub-neighborhoods Each of which act as their own self-contained megalot Pleasantville is unfortunately gone forever but we are back to starting with twenty thousand dollars one thing I find intriguing is how in each game since the Sims 2 the lots have felt smaller and more cramped with each release even when they have the same total number of squares the music is much better this time around having a distinct personality without being overwhelming the neighborhood music in particular reminds me of the Ori soundtrack far more preferable over the made-for-tv movie sound of the previous game there's now a big get a job button that brings up a menu of all jobs rather than looking through the newspaper or computer each Sim has their own modern smartphone further reflecting the era and everyone gets this blue news Clues looking handy dandy notebook to write things down in bills are higher this time around and broken into subcategories helping the early game feel more vibrant and full of tension objects have power consumption and reliability ratings listed in their description Sims can now extinguish themselves when on fire but can no longer Place objects on invisible walls which is surprisingly annoying and finally a Sims portrait will turn out the lights when sleeping helping to see what they're up to at a glance the UI itself has been reworked to a more modern minimalist approach and not always for the better though that's probably just me being grumpy the activity queue is now a column listing upcoming actions buy and Bill mode have been combined into a single button and the fast forward through current task is gone from three though the game will kick into an ultra speed mode when sleeping or at work the sequencing of actions and path binding by the AI is drastically improved approved though there are still hitches like having to get out of bed before two sims will woohoo overall the graphical presentation is far improved Over The Sims 3. with clean appealing textures that make items immediately recognizable and visually interesting without feeling like plastic it reminds me of Pixar style in a lot of ways and that's a good thing aspirations and rewards are back in a way that sort of combines the approaches from two and three each aspiration is broken down into four levels with each level comprised of subquests that must be completed in order to advance to the next level so for a painter you need to start three paintings while inspired and paint for a total of five hours to complete that level this gives a lump sum of lifetime points and one go and reveals the next level once all of the levels are complete the player unlocks a special bonus trait we solve this system in The Sims 3 where each aspiration had three long-term goals Each of which came with a long-term reward like being able to write faster or sell books for higher royalties in The Sims 4 they somehow expanded it by having many more Milestones to achieve and lessened it by leading to only one bonus rate instead of three like before what's really wild is you can change this asp inspiration at any time for any reason and not lose any of your progress simply jumping back and forth at will good point costs for rewards this time around is much lower but getting those points takes a lot longer because the game shipped without a wish system we'll get back to that aspirations were the only way for someone to earn lifetime points apart from fulfilling certain achievements like having a loner exam do nothing social for 24 hours or reaching the max level of a skill the removal of Sims 2 and 3's short-term treadmill for wants and wishes not only lessened the short-term gameplay Loop it gave long stretches where the player wasn't earning any points it basically shunted the aspiration system to being one of short-term goals to one of medium turn goals the consequence of this is that lifetime points take longer to earn and thus the player is less likely to spin them saving up Ford late game traits that really matter because there's no cost to changing aspirations you could Bounce Around filling all the lower level easier ones to quickly grind points but this seems less than ideal what I don't get is why not just have all of these quests active at the same time or at least the lowest level of each category that would allow you to earn points faster and provide the same Freedom the game already offers without having to cycle between aspirations that have no other effect on gameplay the moodlet system has also carried over but they dropped the bonus moodlets for fully completing an activity like sleeping in all the way or having a well-prepared meal instead they've replaced it with the mood system Sims now have moves like energized or thoughtful these moods allow them to alter existing actions and open up new social interactions in the same way the traits system does moods can be triggered by certain events or surroundings and can be deliberately altered by taking special actions with household objects like taking a thoughtful shower to get them introspective or a Brisk shower to get them energized this mood system in turn feeds back into the likes chosen at character creation eating food a Sim likes can make them happy while listening to music they hate can make them tense or agitated the game will even go so far as to suggest new likes and dislikes to the player based on the actions of their Sim there also seems to be more free will than ever before with Sims choosing to interrupt tasks you've assigned them in past games that was only done when a Sims mood became too negative for them to continue but in The Sims 4 I've had multiple interruptions of even simple tasks like reading it ends up feeling less like Free Will and more like buggy AI