What We Want from The Sims 4

With the official reveal of The Sims 4 at this year's gamescom, Harrie and Emsey take some time to think about what they would like from the next installment of The Sims and why.

No more rabbit holes!

In the Sims 3: University Life we saw a few buildings being opened up to your control, giving you the ability to chose what your sim did in their university buildings and classrooms. In The Sims 4, we’d like to see this happen to all buildings, get rid of those rabbit holes! Especially if your family consists of one Sim, where’s the fun in fast forwarding time while you could be making constructive choices for your character?

Driveable vehicles/motorbikes

Don’t we all wish we didn’t have to pay car insurance and not have to worry about other drivers every time we leave the house in our vehicles? Unfortunately this will never be a reality. For this reason we think Maxis should incorporate the feature of being able to drive your own car using a new range of controls, pay insurance on it, learn routes around your town, pick up and drop off passengers!

Jobs

We all know that when your sim goes off to work, you can chose from a range of different work modes, meaning that you can have your character be the best, or simply lazy not to waste any of their precious energy. However we find this would be much more exciting if we had the ability to interact with our Sims jobs. Coming back to our previous point, your sim could take up theprofession of a taxi driver in which you would have to navigate around and ensure your sim is doing their job properly.

A favourite suggestion of ours is the ability to become an architect, builder orinterior designer, in which you can control your Sim as they build the house of their dreams, laying bricks, or even just stripping and painting walls; though in an ideal world we would also be able to turn this feature off and have your Sim work on their own, incase you already have enough characters to care for.

Multiplayer

The only time The Sims franchise has been multiplayer was in the PlayStation 2 version and was actually a lot of fun! Picture this: a village/town/city/whatever where all of your friends can set up shop or house and you can go and visit them. You could have an open city where randomers can come and live, or you could have an invite only system to avoid playing with strangers. A city where there are numerous player-controlled families; talk about a truly ever-changing environment.

The Sims community is so huge, and the rubbish “I can kinda send my friends a gift and let them know what is happening”  feature that is currently in The Sims 3 just doesn’t cut it. Give us a function where we can really interact with others. You could even have challenges where you have to work together to get sims to certain levels in their employment tree in order to unlock a reward or improve a building (medical centre changes into hospital or park gets a bandstand etc).

Memories

You know what, we loved memories in The Sims 2, and feel like they really made a mistake cutting it out of The Sims 3. We used to love scrolling back through our sims personal histories remembering that timewhen they had an affair and got caught; ending in divorce and a big fight. Good times.

There is the scrapbook now of course, but it just doesn’t seem personal enough. Sim A teaches toddler sim to walk and every other person in the household gets a memory in the scrapbook? Hmm okay... either bring back personal memories or make the scrapbook better please!

Babies and toddlers

They kinda made children more exciting with the Generations expansion pack in The Sims 3. Interacting with imaginary friends, treehouses, and more social interactions with other sims is great but babies and toddlers are still absolutely snore-worthy. We have them permanently set onto the minimum amount of days possible until aging because they are so dull.

How about having realistic toddlers that climb on furniture or break the TV by pressing the buttons, or ones that bug the adult sims for the food they are eating, or kids that follow and copy mum and dad, maybe pretending to hoover or help with the washing up. Also breastfeeding should be introduced, as at the moment there is only a bottle-feeding option.

Maternity leave should be also be optional, having to stay at home and miss out on that promotion at work because maternity leave is obligatory is a massive pain in the bum. It also might be nice to develop a skill with children as you raise more. There is already a nurturing trait, why not have the option to earn that over time when your children age up well?

Traits

This brings us nicely onto the next point, traits. It’s great that you can choose traits for children or your sims but it feels like this aspect could be further improved by making it more realistic. Traits should be perhaps earnable, or changeable in certain circumstances. Maybe your sim is shy, but as they gain charisma and move up in their job, it could be nice to have your sim leave their shy ways behind, becoming more sociable.

It could work the other way too; a hopeless romantic sim is hopelessly in love with their partner but comes home one day to find them being unfaithful throwing their fantasies out the window, leaving them with a suspicious trait. This is such an untapped idea and could really do with being exploited.

 

Gardening

What happened to being able to prune bushes and hedges? That was a nice part of gardening, but now it only includes stuff you can eat/use. Have lawns that get overgrown, bushes that need trimming, seeds that grow from seedlings to trees, making huge shade-giving arbours, and not just apple or lemon ones. How about mini herb plants in the house that need watering and can be used in cooking?

Houseplants should need maintaining, giving a boost to environment (a bigger one to those wholove the outdoors) when looked after and a minus when not.  Maybe trees could grow so big their roots threaten the foundations of the house and need to be chopped down and the wood could be used in the fireplace in winter or for a carpentry profession to furnish the house. You could even chop down your own christmas tree, the possibilities are endless.

Hobbies

Hobbies should have more of an effect on the individual sim. Sims that read should become more articulate and charismatic as they read more books. Gamer sims should become more dextrous and logical making them better engineers and problem solvers. Sims who watch a lot of films and tv should become better at writing review articles, or other ideas like this.

Those who take the time to do their hair and makeup, or change outfits regularly should have a bonus to charisma, or a buff that says they’re looking particularly foxy. You could even have it so Sims that spend a little time on their faces before bed have less wrinkles upon aging up. The Sims 3 provides well on the hobbies front but they should affect social situations and personalities more, changing how sims react in different situations.

It might be worth even changing some traits into “Interests”, so sims that have a thing for alternative music, or tattoos, or animals find it easier to spark conversations with others who are interested inthe same things. It might make the social dynamic a bit more varied.

Height

It sounds a bit trivial but why are all sims the same height? Give us petite and grande options already. Sometimes you just wanna make some hobbits.