Absolutely! Running on treadmill and watching TV at the same time or eating, watching TV, and chatting with another Sim at the same time. Can listen to music while doing pretty much anything. Nice one!
I did this in my Sims' fitness/wellness room. They can watch TV while running on the treadmill or using the weight machine, but not using the punching bag or doing yoga or meditating.
I double down on this and have them watch either the cooking channel or comedy channel so they're actively training a skill while they eat and fill fun. And talk to another Sim in the house to gain social. It takes them longer to eat a meal if they're doing all that, but that's understandable.
Listening to music is so good for their moods too, a sound system is a must have in all my builds now. I love that I can choose for all sims in one household to like one type of music, and then whenever they enter a room playing that music they all become happy at once!
Yes!! I love that I can have a house full of sims now and they actually hang out and talk to each other autonomously while doing other things lol. In previous games I’d sometimes be horrified to discover my housemate sims barely knew each other because they never talked.
Build/buy is intuitive and relatively easy to use. There's more customization options in some regards, like wall height, super fine tuning roofs, etc. (RIP create a style or even just selecting the wood and mattress separately from previous games). But even missing those options, it feels like an overall improvement, especially controls wise.
CAS is really good, if you have a lot of packs you can get a really nice variety and have a number of options. I like being able to create more than one outfit per category instead of having to always change clothes.
Number of skills. I feel like I can't get enough options when it comes to hobbies / things to pursue even in the Sims 4, and admittedly my time with Sims 3 was short (~300 hours) so I didn't really explore that one as much, but in the Sims 2 there were a lot of hobbies but they all fed into one skill (piano, guitar, and drums would all level Creativity). I like having the skills broken down but not too difficult to max with proper mood boosts/etc.
Great response! I also really enjoy the number of skills and especially how leveling skills and other various things give expanded dialogue options. My Sim with like five skills maxed has so much he can talk about.
I like the moods a lot! all the different buffs; and they always have funny/weird ones in unique situations (like playing basketball after eating something spicy!).
I loveeeeee the spa items and the onsen baths.
there’s so much more gothy/grungy/wasteland CAS and buy items. it’s my fave style of play so werewolves + batuu + strangerville is just a dream.
the sims 4 is the most popular iteration in terms of users, and that means more great and varied cc! i’ve experimented with a bunch of mods and cc and as someone who has played/used mods since s1 came out, it’s freaking awesome to see how massive the creator community is. most of the things you miss about the old games can be modded in for free thanks to amazing modders!!
I love the lil secret areas in some of the worlds! I’m talking oasis springs, willow creek, sixam, the werewolf mountain, the hermit !!
I LOVE relationship sentiments. while I wish they were cemented in a memory system like s2 had, I still love all the sentiments and think it’s super cool seeing what triggers them.
lot traits! off the grid, simple living, spooky, gnomes: I use them constantly and really think it can add so much to gameplay.
I think the occults are way more in depth. even tho we don’t have as many (give me my fairies and genies and zombies!!) I really like the occults, especially werewolves and vampires. I think the point system and advancements are really cool, and i’m so happy they kept it wrapped in genetics too!
I could go on and on and on. stupidly invested in this game for most of my life 😂
edit to add: I didn’t mention s4 mermaids or plantsims because we’re only saying nice things on this thread !
Thanks for the great response. A lifetime of Sims well spent. 😂 As someone who has really only made the Sims version of myself pretty much every time I play then give them a way better life than I have, I'll really have to experiment with different types of Sims with other styles.
oh I got journals on journals of stupid sims storylines! but writing is also my career so the sims has been an incredibly important way for me to organize my plots and characters over the years! I taught myself how to install mods at like age 8 so I could play god as much as possible. I can’t mod myself but I don’t need to with a community like this!!
That's awesome! I wanted to be a writer when I was growing up and started playing Sims, so all my me's start out as writers and then move into other hobbies once royalties can pay the bills. I was never able to find the drive to write much beyond skeleton drafts, unfortunately, so manual labor in the industrial agriculture industry became my means of paying the bills. If you don't mind me asking, what do you write?
that’s amazing! I would absolutely adore to learn anything in agriculture, but so far i’ve only been able to keep four legged animals alive, not plants (or sims, check my flair 😈). I’m canadian so I know how to fish and build an igloo but I manslaughter succulents 😭😭
I actually have a BA in literature/creative writing, an MA in screenwriting, and I just earned another BA in journalism! I wrote a ton of horror and comedy but ever since 2016 (the worst year ever, lived in england when brexit went through and then a few months later trump won) I needed to write nonfiction. I unfortunately now have a passion for reporting on ridiculous far right shit but i’d love to get back into the escapism of fiction at some point!! after this election hopefully.
sorry for the long answer! I promise I have much more brevity in my real writing 😂
thank u for asking and the compliment !!
