The Sims 4, Approaching Fast!

[Formalhaut]

*Looks left* *Looks right* No Sims thread recently? Good. I'll continue.

So The Sims 4 is rapidly approaching, with a release date sort of ball-parked around the third or fourth quarter of the year, so basically Autumn or Winter. It was meant to be early 2014, but you know, gaming delays.

I vaguely recall there being an E3 round the corner, so we'll probably here MUCH more about it there. In the meantime, here's a link to this website which sort of summarises the announced new features and basically does my job for me.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features/...ures-trailers/

One thing in there that I'm excited about is the possibility of reduced loading times and the working on game performance. The Sims 3 is a great game, but my God can it be slightly laggy, especially on my lower end PC.

So what do people think of the upcoming Sims game? Excited?

Discuss.

[Pumpkin]

I wish I could get it

[Freya]

The just posted their build video and omg, i want it so bad.

[Psychotic]

It doesn't really look all that much of a step up from 3 if I'm honest. The Create-a-Sim is obviously different in how they go about it, but I don't think the end result is all that different from what you'd get on 3.

[blackmage_nuke]

My PC cant run sims 3 on the highest detail settigns anyway so any little tweeks I make to dimple depth or whatever is unnoticable

Though if what you say about load times is true maybe S4 will flow better. I know I didnt like the choppy frame drops everytime I wanted to zoom in and out.

[Fynn]

I am so excited. Though my wife and I have a oatcake - we're not buying it until they have seasons. There's still so much we haven't discovered in 3, and we will probably need better PCs for 4 anyway.

Anyway, I just love the graphics in this game! This stylized aesthetic really fits the sims. Also, the gameplay should be different from 3, as they have shown that the sims are now supposed to be extremely complex emotionally.

But yeah, I agree it probably won't be as big a revolution as 3. An open world is a way bigger deal than emotions.

[Formalhaut]

I am so excited. Though my wife and I have a oatcake - we're not buying it until they have seasons. There's still so much we haven't discovered in 3, and we will probably need better PCs for 4 anyway.

Anyway, I just love the graphics in this game! This stylized aesthetic really fits the sims. Also, the gameplay should be different from 3, as they have shown that the sims are now supposed to be extremely complex emotionally.

But yeah, I agree it probably won't be as big a revolution as 3. An open world is a way bigger deal than emotions.

I think you both hit the nail on the head. I think the Sims 3 did a huge deal to the series as a whole and made it hugely popular, not that the Sims 2 wasn't good in and of itself. There was so much content in the Sims 3, that in a way, the frame-rate and lag issues were almost to be expected - it really was a huge world.

I mean, I can only play the Sims 3 on my brother's gaming PC, and even then, it is not perfect and can only run it on medium, though this is partially because I have so many stuff packs, expansion packs and 'dubiously obtained' store items on them. To be honest, medium settings isn't bad at all, to be honest.

The stuff with the emotions is pretty interesting, and the build/buy mode improvements are genuinely interesting.

But, the majority of upgrades were in the Sims 3, definitely. For the Sims 4 to really impress me, I'd want more content in the base game. I mean, it already has my money, but the Sims 4 base game could do with more. Seasons and Pets would be fantastic, but, I do not think that would happen without an expansion pack. Better make it one of the earlier ones: we had to wait until the eighth expansion pack for seasons and the fifth for pets in the Sims 3.

[Pumpkin]

I want to play it

How not crappy does my computer have to be for this?

[Formalhaut]

I want to play it

How not crappy does my computer have to be for this?

I'll quote the man himself on this one:

Another thing we're please to hear but also a little dubious about is the system requirements for The Sims 4. The Sims is notorious for being glitch and crashing (normally when you haven't saved in ages), but EA says its working to improve this with The Sims 4.

The Sims 4 producer Ryan Vaughn has said that a new "SmartSim" technology powering game means that players on lower-end machines will have a better experience on The Sims 4 than they did with The Sims 3.