for example Apple I make Sims neat because it makes cleaning easier but the Sim kept interrupting activities to go clean making them seem more obsessive compulsive than someone who merely likes to keep a tidy home it's possible that the task is stopping at certain Milestones 25 50 or 75 percent of the way through the task but the game doesn't really explain this [Music] careers are pretty similar to The Sims 3 receiving the least amount of overhaul in any of the games so far job performance is back to being a meter like in The Sims 2 with promotion requirements and a daily task that can be used to boost performance honestly it fuels kind of a step back from The Sims 3 system but perhaps they felt that game's implementation was too unfocused there's also no more carpool boo not only does this send a worse environmental message but I always loved seeing the cars get upgraded as you increased in the career path it was a nice touch that has now just gone it's not all bad they kept the choosing how you want to work mechanic from three and brought back career rewards in the form of items that unlock for the household as you climb the corporate ladder they've even added specific conversation interactions that only unlock once you reach a certain level in a career very cool skills are yet again more granular you even surpassing the minutia of three there are now 20 skills in the base game including video games Gourmet cooking photography and programming nearly all of which can be used for secondary sources of income while hoping to add a bit of personality to the SIM for instance having woodworking as a career skill it all ends up feeling a bit aimless like programming I get gardening shore fishing why not but do we really need comedy mischief and video games as their own skills what is served by breaking all of these skills out take cooking for instance the base game has three separate cooking skills including General cooking Gourmet cooking and Mixology AKA bartending does the variety make cooking more fun does it help make the Sim feel more individual does it help to have more skills to grind or is it simply variety or variety's sake it does add some flavor if if you can forgive the pun to the cooking career path which requires skills in both cooking and Mixology to progress but I'm not sure the cooking juice is worth the complexity squeeze on some level I do find it interesting that games like the Elder Scrolls series are routinely criticized for reducing skills in their games for dumbing it down for the casuals and yet here we are in The Sims which is about as close to a flagship title the so-called casuals are ever going to get and they just keep piling on more skills with every release foreign so far they haven't made many huge changes to careers or skills aside from adding on to them so what have they done with social well they've enhanced the grouping feature from Sims 3 upgrading them to social events that last a specific amount of time the player is introduced to this right away with the return of the welcome to the neighborhood event conversations can now seamlessly involve multiple people and can roam about a space while having them with different people sitting in different areas able to take part without interruption your sim now keeps a dossier on everyone they met which is creepy but it also finally shows their work schedule something we've needed since the Sims 2 in the introduction of time you can now encourage Sims to pursue dating with other people and they'll even call you to ask if they should do certain things like ask someone out or change jobs adding to the sense that these people are actual friends this can backfire fire like I told a Sim she should ask a guy out before realizing she was the most likely match for my sim given the overlap and personality or how I told them to pursue their dreams once the two sims were dating only for her to move in and then quit her dream job at a moment when money was particularly tight overall it's a simple but fun addition that adds to the game's emergent narratives relationships are back to progressing quickly and they've either jettisoned or diminished though momentum system a little menu pops up showing how an individual conversation is going and a refinement of a similar system and three and now we have two meters one for friendly progress and one for romantic while these changes make the system easier to understand it also means we're back to getting married in a single night overall The Sims 4 puts a lot of effort into facilitating conversations add to the addition of the likes and dislikes on top of traits and Sims have more things to a bond or disagree over than ever before as much as refinements have brought the social system forward the neighborhood feels like a distinct step back the neighborhood is no longer full of houses and shops and parks for the player to explore or meet people in instead the neighborhood is broken up into sub-neighborhoods there are lots of random houses around the edge to help make the city feel bigger but they can't be interacted with and there are no restaurants or movie theaters to hang out in it feels like a throwback to The Sims 2 when Lots were more isolated and individual it's one of the rare instances in the series that feels like a noticeable downgrade from previous games at least these loading screens don't have ads The Sims 4 tries to make up for this with the new public events system public events were present in previous entries in the series but the Sims 4 puts an added Focus on them through festivals which are time unique events that pop up on a semi-regular schedule unlike the Sims 3 however these events are instanced meaning you have to load into them and can't jump back and