User blog:Lost Labyrinth/The Sims 4: One year later

I never really publicly shared my thoughts on The Sims 4 to a large audience. Partly because, as you all know, I ragequitted retired from this place last year, and partly down to something that I'm going to get down to in this blog post.

I purchased the game upon release. For a little while, I actually enjoyed it despite the lack of content. Hours later it got old. It became very stagnant and while some of the updates pumped in new features, they weren't enough to keep me interested. The expansion packs to date don't appear to fill that void too much in my opinion. But I quickly got bored of the game and moved on, hence why I never really spoke about it too much. My girlfriend stuck with it for a bit longer but eventually went off it.

One year later I decide to open up Origin and reinstall the game. 64-bit .exe... interesting. Might as well see if anything has changed with the updates. Well guess what?

It might actually be even worse now than it was upon release.

In the screenshot that I have so kindly provided, my Sim is meant to be doing something with yoghurt. Eating it maybe? Yeah, didn't take anybody from True Detective to figure that one out. The thing is... she won't open the fridge. At all. If I try to serve a "nutritious" meal for my two Sims, nothing happens. If I go for a quick meal, like yoghurt, nothing happens, the "eat yoghurt" interaction is queued and my Sim just stands there. Oh, and the same thing happens if I try to call for pizza.

Yay bugs. I delete my cache files, use Origin to repair the game. That must have fixed it right? Why wouldn't it?

Oh right, it didn't. What a surprise.

This isn't my only annoyance with the game. Actions that I queue often either don't happen or they have a significant delay in commencing while time continues to pass. Hmm, what does that remind you of?

Is this game meant to be a joke or are EA really this incompetent? I see people trying to justify TS4's "ten steps backwards" from TS3 with the game performing better and having less bugs. But the game has the exact same bugs as TS3 and while it doesn't stutter horrifically like TS3, it still doesn't take advantage of more than one CPU thread thus crippling the game for modern PCs. Oh and the 64-bit exe doesn't improve anything.

Even worse, I'm sure that EA are aware of TS3's performance issues. Yet they have proven that they haven't learned their lesson and that history is set to repeat itself. Are they selling fixes with EPs again? Speaking of EPs, besides get to work none of them look particularly interesting yet they still charge an extortionate amount of money for them. Clearly the series is all about money now and has been for quite some time. EA are going to milk this for as long as they can and TS4 selling well is just indicative of their plan working.

Honestly I didn't expect an abundance of new content (Star Wars tie-ins? lolwut?) but how they have managed to make the game even more of a chore to play through bugs is beyond my understanding. At least they made the world map more colourful... I guess?

I suppose that concludes my brief return to this series. Might as well watch my Sims starve to death then uninstall. Congratulations EA on making your game even worse one year later while still having very little content which caused the game to stagnate in the first place. It almost feels like you're trying to be terrible on purpose. 23:17, December 12, 2015 (UTC)

P.S: No I'm not coming out of retirement. There, I didn't ruin your day after all.