"We know that our players have a wide range of different PC specs. We want to make sure that somebody playing on a lower end machine has just as great an experience as somebody on a higher-end machine," he said. "Right now, we're doing a lot of work to optimise the game's performance, cut down on loading screens and make sure everything still looks as beautiful, and the Sims feel as vibrant and that your gameplay is just as much fun regardless of what spec you're playing on."

So basically, they're acknowledging the problem, but I would hold out until we get the official recommended and baseline PC specs, later down the line. What system do you have shion anyway?

[Mirage]

*Looks left* *Looks right* No Sims thread recently? Good. I'll continue.

So The Sims 4 is rapidly approaching, with a release date sort of ball-parked around the third or fourth quarter of the year, so basically Autumn or Winter. It was meant to be early 2014, but you know, gaming delays.

I vaguely recall there being an E3 round the corner, so we'll probably here MUCH more about it there. In the meantime, here's a link to this website which sort of summarises the announced new features and basically does my job for me.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features/...ures-trailers/

One thing in there that I'm excited about is the possibility of reduced loading times and the working on game performance. The Sims 3 is a great game, but my God can it be slightly laggy, especially on my lower end PC.

So what do people think of the upcoming Sims game? Excited?

Discuss.

If you think the Sims 3 is performing poorly on your PC, I think you will be disappointed if you expect the Sims 4 to run faster for you.

[AssassinDX]

It doesn't really look all that much of a step up from 3 if I'm honest. The Create-a-Sim is obviously different in how they go about it, but I don't think the end result is all that different from what you'd get on 3.

My thoughts exactly, to me it looks like another Sims 3 expansion that focuses mostly on character creation and how to build a house in a slightly different way.

Also speaking of expansions I don't think I've got enough mileage out of The Sims 3 just yet to justify getting the next game, I own a handful of the expansions but despite putting 80+ hours into the game I've barely done anything other than create houses and put my family and friends in the game world. The problem is it's all so damn expensive, I have the Steam version so I have to wait for the rare occasion when each DLC goes on sale, and even then it's never been a reasonable enough drop in price to justify buying content for a title released five years ago.

[Fynn]

*Looks left* *Looks right* No Sims thread recently? Good. I'll continue.

So The Sims 4 is rapidly approaching, with a release date sort of ball-parked around the third or fourth quarter of the year, so basically Autumn or Winter. It was meant to be early 2014, but you know, gaming delays.

I vaguely recall there being an E3 round the corner, so we'll probably here MUCH more about it there. In the meantime, here's a link to this website which sort of summarises the announced new features and basically does my job for me.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features/...ures-trailers/

One thing in there that I'm excited about is the possibility of reduced loading times and the working on game performance. The Sims 3 is a great game, but my God can it be slightly laggy, especially on my lower end PC.

So what do people think of the upcoming Sims game? Excited?

Discuss.

If you think the Sims 3 is performing poorly on your PC, I think you will be disappointed if you expect the Sims 4 to run faster for you.

It's actually possible as they're trying for the game to be accessible to everyone. This is a big deal, considering the target audience. They are usually not gamers, thus their PCs won't be modern powerhouses.

[Formalhaut]

Which actually makes it stranger that The Sims 3 ran so slowly, given the casual audience

[Mirage]

It's actually possible as they're trying for the game to be accessible to everyone. This is a big deal, considering the target audience. They are usually not gamers, thus their PCs won't be modern powerhouses.

Of course, but the 3rd game does run acceptably fast on my friend's midrange laptop from a few years ago, except the loading times, which are gonna be hard to do a lot about anyway. It's been several years since she bought that thing now, which means the average laptop performance has increased quite a bit, therefore I'm thinking it'll need as much resources as the sims 3 at best, which will make it a lighter game relative to the increased computing power, but not a faster game when run on the same hardware that you previously ran the sims 3 on.

[Fynn]

There's still the issue of expansions slowing down the game considerably. In that, I think that while 4 will probably not run as fast as the base Sims 3.game on weaker computers, it will probably run faster than 3 with all packs.