forth between public lots and homes like you could in The Sims 3. jumping back home to check on another Sim means the end of the special event the goal seems intended to present the player with something to break up the monotony of gameplay but the events themselves feel aimless and devoid of purpose there's a flea market to buy occasional items or a cook-off to try out new food but they feel lackluster compared to the implementation of such things in other games look at animal crossing or stardew Valley both of those games themselves narrative sandboxes built around consumerism one four and one against have special events to help break up the repetitive nature of their gameplay but in those games these events come with special times unique mini games or other unique encounters that separate the gameplay of the special events from that of normal play now compare that to the Sims sure the festivals have a different color wrapping but the interactions the player is doing are the same in Animal Crossing you can unlock unique items for your house or earn prizes in stardew Valley but what do you get in The Sims 4 you're not coming home with unique items or new recipes outside of buying a t-shirt the flea market idea is kinda cool dropping random items at potential discounts and allowing the same space to sell their own belongings such as crafted Goods but again there really isn't much to do hardly worth the effort of loading into a smaller slice of the game unable to interact with your household aside from the issuance of very basic commands at least in The Sims 3's case you could bot back and forth while your sim was out and about [Music] foreign last thing we have to touch on before we start to wrap up during the writing and recording of this video The Sims 4 decided to put out a big update reintroducing the once and fear system from three so let's fire the game back up and see how or if this changes anything characters old and new now have two ones that pop up over their heads but no immediate fears once consist of typical actions and a word lifetime points depending on the complexity or time requirement of the task so far so normal the game will even tell you what like trait or other event triggered the want and they make sure to tie it into the mood system such as wanting to go to work Focus you can't dismiss these two ones but you can pin them and they reset upon completion or going to sleep rather than changing with time like in The Sims 3. a third want will pop up in special circumstances like during Town festivals or when the Sim has a critical need like going to the bathroom only these third ones can be dispelled though I'm not sure why they're different than the other two overall the one system feels more rigid and less spontaneous than the Sims 3. I noticed a distinct lack of variety in the ones being limited to simple activities like listening to music and social wants seem to pop up less often than in earlier Games music once were so common for the Sim I made who did have a bunch of light music that I actually went back into the Character Creator to remove them this did free up the ones for a little more variety overall it was still pretty stale and seemed unrelated to The Sims actions in the Sims 3 characters forced to wash dishes by hand would dream of a dishwasher or would be so depressed that even mopping up the floor was considered a huge success while reintroducing the one system does a lot to shore up the short-term gameplay Loop of the Sims 4 it feels rather lackluster in comparison seeing the same once over and over again and earning few points for them to the point they hardly feel their worth the effort the new fear system is also kind of a mixed bag I really like it conceptually but I think the execution is a little rough instead of Simply being anti once like they were in The Sims 2. fears are now a trait that gets added to the character throughout play they include things like fear of death or being stuck in a dead end job these fears once triggered can put Sims in a special mood then in turn unlocks special actions or social interactions like panicked poop or Screaming incoherently it's a really cool idea these fears will in turn spawn a special kind of want that helps the Sim get over their fear like regaining their passion for work or confiding in someone their fear of death these aren't a guaranteed success and may need to be tried multiple times to work they also can't be locked in and wipe upon sleeping this can cause issues where a Sims fear triggers upon them getting home from work but requires them to take an action before going to work to dispel it which wouldn't be a problem except the Sims tend to sleep between getting home from work and returning to work which wipes the want far more damaging are two of the fear system's biggest drawbacks the first being its disconnected nature and the second being its repeatability the fears that Sims have seem completely separate from their personalities I made a money-hungry ambitious climber of a Sim who was getting steadily promoted so why was she afraid of a dead-end job upon getting promoted the promotion was definitely the trigger as it happened to both Sims but that seems to not make any sense to me shouldn't getting promoted be the opposite of a dead end job the fear of death also seemed random it was caused in both Sims by fixing Electronics which can technically electrocute them but there was nothing in the action to cause that fear it just popped up like if they got electrocuted and lived then I could see them being afraid the next time around but the repair was successful so why were they afraid and the ultimate fatal flaw here is that fears not only seem limited they repeat even if you successfully