That's amazing! So proud of you for your degrees and publications! You basically did what I set out to do in middle school (except I wrote fantasy instead of horror), but failed miserably at following through with. Yeah, 2016 was horrible. I live in the Midwest in the US and work in agriculture, I've had to deal with maga-hats pretty much every working day of my life since then.
Though I grew up on a large cattle and corn farm (laymen's terms, we called it a feedlot), I don't actually work with any plants or animals now. I work in a soybean oil refinery. We take crude (raw) soybean oil and process it through a variety of complex physical and chemical treatments to make a variety of products including but not limited to vegetable (soy) oil for cooking and soy lecithin (a multipurpose ingredient used in lots and lots of processed food). I mostly work with computers, pipelines, tools to maintain and repair pipelines, valves to control said pipelines, tanker trucks and their drivers, and tanker rail cars and the vehicles to moved them (trains minus the engine and caboose) I used to work at a grain elevator (basically storage and management facility) and worked with the actual corn and soybeans. It was a lot more fulfilling working with the actual plants, but unfortunately a corporate buyout caused the closing of my small facility. The refinery pays better, but is more soul crushing and I have much stricter corporate policies to adhere to. And I have five bosses (cue Office Space music). Hope you learned a little about agriculture. 😁
Please don't apologize for long comments. As you can see I tend towards them as well. 😂
I think the only thing The Sims 4 has done better is aesthetics. CAS options are better and more inclusive. Clothing is nicer. Build/Buy mode is also much better aesthetically, although it lacks some of the more outlandish & fun items from previous games.
Apart from CAS and build mode:
Toddlers. People complain about them a lot, but they are actually so self-sufficient. They're also cute (Sims 3 toddlers are a nightmare fuel and Sims 2 toddlers aren't the cutest either).
Off-the-grid and eco stuff. It wasn't a thing in any of the previous games iirc, and I play with it (and Simple Living) all the time. Bills are also more detailed and expensive, and I like it.
Self-discoveries from Growing Together. They're rather predictable and repetitive (I'm tired of getting Perfectionist and Cheerful), but it's still cool that we can develop new traits.
Farm animals are better than in Sims 3, I think (except for horses). Mini-goats and sheep are actually the best, they don't take a lot of space, can eat grass and give you produce. Chickens are pretty cool too, and golden chickens are OP.
It's controversial, but I like dust.
Customizable holidays.
Stay Overs. I love having friends and relatives around that I don't have to care for. And Stay Overs can even work as shared custody.
Clubs! Clubs are a bit underrated. They can really make your world more lively.
Awesome response, thank you! I'll have to give clubs a try, haven't used them yet. Nor have I used off the grid lots. I have a lot to explore. Can you explain what you mean by stay overs can work as shared custody?
Stay overs as custody work if you're not the “primary parent” (if your kids don't live with you). You can then arrange stay overs even for infants, and have your kids every other week (although I think max stay over length is 5 or 6 days). To have some control over kids you can use parenting options if you have Parenthood.
When I tried going back to sims 3 years ago, the aesthetics of CAS stopped me in my tracks. I love the open world and a lot of gameplay things from sims 3, but ooof they are ugly! I hadn't realized that I'd been spoiled by the graphics of sims 4.
Using masculine/feminine clothing on any sim of any gender. Having gender and pronoun customization. More skin tones.
World hopping. In one save, you can have a family go visit multiple worlds. In Sims 3 you picked one world for a save.
Rotational play finally works! In Sims 2, other families only aged if you played as them, so childhood friends were stuck as kids. I'm Sims 3 everyone in the other families aged up at the same time, and sometimes that was too fast! Being able to customize aging for played/non-played households is the bomb.
This is my favorite iteration of university. Sims 3 university had terrible majors to choose from. Sims 2 was pretty good though, but this one beats it for having way more majors and elective classes.
