Let’s Play The Sims 4!

Except… in powerpoint form rather than a video on Youtube.

Yeah. Moving on.

Hey everybody! This is Keika! So, I know that a lot of us are still waiting for their chance at The Sims 4, and I figured that while you were waiting, or deciding to get the game, you might want a sample of how gameplay goes and how it looks and all. So, here we are. Stop me if you’ve already seen this, okay? And if you don’t want spoilers, this probably isn’t the slideshow for you.

Jumping right in, this is what the loading screen looks like. You get random animations of sims walking onto your screen and doing random things—I’ve seen the Grim Reaper float by trailing smoke. That was cool. Right now, looks like we’ve got an astronaut.

Now we’ve got a woman at a tiki bar. Interesting.Anyway, you get started the first time by hitting the rather conspicuous play

button down in the lower-right side of the screen. Let’s go!

When you hit the play button for the first time, it’ll launch you straight into CAS and start guiding you with a heck of a lot of tutorials. Now, I figure that if you’re taking the time to read through this, you’ve probably seen the CAS demo that EA released long before TS4 came out, so I’m going to assume you know how this works and just move along.

So without any further ado, here she is. My new sim here is named Anna Terry. I’ve given her the “Fabulously Wealthy” aspiration, and the traits “self-assured,” “cheerful,” and “ambitious.” So, let’s see how this goes!

The next screen you’ll be treated to is of the neighborhood view. See the buttons up in the top left? Those show you all the neighborhoods—excuse me, worlds—loaded in the game. The one I’ve got up now is called Willow Creek…

…and this is Oasis Springs.

Now, I like to play on big, empty lots and build up my own house from scratch, so I’m going to start on the lot called “Arid Ridge” in this neighborhood here. It’s 40x30, and looks to be the largest lot available to start with right now.

A brief loading screen later, and here we are!The first thing you’ll notice here is that the interface is very different from how

it looked in the last two games. The build mode toggle and camera options are up at the top. On the bottom, there’s the action queue (that empty white box there next to Anna’s picture) and her mood, which is currently “fine.” Her wishes appear in thought bubbles above her head. She can use her phone now from underneath her portrait, which is nice, since we don’t have to go through pie menus to reach it anymore. Date, time, and speed are in the center, and all the simology tabs (including career, skills, etc.) are all in the bottom corner on the right.

Apparently, Anna’s first wish to earn $1,000, and she got this wish because of her aspiration. Good to know. We’ll see what we can do about that, but first, I have $14,500 to burn in building a house. *cracks knuckles*

One of the first things you’ll notice in build mode is that there’s a lot more emphasis on separate rooms. You can move them around, save them into your library, pretty much anything. One of the upshots of this is that when you hold CTRL when placing wallpaper, it now only covers the room, rather than all walls it can reach. It’s only a minor annoyance, really, and you only notice it when you’re painting the outside of the house.

Windows can now be placed anywhere on the wall you want, depending on where you hold your mouse. Also very interesting.

Sorry, sorry. I’ll get on with the important stuff.

Roofs are now placed by picking the style you want and placing it in this little 3x3 square…

…and then dragging it out to the length, width, and height that you want, which is nice. Roofs can be resized after they’re already placed, so you don’t have to delete a piece of your roof to place the right size anymore!

Also on the subject of roofs, you don’t have to pick one style for your entire lot anymore, either. Mix and match however you like!

Wall height can now be adjusted to short (default), medium, and tall sizes, now. Sweet. You do that by selecting a room, and then choosing one of those varied bars in the center of the screen. It’s sitting at medium height right now.

Foundations are now placed by putting down your walls first, and then adjusting the foundation height underneath it. I would talk more about it, but I’m not entirely sure I’ve completely figured it out yet. Porches in particular.

Like in TS3, furniture can be sorted by either room or function. Personally, I like to sort it by function, just because that’s what I’m used to from TS2.

Except, instead of pictures in a menu, we now have a dropbox of all the various types of furniture.

What makes me far more excited is that search bar, which I’ve conveniently mostly hidden behind the menu. It is going to be so much easier to find that one specific piece of furniture now; no more clicking through all the different menus you think it might be hiding in! I wonder if it’ll be compatible with custom content?

Other than what I’ve highlighted, not a whole lot has changed about build and buy mode, at least not to my first glance. Now, let’s go into live mode.