complete the activity to relieve the Sim of that beer it can come randomly back at any time the Sims suffering and re-suffering through the same fear every few days it makes the system feel more like busy work than rewarded progress and I do mean suffer the fears seem to make Sims miserable imposter syndrome dead-end jobs fear of death there's no therapy in this game to deal with it either I think they brought back the want and fear system to help Shore up the short-term gameplay Loop of the Sims 4. the medium Loop of gaining skills and promotions is still there bolstered by the revamped aspiration system and the long-term goals of Financial and familiar gain are ever present it was the short-term Loop that was dragging but the combination of two wants drawn from a limited pool and there are pitifully small point value leads to a system that feels tacked on rather than integral aspirational Milestones can reward a thousand points of Pop enough to buy a new trait but the ones tend to generate on average 25 points with some getting as high as a hundred with good trades cost anywhere from a thousand to three thousand points the effort of fulfilling all those once seems hardly worth it this is highlighted by the third want which only pops up sparingly it's hard to tell whether this is to intentionally limit the player's Point gain or if it's because the system is so thin it would exacerbate the already noticeable problem in the variety of existing once lifespans do feel longer in The Sims 4 which could explain why they slowed down so many systems from a skill gain to accruing wealth to getting promoted but make too many things too slow and you don't have a marathon of a game you have a slog The Once In Fear system while cool to see returning only helps mask the issue it doesn't help solve it foreign sitting down to do this feature I remembered what the Sims 1 and 2 were mostly about with three and four being fuzzier but the Sims 3 quickly revealed its themes of community of stepping past the boundaries of the lot and letting your sim and their family engage with the wider world but after dozens of hours with the Sims 4 I still don't know what the game is trying to say sure it's a virtual dollhouse but so were the other three games in the series Each of which used their mechanics to push a central idea the game wants to pretend it's about socialization and group activities but there is so little to do outside of the home think about how games like Animal Crossing reward you for interacting with your neighbors prompting the player with Quest and rewarding them with unique items The Sims 4 is not about family or Community or the gaining of wealth and social status like the game is decidedly the Sims it looks like the Sims it plays like The Sims but the previous games all had their own identity as to where this one just is it gives me distinct design salad Vibes a trend I'm noticing more and more in the industry mechanics and ideas tossed in without much thought given as to why they're there but more than anything I think the game is trying to be a reboot of sorts a game focused on modernization instead of evolution or revolution it reminds me of the Arkham Batman games how they tried to take all the best bits of the Batman story and mix them into something new but where that felt like a fresh new coat of paint this just feels watered down it feels like Maxis was trying to pair back some of the feature creep that accumulated over the past three games and God only knows how many expansions in some way that's kind of the point of of every Sim sequel strip everything back down to provide a new layer to build on top of one DLC and microtransaction Laden brick at a time the Sims 4 is very smooth there's very little friction to everything sanded back down to its roots so sure it's a return to form but what form so what is the point of the Sims 4 based on the amount of people and phone calls you would think the game was about hanging out with friends except the game doesn't provide any good incentive or interaction for doing that there's no promotion social requirement like in the first game there's nothing to do with them out on the town like in The Sims 3 and you don't get unique items like in animal crossing the thing the game pushes you toward the most is increasing your skills both through promotion requirements and aspirations these open new items through promotion and open new interactions both with existing items and in conversation there are more skills than ever many of which are unique and yet the game breaks up the training of those skills taking longer to earn them and has the Free Will of the Sims to constantly interrupt them Sims 4 has the best art style of any game in the series and has clearly given thought to how to modernize mechanics of the past but as a whole is left feeling like it doesn't have much of a point much of a statement when I dig in Minecraft I get stuff that helps me progress when I explore unknown areas in Elden ring I get stuff that helps me progress when I do chores or special events and Animal Crossing I get unique items but what do I get in The Sims 4 a t-shirt it feels like Sims 4 took all the past mechanics of the franchise and rebuilt them into a solid foundation and then didn't know what to do with it the game feels small cramped and isolated it doesn't feel aimless as something like Minecraft can but it does feel devoid of purpose Sims 3 bombarded the player with ads but once you turn all of that off you find a rewarding Sims experience but in Sims 4 what do you get what are you working toward it feels kind of soulless an odd thing to say about a series known for its personality it feels pre-packaged in a way these games who were always made by Max's post