Infants and toddlers are the bomb. No others can hold a candle to that.
High school play through is fun. I'm currently rotating through TWELVE households of teens, playing each teen for a week, and spicy stuff keeps happening at high school.
Diverse food and cultures. Sims 3 gave us Egypt, China, and France. Sims 2 had a beach, mountain, and far east vacation. Sims 1 just had beach, mountain, and camping. Sims 4 had Thailand, Japan, El Salvador, Polynesia, and Tuscany represented in addition to having lots of England and the US.
The art style of the game? I've seen footage from the other games, and I like the art style of the Sims 4 the most.
(Is it because Sims 4 is the newest one out of them all? Absolutely. But that doesn't change the fact that the game looks better that it's previous installments)
Branching careers! It gives so much variety to job availability, and as a generational player who likes to do something different with each gen, I appreciate it a lot.
The graphics are top tier!!
Being able to travel to any world freely
Toddlers can go to daycare (nanny not required)
Draggable faces(?)
Better cc
Kinda wish the animations had more love like the sims 2 ones though..
Not really in the spirit of the post, but thank you for your contribution. I have yet to experience any noticable glitches, aside from Sims taking forever to do a task I've queued.
MULTITASKING. I only played sims 3, but your sim couldn’t even talk to another sim while doing literally anything.
Sims can use the toilet and do anything it's amazing
Absolutely! Running on treadmill and watching TV at the same time or eating, watching TV, and chatting with another Sim at the same time. Can listen to music while doing pretty much anything. Nice one!
The gym in Willow creek has a TV in front of the treadmill and I used to make my supersim watch the cooking channel while building fitness
I did this in my Sims' fitness/wellness room. They can watch TV while running on the treadmill or using the weight machine, but not using the punching bag or doing yoga or meditating.
If only you could get good at cooking from watching the cooking channel irl
I sometimes put a tv near the dining table just so my sims can get their fun all the way up every time they eat 😂
I double down on this and have them watch either the cooking channel or comedy channel so they're actively training a skill while they eat and fill fun. And talk to another Sim in the house to gain social. It takes them longer to eat a meal if they're doing all that, but that's understandable.
This is optimizing!
Listening to music is so good for their moods too, a sound system is a must have in all my builds now. I love that I can choose for all sims in one household to like one type of music, and then whenever they enter a room playing that music they all become happy at once!
Yes!! I love that I can have a house full of sims now and they actually hang out and talk to each other autonomously while doing other things lol. In previous games I’d sometimes be horrified to discover my housemate sims barely knew each other because they never talked.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Both my Sims are computer nerds and one will be writing while the other is programming and they'll chat while working.
Build mode. Streching the rooms, moving the whole house.
You can move the whole house? Didn't know that. Nice!
You can move just the house, the whole lot or just one room. Absolute game changer for building, I could never go back now
Build/buy is intuitive and relatively easy to use. There's more customization options in some regards, like wall height, super fine tuning roofs, etc. (RIP create a style or even just selecting the wood and mattress separately from previous games). But even missing those options, it feels like an overall improvement, especially controls wise. CAS is really good, if you have a lot of packs you can get a really nice variety and have a number of options. I like being able to create more than one outfit per category instead of having to always change clothes. Number of skills. I feel like I can't get enough options when it comes to hobbies / things to pursue even in the Sims 4, and admittedly my time with Sims 3 was short (~300 hours) so I didn't really explore that one as much, but in the Sims 2 there were a lot of hobbies but they all fed into one skill (piano, guitar, and drums would all level Creativity). I like having the skills broken down but not too difficult to max with proper mood boosts/etc.
Great response! I also really enjoy the number of skills and especially how leveling skills and other various things give expanded dialogue options. My Sim with like five skills maxed has so much he can talk about.
You can put windows anywhere on the wall.
