Going back to The Sims 2 showed me everything wrong with The Sims 4

I recently returned to The Sims 2 Still primarily playing The Sims 4 Over the past ten years, I have found that it has some qualities that I prefer to those in The Sims 4. Considering it’s been so long since I returned to play a major game in the series other than The Sims 4I suspected it was the nostalgia of The Sims 2 Which made me remember it as more fun, and perhaps a result of playing the game at a time in my life with fewer responsibilities. finally, It wasn’t just nostalgia that influenced my mind.

The Sims 4 has celebrated its 10th anniversary, and it shows no sign of slowing down, with a new expansion announced and set to arrive in time for Halloween. However, being the longest-running base game and the entry with the most extra content due to the variety of packs that have been released for the game over ten years does not make it the best base game by default. In comparison with other versions of The SimsI would even go as far as saying that The Sims 4 May be the most boring among them.

The amount of content available for The Sims 4 is overwhelming

Too many packs add too little

I find that the setup for additional content for The Sims 4 Has a few flaws, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was done on purpose for the sake of getting as much money out of the game as possible. The packs are separated into several categories, from full expansions to kits, and The category basically indicates how much the pack will cost and the type of content it will contain. Complete expansions are the most expensive, but they include real changes to gameplay, such as new stages of life and new locations. Currently, kits are the cheapest and include mostly cosmetic additions, like furniture and clothes.

The idea of ​​sharing additional content like this isn’t necessarily bad, but I don’t think it’s exactly satisfying in the way it’s implemented, either. In this case, I’m talking mostly about the kits. They don’t cost much, about $5 USD, but they also add little in terms of content, and in many cases, The added amount is not even worth the money. Usually, when a kit is added and what it will include is revealed, it feels like more of a premium patch than anything. The result is that you often feel a little disappointed by the packs, and few of them are worth buying, if any.

Now, we have A game that costs over $1,000 in 2024 If you want to buy all the available content. Plus, there are expansion packs that add features that should have been part of the base game, such as Seasons And Cats & Dogs. So, we have this game that is bloated with extra packs, and while some of them bring fun features, others just feel like a lot of bells and whistles. I see The Sims 4 As a case where more is not always better, and condensed expansion packs that give you more for your money instead of many small packs would have helped.

How The Sims 2 feels more rewarding than The Sims 4

It didn’t overstay its welcome

I found that there are quite a few factors that I prefer The Sims 2 Over The Sims 4. First, it’s More challenging to keep the sims alive in 2 Compared to 4Which also makes a family survive for multiple generations more rewarding. Some features that make survival difficult include the slower filling of needs, the inability to just spend reward points on a potion to fix needs, and the sims are not as fire-proof as they tend to be. The Sims 4. Second, the programming of the Sims’ free will in 2 Makes convincing them to do tasks so they live quite tough.

Then, there is also the fact that The Sims 2 Wasn’t the primary entry in the series for a decade. It polished the gameplay and graphics of the first game, added additional content through expansions to make it feel more complete, and then It bent down to leave The Sims 3 to take over. There have been endless expansions that keep driving up the total cost of the game, only to keep adding features to the extent that it will be hard to convince me to switch to The Sims 5 When, or if, it ever comes out because I don’t want to start over with the bare minimum content again.

The Sims 4 is polished but not perfect

It’s also crawling with bugs

Even after a decade, The Sims 4 is full of bugs, glitches and anything you want to call issues that make some features not function properly. I know it’s normal for every major game in the series to have issues like this, but It feels worse when the game has been around for so long and received active updates over timeAnd you’ve added more content that brings its own set of issues to the mix. It’s pretty messy in practice, but being able to use cheats, mods and console commands can help with the load – until there’s a new patch that affects them.

This brings us to the point of how polished The Sims 4 Is. It has a lot of content and features that we haven’t had in past games, and for the most part, the content is good enough. however, It doesn’t have that touch of a challenge that The Sims 2 Did, and I often end up bored after I create a house and family in-game. I can leave my game running for hours, and come back, and not much has happened. In the end, I think that being too polished hurts the game more than it helps.

I played The Sims Since the first game, where fires felt like a constant threat, and every house succumbed to the threat of cockroaches. As much as I love the series, I find that The Sims 4 Taking more inspiration from his predecessors and keeping some of the challenges that they had made it difficult to survive. It turns out that it wasn’t just the longing that was talking, and I saw many more faults in it The Sims 4 After I went back to The Sims 2.