EA involvement never have before the Sims 4 thus seems to exist only to be a platform for DLC in some ways that brings it full circle back to being a dollhouse an empty vessel give an identity only by the things purchased for it it's still about the money just not in The Sims wallet now it's about the money and yours [Music] some of you may have noticed throughout this entire video that I have not really spoken about the build mode the part of this series that lets you build the virtual dollhouse your Sims live inside of that's partially because it doesn't really affect gameplay and as a direct a manner and partially because I thought it deserved a section all on its own that's this part you are here so let's wax poetic about buildings while I try to recreate the house I grew up in throughout the series as a kid I had a lot of disparate interests not only in Reading be it genre fiction or history or things like writing or game design which I'm still pursuing today but I was interested in law and music and eventually in architecture I was a kid that was perpetually bored with a capital B and constantly saw intellectual stimulation that was shall we say lacking in my home environment I had an uncle who was frustrated by my ever-present boredom and tried to help me see my way out of it by explaining that there are interesting things all around us that the world is only boring because we don't know the wonderful or impactful things right in front of us unfortunately he chose a tree as his example for this lesson like look at the beautiful things in nature take for instance that tree look at how interesting that tree is but I was like 12 and it was just a tree not even a particularly good tree intelligence and wisdom are different stats for a reason that's all I'm saying but over the years I developed an interest and architecture specifically in layouts and how spaces are organized when bored I could stare out the window at a building across the street or look at a floor plan and think about its design I started to find interest in the mundane objects around me this arose out of my criminally small bedroom that I rearranged every few months for maximum efficiency the room you were seeing in game right now is no exaggeration if anything it's larger than the real life representation because the Sims apparently has better building codes than the neighborhood I grew up in the second was a love for maps one I still carry with me to this day I have this one memory lodged in my brain from like first or second grade I needed to go to the library to pick something up and normally we'd all go as a class and single file but the class was busy I had to go alone as a six-year-old this was tantamount to a token-esque adventure a there and Back Again tale of dragons terrifying adults and lost treasure in reality it was like two hallways and a staircase point being my teacher who I adored gave me a map of the school and a yellow brick road written and highlighter of how to get there I looked down at this map and followed it exactly walk here turn there head up the stairs down past the principal's office turn left and according to this map I should be in the library I looked up and sure enough walls and walls of books and a kindly librarian with the package I was supposed to pick up so I was well primed to be interested in Blueprints and layouts and Architectural plans but it was The Sims that made it stick that tied all these desperate threads together this may sound like High Praise of someone's whole life being changed not from a video game but a single mode within that video game especially when you consider the absolutely primitive building tools of the Sims one but do keep in mind that in the year 2000 I was 11 and my alternative was a lifelong interest in trees no shade to the botanist in the audience well I guess there would be shade from the tree moving on the Sims build mode was interesting not only because it let me play with various interior designs and Architectural layouts of houses my entire generation would never be able to afford but it let me see how the Sims would interact with those designs you build hallways too narrow and you notice you have a kitchen with only one interest and exit you notice don't build enough bathrooms or build them all the way across the house you notice it's a wonderful little tool for teaching soft lessons that that could otherwise take years to learn and that's one of the reasons why this Sims was so instrumental in fostering that early interest and architecture open any architectural book and you will see paragraphs of text or abstract art or engineering diagrams The Sims isn't just fun it's easy drag and drop some walls here pop down a bathroom or a kitchen there I imagine there's a whole generation of kids doing the same thing in Minecraft these days over the years I've dabbled with things like SketchUp and I've done the barest of messing around in blender for unrelated game projects and they're great I have a lot of fondness and respect for both programs but they're nowhere near as simple as something like the Sims and while you can mess around with layouts on paper or in Microsoft Paint both of which I've done it doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to show you real world uses lighting or how placements of windows and door really help the feel of a room so yeah build mode is never going to be the biggest draw of this series I'm sure there are literally millions of Sims players who barely even touch it but it's remained a crucial part of this series to me and I'm really happy to see it get love throughout each major installment Sims 4 is not my favorite Sims by a long shot but it's undeniably the best looking of the series and has not only