Forum:Disease in The Sims series

I considered writing a blog post about this idea, but I felt like a forum thread would be a little more interactive.

I've played The Sims since 2000, but recently I've become somewhat bored with the game, especially The Sims 3. I have fun creating families and having them live out their lives, have children, etc. But after 14 years following this formula, it begins to be repetitive. At this point, the game presents no challenges to me; given enough time and willpower, anything is achievable for any Sim. When all your Sims are destined to be successful, that seems to remove a lot of the challenge out of the game.

So then I wondered, what would it be like if there were an aspect of the game that added an additional challenge. What if Sims could catch diseases? What if Sims could die from these diseases? What if these diseases were incurable?

There has been sickness and disease in the series before, but it was never something that couldn't be fixed by a couple days of bed rest or a bowl of grandma's comfort soup. My experience with illness in The Sims 2 makes me think of it as more of a nuisance than an actual game challenge. There are no cancers, no heart diseases, no diabetes, no birth defects, and no handicaps. The Sims, health-wise, are always perfect all the time, and if not, the fix for their ails is redundantly simple.

I can understand why this aspect is not in the game. Maxis is in the business of making a game where players can control every minute aspect of a Sim's life. Adding a random factor like disease to the game takes away the aspect of control from the player.

On the other hand, they could implement a method by which Sims can be resurrected (they've done it plenty of times before) if they were to catch a disease that the player didn't want them to have. Or perhaps there's a disease - like cancer - that affects multiple Sims in the world, but one of the player's Sims can join a scientific career and discover a cure for it, allowing the player to improve the lives of all their Sims through a gameplay challenge.

The bottom line, from my perspective, is that playing with perfect and always-healthy Sims is too predicable and dull. I think that taking a little bit of control from the players might not be a bad thing. What do you think - is this a crazy idea? ---  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 05:51, January 8, 2014 (UTC)