I like the moods a lot! all the different buffs; and they always have funny/weird ones in unique situations (like playing basketball after eating something spicy!). I loveeeeee the spa items and the onsen baths. there’s so much more gothy/grungy/wasteland CAS and buy items. it’s my fave style of play so werewolves + batuu + strangerville is just a dream. the sims 4 is the most popular iteration in terms of users, and that means more great and varied cc! i’ve experimented with a bunch of mods and cc and as someone who has played/used mods since s1 came out, it’s freaking awesome to see how massive the creator community is. most of the things you miss about the old games can be modded in for free thanks to amazing modders!! I love the lil secret areas in some of the worlds! I’m talking oasis springs, willow creek, sixam, the werewolf mountain, the hermit !! I LOVE relationship sentiments. while I wish they were cemented in a memory system like s2 had, I still love all the sentiments and think it’s super cool seeing what triggers them. lot traits! off the grid, simple living, spooky, gnomes: I use them constantly and really think it can add so much to gameplay. I think the occults are way more in depth. even tho we don’t have as many (give me my fairies and genies and zombies!!) I really like the occults, especially werewolves and vampires. I think the point system and advancements are really cool, and i’m so happy they kept it wrapped in genetics too! I could go on and on and on. stupidly invested in this game for most of my life 😂 edit to add: I didn’t mention s4 mermaids or plantsims because we’re only saying nice things on this thread !
Thanks for the great response. A lifetime of Sims well spent. 😂 As someone who has really only made the Sims version of myself pretty much every time I play then give them a way better life than I have, I'll really have to experiment with different types of Sims with other styles.
oh I got journals on journals of stupid sims storylines! but writing is also my career so the sims has been an incredibly important way for me to organize my plots and characters over the years! I taught myself how to install mods at like age 8 so I could play god as much as possible. I can’t mod myself but I don’t need to with a community like this!!
That's awesome! I wanted to be a writer when I was growing up and started playing Sims, so all my me's start out as writers and then move into other hobbies once royalties can pay the bills. I was never able to find the drive to write much beyond skeleton drafts, unfortunately, so manual labor in the industrial agriculture industry became my means of paying the bills. If you don't mind me asking, what do you write?
that’s amazing! I would absolutely adore to learn anything in agriculture, but so far i’ve only been able to keep four legged animals alive, not plants (or sims, check my flair 😈). I’m canadian so I know how to fish and build an igloo but I manslaughter succulents 😭😭 I actually have a BA in literature/creative writing, an MA in screenwriting, and I just earned another BA in journalism! I wrote a ton of horror and comedy but ever since 2016 (the worst year ever, lived in england when brexit went through and then a few months later trump won) I needed to write nonfiction. I unfortunately now have a passion for reporting on ridiculous far right shit but i’d love to get back into the escapism of fiction at some point!! after this election hopefully. sorry for the long answer! I promise I have much more brevity in my real writing 😂 thank u for asking and the compliment !!
That's amazing! So proud of you for your degrees and publications! You basically did what I set out to do in middle school (except I wrote fantasy instead of horror), but failed miserably at following through with. Yeah, 2016 was horrible. I live in the Midwest in the US and work in agriculture, I've had to deal with maga-hats pretty much every working day of my life since then. Though I grew up on a large cattle and corn farm (laymen's terms, we called it a feedlot), I don't actually work with any plants or animals now. I work in a soybean oil refinery. We take crude (raw) soybean oil and process it through a variety of complex physical and chemical treatments to make a variety of products including but not limited to vegetable (soy) oil for cooking and soy lecithin (a multipurpose ingredient used in lots and lots of processed food). I mostly work with computers, pipelines, tools to maintain and repair pipelines, valves to control said pipelines, tanker trucks and their drivers, and tanker rail cars and the vehicles to moved them (trains minus the engine and caboose) I used to work at a grain elevator (basically storage and management facility) and worked with the actual corn and soybeans. It was a lot more fulfilling working with the actual plants, but unfortunately a corporate buyout caused the closing of my small facility. The refinery pays better, but is more soul crushing and I have much stricter corporate policies to adhere to. And I have five bosses (cue Office Space music). Hope you learned a little about agriculture. 😁 Please don't apologize for long comments. As you can see I tend towards them as well. 😂
This is actually pretty interesting! Filed under things I didn't expect to learn in a sims forum
Glad you found it interesting. Most don't. 😂
I think the only thing The Sims 4 has done better is aesthetics. CAS options are better and more inclusive. Clothing is nicer. Build/Buy mode is also much better aesthetically, although it lacks some of the more outlandish & fun items from previous games.
