Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

This week, I revisited an old Digitally Staving Off Boredom pastime I like to call, "Let's see if the game is fun if I play it in a different way."  Target: The Sims 4.

Fresh off the back of raping the dollhouse last week, I thought it perhaps unfair that I resorted to such drastic measures when Origin was currently extending an olive branch of a "20 year anniversary" Sims franchise sale on most of the expansions, "game packs," and "stuff packs" they put out for The Sims 4.
[Image] Check out those sale percentages!  Let's make some purchases! I picked up the following:
The Seasons expansion, which primarily brings the four seasons of the year, complete with several holiday events for your sims to participate in.  The best of the bunch, it adds some much-needed activity variety to the dreary monotony of simulated living. The Cats & Dogs expansion, which adds the ability to adopt a wide range of the aforementioned four-legged friends.  Like the domesticated animals of modern suburbia, they're faithful companions whose primary function is to input food and output poo and affection. The Realm of Magic game pack, which pulls off a half-hearted and legally distinct from Harry Potter Wizarding World impression.  It boasts a moderately robust selection of spells and potions that mostly just break the game balance, but you can't lose what you never really had. The Tiny Living stuff pack, which is supposed to have a bunch of space-saving furniture inspired by the tiny house movement, but I have found a little hard to employ well since most of the furniture is useless, such as murphy beds which have abysmal rest effectiveness scores and occasionally murder their owners. My first attempt to enjoy the game with these new DLCs installed ended in a bit of a bust because I tried not removing the lewd mod.
I moved my new spellcasting sim in and entertained the welcome wagon.  At the end of the event, a woman who he had found attractive hung around to chat, and shortly afterward they began to messily copulate all over his fantasy wizard canopy bed.  I didn't direct that, nor had cheats enabled, it's just that the mod figured if you were chatting up someone that your sim found attractive that this is what was supposed to happen, autonomously.  
Possibly the autonomous copulation fired off because the mod had supplied another sim woman, a voyeur named "Tina Peepers," and she needed something to watch and furiously pleasure herself to while standing outside the window.  Since Tina seemed in desperate need of catharsis, I invited her in for round two after the first woman had left.  Having forgotten to enable the, "always use protection," option, I was informed there was a chance both had been impregnated.  Just think: somewhere out there, a sim created by a mod author entirely to fill the role of a voyeuristic creep might be multiplying, like a cockroach in the walls of human depravity.
Having grown thoroughly nauseated with the constant, ongoing porno that was the Wicked Whims mod, I uninstalled that mod and started over again.

Thus began my first real foray into Glimmerbrook, the neighborhood for the Realm of Magic game pack.  Glimmerbrook is notable for having a pathetically small number of lots but nice scenery.  It's almost like living next to a nature preserve with a few rich peoples' houses up on the hill.  The sole commercial lot is a drinking establishment which is about as close to being Hogsmeade as your average sports bar.
The tiny amount of potential places to visit in Glimmerbrook is thought to be made up for with the inclusion of The Magical Realm, a whole other map you can visit at any time via a magical portal in Glimmerbrook (the only way to make it a group outing).  Alternately, you can access The Magic Realm via activating a special teleporting stone in the inventory of every spellcasting sim.

In practice, The Magical Realm is a rather lackluster Wizarding World.  There are just 4 floating islands.  The main island hosts a mansion to practice spellcasting in.  Hogwarts it ain't, but does even Rowling herself know why Hogwarts worked?  The connected, smaller islands consist of a garden to harvest ingredients, a completely barren dueling ground to conduct magical duels in private, and a small slice of Not Diagon Alley run by three astral projections who flog wizardry junk such as wands, brooms, spells, potion recipes, and alchemy ingredients.  
As with Glimmerbrook, the overall appearance of The Magical Realm suggests that an awful lot of potential content died on the cutting room floor or perhaps to the whims of disinterested interns.  Joke's on them: I paid about as much for it as I did their major expansions during this sale.

[Image] TIL Sims 4 is about the cool props. The household I moved into Glimmerbrook was my favorite power fantasy: a sim representing me, alone, on a quest for immortality.  This time I traded computers for magic spells, and I'm not entirely sure it was a good trade.  To increase the challenge, I also had two cats, but the cats ended up taking care of themselves because I had immediately installed an automatic cat feeder and (BEST THING I HAVE SEEN IN THE ENTIRETY OF SIMS 4) a litter box that cleaned itself by scanning the box and destroying the fecal matter with lasers.

The playthrough went remarkably smoothly, with my sim largely using his home cauldron to brew up massive quantities of macaroni and cheese to sustain him between visits to The Magical Realm where he effortlessly climbed to the top of the spellcasting ladder by stirring cauldrons, foraging for tomes, begging for spells, and engaging in silly magic duels.  
I even had enough spare time to elevate his pets' opinion of him to the maximum value, and had reached my goal of immortality about halfway through a normal-game-length sim adult's lifespan.  All this while living in an "off the grid" lot which traded having no bills for a greatly reduced number of working furniture and an occasional negative moodlet.
Due to a fluke, he didn't end the challenge as an adult.  I had thought my sim's quest for immortality had ended prematurely when they managed to brew up a Potion of Rejuvenation, whose function was to reset their current life cycle.  Alas, potions can fail, and this one backfired by doing the opposite, setting him up to immediately age into the next life cycle!    I find it quite irresponsible of them to allow prematurely aging up and yet no non-cheat means to age down.