From here on out, I haven’t done a whole lot of prior playtesting, so I guess we’re going to be discovering the game together! Hooray!

Since Anna’s first wish is to earn $1,000, let’s start with that. Most obvious route? Let’s get her a job!

Newspapers seem to be becoming more and more extraneous as the games go on. Just clicking on the career tab now brings up this most interesting button. Let’s press it.

Anna pulls out her phone…Hey, look at that, cameraman mode (still accessible through TAB) edits out the

pause screen and the speech and thought bubbles now…

…and this sweet box pops up, showing us all the listings for today’s jobs. Awesome!

Is that a “secret agent” listing that I see?

Cool! Anna is now an Agency Clerk, working for $17 an hour. Admittedly, that is one of the worst paid jobs in the listings for the day, but come on. She’s a secret agent.

What we’re looking at here is a performance bar, which is probably even more idiot-proof than it was before, and her job tasks. To get promoted, she needs to browse the intelligence database on a computer.

Luckily we bought a computer (in a manner of speaking) when we were furnishing the house, so there’s no point in waiting to fulfill that requirement!

Well, we’ve gotten that little hurdle out of the way, but I see that Anna has now become bored. Figures. What’s boring about browsing an intelligence database?

Aha, I see that there’s simply too much intelligence for poor little Anna.Moodlets now appear under a sim’s portrait, and instead of giving either

positive or negative boosts to a sim’s mood, they now put certain modifiers towards a specific mood. Like bored, for instance. This “too much intelligence” moodlet is putting a +1 modifier on her “bored” mood, and it’s going to last for eight hours.

Oh, boy.

Anna’s picked up a couple of new wishes—one for getting a promotion (from her “ambitious” trait), and one because she is bored. Looks like she wants to buy a chess table. Well, sweetheart, seeing as how you only have $34 to your name, I think we’re going to pass.

We don’t have a lot of room for entertainment around the house right now, so let’s go out on the town and see what we can do to perk up Anna’s mood, huh? Sounds good to me!

It’s worth noting, by the way, that we can see the smaller neighborhood in which Anna lives in vivid detail from her house. She has to go through a loading screen to visit any of those houses, but there they are.

…okay, so her house doesn’t match the neighborhood. It will probably never match. Tough.

Oh hey, look. Tooltips say that the blonde in the red shorts is Dina Caliente. Hi there, Dina! *waves*

This is still on Anna’s home lot, by the way.

After a short loading screen… hey, this looks familiar! Looks like we can still access both Oasis Spring and Willow Creek. Good to know.

I figure this park in the center of town, Desert Bloom, seems like as good a place as any to go meet some people and possibly play some chess or something. Let’s try it out.

Here we are! Whenever we enter a lot, the name of the lot shows on the screen like this. I find these little touches really nice.

Now, about that mood of hers…

Desert Bloom seems to be quite the pretty place, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot in the way of entertainment. We’ve got some nice fishing spots, though, so let’s try this out!

Whenever a sim tries an activity associated with a skill for the first time, a little notification pops up, telling us that they’ve learned a new skill. They have no actual skill in it yet, but it’s now listed in their skills menu.

I think that was four uses of the word “skill” in that paragraph.

Anna: “Oh yeah, I so got this. Fishing queen, right here.”

Hey, look! We caught a fish! Which we can name!Buddy here is a tetra. He’s apparently a common fish, which is only to be

expected. He weighs 0.10 kg, was caught by Anna Terry, and has a freshness of “excellent,” according to our little fishy menu that pops up when he’s hovered over. Good to know.

Fishing was fun, but after a while, the fish apparently got “a little too crafty” for Anna, according to a notification, and we were told to go get more skilled or find more valuable bait. Poor Anna is still bored (apparently, fishing isn’t her thing) but on our way out of the lot, we happened to meet a handsome man in a very stylish hat.

The brown hat, I mean, not the creepy guy in the pink baseball cap, who seems to be leering at Anna. Definitely not him.

And so Anna’s first social interaction begins.This here is Mitchell Kalani. When we first had Anna go introduce herself, that

“casual discussion” box popped up at the top of the screen.

When we mouse over that box, we get to see Mitchell’s mood. Hovering over the relationship bar shows us what their relationship is—acquaintances.

Having introduced herself, Anna automatically starts chatting it up with Mitchell, with just a bland “chat” interaction.