the most versatile build mode to date it has the one that's easiest to use and that's gotta count for something foreign I don't know how many hours in costume changes we are into this video by now but uh this next section is the downer episode so if you've been having a rough week or you need a break maybe skip this section and we'll see you in the wrap up cool cool one of the reasons I did not remember the Sims 3 and 4 as well as the first two games is because I was in a very different place in my life when those games came out when the original came out I was still a kid playing with a virtual dollhouse in between playing with a virtual Toy Soldiers of Age of Empires or a virtual knight in shining armor and Zelda by the time 2 came out I was a teenager with an active social life and playing the game was as much a communal experience of sharing stories of what happened in game with my friends as it was something for me to spend time with but Sims 3 oh boy that was a different story there were some dark years in there that we don't need to get into but on top of being miserable during that stretch I was dirt poor like literally sleeping on the ground because I couldn't afford a bed or it's okay I bought a 30 camping cot from Walmart and I now own my own home it all worked out go work for the government kids thank me later playing The Sims one and two was fun and aspirational someday I would be an adult like The Sims were adults able to go places and make friends and form relationships and buy that giant train set I always wanted or put a pinball machine in my living room two things I have yet to actually do in real life now that I think about it part of the whole appeal of doll houses and virtual spaces is allowing kids to mime to play out adult behavior I'm sure we've all either seen or been a kid who drives around in GTA obeying the traffic laws because we hadn't yet experienced The Joy or freedom in driving a car ourselves it's a very basic part of human psychology but playing the game as an adult is very different especially when you're an adult that is poor or unhappy or struggling in some other way writing novels in The Sims as a teenager was a reflection of my dream of someday being a writer but writing novels in The Sims as an adult is depressing it's very depressing it's still one of a wish fulfillment of fantasy but it's one that starts to turn inward rather than outward The Sims offers a fantasy of easily made and maintained friendships something even social adults struggle with in real life it offers the fantasy of buying a home and easily paying your bills of steady progress both in individual skills and in financial wealth in the furthering of a career a Sim's life is utopian it is free from Sudden tragedy or even death can be bargained with where chronic injuries don't exist health care and insurance are both free and where death and grief are represented only for comic relief a word to wear burglaries and fires are only the most temporary of setbacks and where you have to try really hard to kill someone from anything other than old age how often do we go to these virtual playgrounds to blow off steam or for a little entertainment and how often are we going to them as escapism from our actual lives it's so much easier to have my Sim work on their next great novel when I should be working on mine of ascending them to learn the piano when I could be learning the piano to have my sim clean their house while mine goes to crap because I'm crunching on projects or dealing with too much stress from work as I said earlier I have no plans to get married or have kids but is this really a healthy way to spend my time raising a tiny virtual family that I will never have personally so long as I did something productive that day got some work done on a novel or YouTube video for instance I didn't feel guilty wasting hours playing with my virtual dolls and maybe that's on Me Maybe that guilt is my problem but the games have trended in a direction not only to ignore this but actively exploit it this is why I hate all those micro transactions the pop-ups the title screen begging you to spend real world money on more virtual things just buy this item pack and you'll be happy just download this expansion and your Sims will have so much more to do you don't have to look away from the screen you don't have to do anything other than spend time here or there's so much more to click on sandbox games have a blessing and a curse in their design they don't end Minecraft always has another Horizon for you to explore the sun will always rise on another animal crossing island or stardew Valley Farm but those games aren't trying to simulate re real life an idyllic life sure but in a way that is undeniably not real but the Sims is specifically replicating an Ideal World Without End there's always another romantic partner always another promotion always something to improve the life of the Sim but not the player and EA is all too happy to prey on you in those dark moments to try and sucker you in with another pop-up with another item in the menu you can only experience if you Fork over additional money way back when I was in the eighth grade I discovered this game called Morrowind I bought it in a Bargain Bin for eight bucks and it kinda wrecked me for a while I was already skipping school by that point so playing the game for 12 plus hours a day was not unreasonable I remember going to class like three days after buying it and running into my buddy Max Max was cool I don't know where he is these days but I hope he's doing all right out there anyway Max walks right up to me and goes you look like and I was like thanks but he was serious he thought I was sick nope just been playing that stupid game I