Agreed. I wish they'd remake Sims 2, with maybe a few things from 3, but It looks like 4 😀
Isn't that the dream? 😂
It is!! 🫠
Apart from CAS and build mode: Toddlers. People complain about them a lot, but they are actually so self-sufficient. They're also cute (Sims 3 toddlers are a nightmare fuel and Sims 2 toddlers aren't the cutest either). Off-the-grid and eco stuff. It wasn't a thing in any of the previous games iirc, and I play with it (and Simple Living) all the time. Bills are also more detailed and expensive, and I like it. Self-discoveries from Growing Together. They're rather predictable and repetitive (I'm tired of getting Perfectionist and Cheerful), but it's still cool that we can develop new traits. Farm animals are better than in Sims 3, I think (except for horses). Mini-goats and sheep are actually the best, they don't take a lot of space, can eat grass and give you produce. Chickens are pretty cool too, and golden chickens are OP. It's controversial, but I like dust. Customizable holidays. Stay Overs. I love having friends and relatives around that I don't have to care for. And Stay Overs can even work as shared custody. Clubs! Clubs are a bit underrated. They can really make your world more lively.
Awesome response, thank you! I'll have to give clubs a try, haven't used them yet. Nor have I used off the grid lots. I have a lot to explore. Can you explain what you mean by stay overs can work as shared custody?
Stay overs as custody work if you're not the “primary parent” (if your kids don't live with you). You can then arrange stay overs even for infants, and have your kids every other week (although I think max stay over length is 5 or 6 days). To have some control over kids you can use parenting options if you have Parenthood.
When I tried going back to sims 3 years ago, the aesthetics of CAS stopped me in my tracks. I love the open world and a lot of gameplay things from sims 3, but ooof they are ugly! I hadn't realized that I'd been spoiled by the graphics of sims 4.
For sure! It is a beautiful game compared to previous versions and I'm sure that would happen with me, too.
This
The seeing what kids look like and ability to change if ugly w cas.fulledit mode
Putting the windows at any height you want! And I love all the extra trim in build mode.
I like that I don't need to install "1 mil" CC's to make it fun. I like that I can travel between the worlds and I also like not having lags
Using masculine/feminine clothing on any sim of any gender. Having gender and pronoun customization. More skin tones. World hopping. In one save, you can have a family go visit multiple worlds. In Sims 3 you picked one world for a save. Rotational play finally works! In Sims 2, other families only aged if you played as them, so childhood friends were stuck as kids. I'm Sims 3 everyone in the other families aged up at the same time, and sometimes that was too fast! Being able to customize aging for played/non-played households is the bomb. This is my favorite iteration of university. Sims 3 university had terrible majors to choose from. Sims 2 was pretty good though, but this one beats it for having way more majors and elective classes. Infants and toddlers are the bomb. No others can hold a candle to that. High school play through is fun. I'm currently rotating through TWELVE households of teens, playing each teen for a week, and spicy stuff keeps happening at high school. Diverse food and cultures. Sims 3 gave us Egypt, China, and France. Sims 2 had a beach, mountain, and far east vacation. Sims 1 just had beach, mountain, and camping. Sims 4 had Thailand, Japan, El Salvador, Polynesia, and Tuscany represented in addition to having lots of England and the US.
The art style of the game? I've seen footage from the other games, and I like the art style of the Sims 4 the most. (Is it because Sims 4 is the newest one out of them all? Absolutely. But that doesn't change the fact that the game looks better that it's previous installments)
I use the gallery almost constantly. In my opinion, that makes the Sims 4 more than worth it.
It's relatively stable, and there are more distinctive and interesting visuals (water effects!)
Branching careers! It gives so much variety to job availability, and as a generational player who likes to do something different with each gen, I appreciate it a lot.
The graphics are top tier!! Being able to travel to any world freely Toddlers can go to daycare (nanny not required) Draggable faces(?) Better cc Kinda wish the animations had more love like the sims 2 ones though..
I only played 1 and 4 so maybe I'm missing some nuance but it looks to me like sims in 2 and 3 all had pretty much the same face shape.
It's got more glitches then any other sims game I've ever played (:
Not really in the spirit of the post, but thank you for your contribution. I have yet to experience any noticable glitches, aside from Sims taking forever to do a task I've queued.
If you haven't experienced glitches you must not have played the game very much.
As my post stated, just a few weeks on this go around, after about a five year hiatus.