As an arthritic old man, my sim finally managed to unlock the Potion of Immortality.  And guess what?  It sucked.  From what I hear, this version of immortality does not actually prevent aging, nor most causes of death, just that it nullifies the cause of death related specifically to old age.  That won't save an old man who does as little as overexerting himself on the treadmill, though maybe having his familiar summoned would help with that.
Then again, it's already fairly easy to live forever in The Sims 4. Depending on what expansions you have installed, there are multiple sources of things that will reset the days in your sim's current lifecycle, the easiest being a simple investment of 1,500 aspiration points for a potion of youth.  To put that in context, by the time my sim had achieved his spellcasting lifetime aspiration (in a little over a dozen Sim days) he was floating in a sea of about 10,000 aspiration points.  Turns out that seeking immortality in The Sims 4 is a pretty dumb quest.
This DLC splurge had done little to rejuvenate the game for me: about the best I could say was that the Seasons expansion offered some nice diversity.  However, I decided to give it one more shot with a little more content.  This time, I picked up:
The Discover University expansion, which mixes idiotic things, like keg-stands in university life, with wonderful things such as servo robots, powered exoskeletons, and the concept of roommates. The Strangeville game pack, vaguely based on Stranger Things and Eerie, Indiana, which is one of the more interesting "adventure maps" that The Sims franchise has ever released. Another thing I noticed during my major playthrough with my would-be immortal was that The Sims 4 is way too easy.  Certainly when painstakingly directing every move of a loner with no job except having awesome magic powers, even with two cats to distract them.  So I decided to come up with some rules to make the game more interesting.
[Image] My next household ended up loosely inspired by Good Omens: two angels, one evil and one good, friends yet playing for the opposite side. The Semi-Autonomous Challenge

This was founded on the principle that it is too easy to win from micromanaging the sims.  So, to make things more interesting, restrictions are imposed on how often the player can order them around.  Furthermore, they are need to be enabled to get into their own mischief, or else there's hardly any setbacks, so there needs to be an autonomous element.

Here are the rules:
Settings: Full autonomy, including the controlled sim.  Only the current household need age (to create a challenge).  Lifespan and season length is up to you, but you might want to set the lifespans "long" because there's going to be a lot more wasted time than usual. The player may control only one sim per day.  At midnight, they are required to alternate to play a different sim than the previous day.  The rest will be allowed to act completely autonomously for the day.  For everything the player directs their sim to do, they must also allow their sim to do something autonomous.  In other words, the player only performs every other move, with the sim they are controlling doing the other one. Interrupting actions not allowed, with one exception. 
In general, the sim should be allowed to perform their actions to completion. That includes autonomous actions, either started by the sim you are controlling or other sims acting upon your sim. For inactivity or useless activities (such as long chats) the player is allowed to interrupt, but only after at least a half-hour in Sims world time has passed.  It is expected that accidental interruptions will happen regularly, just try not to do it deliberately. These rules were a good start.  But then I made them really interesting.

Stage 2: The Meddling

Start with a household with two immortal supernatural spellcasting sims, one good, one evil.  The angelic sim will be fully leveled up with practical and primal magic and has the Good and Neat traits.  The demonic sim will be fully leveled up with mischief and primal magic and has the Evil and Slob traits.  Introduce to this household any mortal (non-supernatural) sim you like.

The rules are as follows:
As with the semi-autonomous challenge above, you can only control one sim per sim day and have to alternate to another.  Ideally, they should be played roughly evenly, perhaps simply going left to right on your household order. When playing the mortal, your goal is to achieve their aspiration. When playing the angel, your goal is to help the mortal achieve their aspiration.  To these ends, they can use their practical or primal magic, potions, and general good conduct to help the mortal achieve their aspiration. When playing the demon, your goal is to confound the mortal, causing them to die of old age before achieving their aspiration.  To these ends, they can use their mischief or primal magic, portions, and general bad conduct. Don't worry about who gets to play God, if you're playing The Sims 4 you pretty much already are.  Suffice it to say, you have ultimate say in how the money gets spent, and no doubt the current sim you are controlling will have leaps and bounds more efficiency than the other two (who will mostly be running interference). If the angel or demon dies, the game is lost for all sides. If the mortal dies for a reason other than old age, the game is lost for all sides.  Interestingly, this means that the demon is not out to kill them, and may actually need to intervene to save their lives, but is still quite happy to make the mortal as miserable as possible. No method of extending the mortal's lifespan or causing it to expire prematurely is allowed. So far, I have not reached stage 2.  I am still on stage 1, with the angel and demon working on maxing out their spellcasting skills.  They live in a triple-decker home, one in the basement, one on the second story, you can probably guess which.  The middle floor will be for the mortal, but it will be quite some time until they get around to inviting one in.

Has this method rejuvenated my interest in The Sims 4?  To be honest, it has not done much for me as of yet.  From what I have seen so far, it seems what sims do when left to their own devices is actually very basic: they have a strong tendency to either meet their most pressing need score or to get tied down in a meaningless chat.

It might be possible to encourage them to autonomously engage in more meaningful pursuits with moodlets, or lock them in rooms with access to the right props, but I have yet to prove this.  For now, it's necessary for the player to direct them from time to time.

Perhaps the main problem with leaning on the sims' autonomous actions to spice things up is that I do not have that many interesting house props for them to get entangled in using yet.  Things seem to go slightly better in The Magic Realm, which has many more sims to interact with and a wider prop variety, but that place is still mostly just bookshelves, cauldrons, and basic necessity props.  So the autonomous sim behavior remains rather banal.

In any case, I have a fair amount of expansion and game pack splurging to vindicate spending time with, so likely I will continue to try experiments like this for some time.  Maybe someone out there on the Internet knows how to play The Sims 4 correctly, to get to the greater level of enjoyment out of the game, but this is the best I have come up with so far.