got the last time we all went to the mall and he was like no way game can not be that good so he goes back to the same EB next to the Games Workshop in the mall and finds another discounted copy and promptly disappeared from school for three days he finally shows up and I'm like you look like what are you sick and he just shook his head and went it's that game the reason I bring this all up is not because it games are evil or you should be careful about game addiction you already know all that the reason I bring this up is because of food Morrowind does not have a hunger mechanic thank Christ that game's got enough in it already but the game does have food they're basically health potions eat some food get some health fun role-playing immersion all around so one night it's probably a skull night it's like 1 30 in the morning and I'm playing this stupid game and in me the real actual human is hungry I was in the game menu equipping some new item or something and I thought I'd grab a snack real quick so I ate the food in my inventory in the game because I the human was hungry now in the moment I realized how colossally stupid that was I blinked shook it off and went man I should really get to bed I think I played another hour or two after that if we're being honest but I never forgot that moment I was so tired and playing the game so long that my brain just conflated the two inputs which brings us back to the Sims people are already prepared to waste their lives playing World of Warcraft or fortnite or any other game so what does a game designed to its very core to reflect a perfect similacrum of Life due to people how many people are sitting in squalor surrounded by empty soda cans and old food wrappers while their Sims have sparkling clean houses how many people excitedly send their Sim to meet the new neighbors but are nervous about striking up a conversation with a relative or a co-worker the mechanics of these games like all games are designed to keep you playing to keep you on the treadmill until you get the next dopamine hit in some ways this is good design we want games to be fun and engaging but it gets a lot less innocent when that engagement is meant to push micro transactions and endless expansions to keep you in the Lotus eater machine not to mention the lessons the game softly reinforces convincing people that the best way to be apparent is to keep their kid inside Min maxing their skills to help them get promoted as an adult rather than living life to the fullest while they have the chance the sims series is not evil by any stretch of the imagination and sometimes we really really do need that escape from the world some days it feels like we need it now more than ever it can be not only refreshing but inspiring to see a world where race gender sexuality romantic interests the clothes we wear the jobs we have and the money we make doesn't Define who we are doesn't matter where everyone can afford a home and medical care and the neighbors roll out the Welcome Wagon anytime somebody moves into town but we need to make sure we're going to that place because it's an aspiration not desperation I put this series down for a long time because I wasn't in the mental place to be able to play it and stay happy some days I'm still not but I was at least comfortable enough with it to have a lot of fun making this video and I hope Sims 5 comes out someday so I can take a look at it but to the designers out there you don't get to play innocent on this one you built a high Vapor cube made from intersecting Skinner boxes each one designed to emulate desires and dreams from The Real World and then you turned it into a vending machine designed to prey on those very same desires you have to think about the messages those things sinned and give people a chance to get off the treadmill once in a while mechanics and presentation and design help us push towards certain themes ideas and messages let's make sure they're good ones foreign [Music] pop champagne but I don't drink all right so I've spent dozens of hours playing through these games and who can tell how many hours writing this script filming me saying these words and adding it down to something that is hopefully watchable did we actually learn anything the original Sims was a lightning and a bottle experiment that just really super worked like everyone remembers Will Wright and earlier Maxis for SimCity which was and is still a great game but damn it ain't nothing close to the Sims either in terms of sheer fun longevity or capacity for straight up printing money it's a game that sought to break down everyday life in a comedic satirical tone to provide a fun mirror on the decisions and dreams we have every day while working to make our Sim the richest and most popular of Sims janky sure laughably primitive by today's standards definitely but I think it if if not the series are going to be remembered as some of the greatest games ever made for a long long time the Sims 2 had an even more impossible challenge take that lightning in a bottle that no one was expecting and do it again oh and also figure out some way to appease the diverse audience of the first game and the vast potential of future players the publisher needs to raise their stock value for this sequel to end all sequels they came up with two very straightforward ideas what if you could go somewhere that isn't your house and hey what if time immortality existed the addition of life spans to the game of being able not only to have children but to raise them and eventually transition to them being the main character of the story is so simple and yet so brilliant that I am really quite Blown Away by it that simple most fundamental of changes not only gave the game became far more