The current state of the Sims 4
Hi everyone.
First, sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker so redacting a long post might include mistakes 🫣
I think the last statement from the Sims 4 community managers was the last straw for me.
I won't expand on save corruptions issues. I know that this one huge issue with multiples causes and ways to manifest, so that's not an easy thing to solve. Knowing that they are at least working on it is good, but they already talked about that in the past, and we have no visibility on the resources invested in that part.
In the meantime, they continue to release packs upon packs and pile up more and more stuff on this game. We don't have to buy them, but still, it means they have resources to invest on working on new features, and that the complexity added to have more and more packs, features and combinations of that, means that their ability to test, find bugs and solve them is stretched thinner and thinner as time goes by.
Talking about QA, they explicitly said here that they are now unable to test their packs correctly with all the existing combinations of packs and devices existing, and that they rely on feedback from players to correct those issues. Even if that doesn't come as a surprise for me as a regular user of the Bug Report forums, they explicitly said that they expect players who paid their packs full-price to be the ones testing and finding issues. Instead of investing the proper resources to do it on their side.
Getting half-baked functionalities and less and less original ideas in packs is one thing, and that's subjective (some recent packs were good in my opinion, even if a little bit disappointing when you see how things work in reality - hello Businesses and Hobbies !). But being expected to face issues and report them when you play a new expansion, it's an early access, smaller game studios with less resources make you pay less for that, and it's explicitly said.
Having worked on QA and managed teams doing QA in context where the time and the resources are too little, I know that's a recipe for disaster. You can have a product that work on the surface, but in the back, it's grasping at straws, and any new feature you add is an additional risk of things breaking. The issue is not only about QA, it's about strategic decisions in terms or resources EA invests in QA.
Of course, all this work behind the scenes is not profitable compared to releasing new content in the short term. But in the long run, it can lead to more and more anger from the customers, a loss of confidence in the product and more and more work to be done to ensure the product is viable at a surface level for casual players.
We can see how it already affects the game now : for each new patch, it's like 20 issues solved, and 30 new issues happening. And they are weirder and weirder. For exemple, at the moment, sims in situation outfits come with a random hat. Looking at the scripts and the tuning myself, I wasn't able to understand what cause that, and what was changed. It's more and more complex.
It's like your own body, where multiple organs are connected and most of them are needed to make you live, that's a system. The game is a system, with multiple interconnected stuff that makes it function. If you make the system more and more complex and it's not robust initially, you have more and more risks to make it fail at some point.
I reported multiple issues in the Bug Report forums. One of my pet peeve is that we have no visibility on the process, we don't know how what we post here is reported to people solving the issues, how it's prioritized, and what's the deadline. I mean, I always take time to investigate an issue, look at the tunings and the scripts, but even when you provide all the infos on a silver platter and identify the root cause, like this one, it's not solved. It's there since B&H release.
I would rather them take a time to aknowledge all of that, and take a step back. Focus the effort on solving the existing issues for a while and not release new content. I know that's not the same teams that work on solving issues or creating features or content, but for exemple in the meantime, teams in charge of CAS content of build content could focus on updating base game content to make it up to current standards, add items (like the Spa Day refresh - we need the simple bed versions of all those double beds from last packs and more content for younger Sims in CAS), update existing worlds of adding new free worlds to represent other parts of the planet, and so on.
There is plenty of stuff to do in every aspect to improve the experience, especially if they plan on keeping the Sims 4 alive. I don't need new duplicate features (I don't need my Sim to learn Herbalism, Apothecary, and Potion Making as a Spellcaster that basically do the same thing) or having 5 new crop tops like for each pack. I want a game that is stable, fun to play, and knowing that if I encounter an issue and report it, it will be taken into account. That doesn't seem too much to ask from a company like EA that has enough resources and money to do it.
I stopped buying packs a long time ago, and I would love to see more and more people boycotting new packs, at least for a while. I feel like that's the only way to express the disappointment and be heard (and I guess the reason of this statement as the uproar is rising and a new roadmap is supposed to be released).
I hope more and more people will talk about it, and make this message be heard.
In the meantime, I will only play this game to test and update my mods when needed. Thanks for reading my rambling 🫣