longevity and an individual playthrough but it made many of the game's inherent mechanics like skill and career progression matter all the more so because of it making a sequel to something is never as easy as it sounds look at all the bad movies or sophomore albums that come out and fail because the studio thought it would be a simple matter of doing the last one again but shinier this time the team Behind The Sims 2 not only managed to do the impossible they managed to do the impossible twice and ensure that the Sims wouldn't be remembered in the annals of gaming history as a single game but as a series The Sims 3 is undeniably the ugliest of the bunch and the one I like playing the most even if I'm fondest for Sims 2. I hate the way it looks and love the way it plays they took the communal aspect and ran with it not only giving you a neighborhood to explore but an entire town to live in they took the Primitive one months and fear system of two and turned it into something that both shored up the short-term gameplay and figured out a reward system that was both fun and helped further customize the individual Sim they added moodlets to expand the versatility of different items and interactions and refine the needs down to the core 6 that really mattered but it's also where the standard practice of regular expansions became one of microtransactions a game where the very loading screens are Billboards for new content just a credit card purchase away and a game where it's so busy trying to sell you something that it can make it hard to just play the game you already bought the Sims 3 is in some ways the end of a Trilogy tying up the Loose Ends of gameplay systems that had been steadily growing throughout the first three games but it also represents a distinct shift the end of The Sims 1 and 2 era where the game was about systems and simulation and one gear tour towards a never-ending assembly line of purchases content and new things to buy and then we have the Sims 4. oh Sims 4 how I want to love you you look so good for the first time ever in the series The Game really managed to capture the look and feel of a virtual dollhouse and not a janky polygon deficient imitation and while I certainly had fun with it at the end of the day it's a pretty face without much personality polish corporatized messaging without much Soul it's the game equivalent of a boardroom meeting of a committee proposal and sure those things can be useful but are they memorable 20 years from now when we look back at the Sims 4 what are we going to remember it for the ground it's made up in terms of diversity the refinement of the mood system or the modernization of systems past or are we going to look back on it as a reset a new foundation for a future Trilogy of sin titles The Sims isn't going away even if EA were to get swallowed by a balrog tomorrow the franchise is too popular and makes too much Goddamn money to disappear it is one of the most recognizable franchises and certainly one of the most played outside of deities like a Nintendo or Grand Theft Auto it's changed and evolved and not always for the better so where does The Sims go from here who is this game for aspirational kids who want to peek into the life of an adult from the safety of their computer is it for streamers and YouTubers and role players trying to share their stories with real life communities or is it for countless folks trying to blow off steam after a long day in a world formed from casual wackiness but the bigger question and the one I'm going to leave you with today is this what would you put in The Sims 5. more importantly what would you take out I'm Michael Aguero thanks for watching I want to give a big big thanks to the Sims wiki over on fandom which was massively helpful during the writing of this script that script was over 29 000 words and took a billion D hours of gameplay capture writing and editing to produce so if you enjoyed this video consider liking it or sending it to a friend hitting that subscribe button and all the rest and if you really liked it consider picking up one of my books I've also resurrected the patreon for people who prefer that route this channel is just kind of here I have a full-time day job and rightful time on top of it leaving little room for this kind of thing so if you want to see more of it consider supporting the channel and help keep it going I'm Michael Aguero thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video kind of that up at the end but it will oh well this is what I get for having a burrito before filming away from the Pearly pearly the riccatella era for catella riccatello riccatello making an interesting uh if unintentioned well there is a very large spider this little spider friend decided to help out with filming so I am going to go let him outside first we are interrupted by a spider and now we are interrupted by a cat say Hello Kitty you wanna go back outside all right let's go let you outside we'll do this section over big

Channel: Michael Aguero

Views: 345,902

Keywords: The Sims, Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 3, Sims 4, Sims Build Mode, Guilt, Depression, Mental Health, Dollhouse, Game Design, The Sims Design, Video Game Design, Game Review, Microtransaction, Free to Play, Sims 5, Sims 4 Update, Architecture, Morrowind, Civilization VI, Game Retrospective, Gaming Retrospective, Retrospective, Complete History, Series, Series History, Series Retrospective, Story, History, Exhaustive History, Defense

Id: jI0dCKmZKpQ

Length: 172min 42sec (10362 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/aguerom]

Hey, that's me! Thanks for posting this, was cool to see something of mine get posted to reddit, really helps smaller channels like mine.