“Start preposterous rumor.” Huh.The pie menu on Mitchell is showing us choices which Anna has available,

which the game considers context relevant. Since these two are acquaintances and they’re in a casual discussion, we’re not going to see any romantic, funny, or mean interactions here, and because Anna’s bored, we have some interactions relevant to her mood—“suggest fun activities” and “complain about boredom,” in this case, which we can identify as related to her mood because they have a gray tag on the option.

But don’t worry, selecting “more options” gives us the full range of choices we have for interaction. We’re not limited to the selection of context-relevant choices.

Why is Anna talking about soiled underwear? Oh, yeah. “Preposterous rumor.” Ha!

She now has the mischief skill. Too funny!

Wait, hold up. Oh my gosh, it is. That’s a tumbleweed rolling across the road back there!!

Once Anna is finished starting her rumor, she and Mitchell go straight back to a neutral chatting interaction, keeping the conversation flowing pretty seamlessly. Sweet.

The sims in the background right now, by the way, are Nina Caliente and Cassandra Goth. Nice to see some familiar faces!

Cassandra came over and joined us autonomously. We’re looking at a three-way conversation, folks!

Make that four-way, now that Jayden Fuller over there has stepped in. I wonder what the limit is on how many people can be part of a conversation? Now the little gray plumbbobs above Mitchell, Cassandra, and Jayden’s heads make sense!

By the way, Anna told a joke about ducks, and gained the comedy skill.

By the time the conversation was over (which grew up to five people, by the way), Anna was feeling much better, having picked up the “playful” mood.

Which seems to be represented by a nice violet color. She now has a wish to tell a joke (from her mood), and having a funny conversation and “feeling good” (having high needs) are both contributing to her good mood.

Anna is no longer bored! Mission accomplished!

The needs menu, by the way, now looks like this. Environment is no longer an issue, and neither is comfort. When a need gets low, the tab icon for needs is replaced by the image for that need, which means that theoretically, the menu doesn’t even have to be open all the time for you to be able to keep tabs on your sims.

Also, bladder has been moved up to where hunger used to be. This is causing me all kinds of confusion on quick glances.

Looks like Anna’s getting hungry, so let’s click on the fridge. Selecting “cook” brings up this menu, which has everything Anna can cook listed. Ooh, chocolate cake! …but no, she’s only got $34, we don’t need to spend it all on dessert. Let’s make some scrambled eggs. Those look cheap.

Selecting scrambled eggs also lets us pick the serving size. Awesome.

Oh dear, seems she’s dropped the pepper shaker into her bowl. She looked around and quickly snatched it back up. Funny!

Note that she’s using the corner counter to cook (a novelty to me and my hours in TS2), and she also gained the cooking skill.

You know, I get the feeling she’s not all that good at this “cooking” thing.

While Anna is playing an oddly familiar-looking game (and gaining “video gaming” skill), I think aspiration deserves at least a quick mention.

It looks a lot like her job panel, in that she has a title and that there are certain achievements she’s looking towards, well, achieving. We’ve already earned the $10,000 in reserve area because when she moved in, she had a little over $14,000 to work with. Convenient, that. Making $5,000 might be a little harder, this early in the game at least. I suspect that when she fills these requirements, she’ll get a “promotion” with a new title and new achievements, but I haven’t gotten far enough to tell that for certain yet.

Also on this panel is the “satisfaction store,” which works like buying lifetime awards in TS3, and the option to change her aspiration at any time.

I have two words for this picture:

Bunny.Slippers.

While Anna’s asleep, all of her moods are completely neutralized into “asleep.” I like this. I like it a lot.

Also note that her portrait changes outfits with her. Cute!

It’s worth noting, too, that sim AI seems to have drastically improved in this game. I left the game running while I prepared and wrote that last slide, and by the time I’d brought it back up, Anna had woken up, made her bed, used the bathroom, and was washing her hands. After she finished, she was hungry, so she started trooping over to the kitchen to get herself some food, at which point I took over again. Looks like we’ll have to spend much less time micromanaging all the sims in the house just to keep them alive!

Upon finishing her breakfast, Anna left for work. In so doing, she completely vanished from the lot (having walked to the sidewalk first) and I was unable to open any of her simology tabs. When she returned, she didn’t have a promotion, but she is up into the deeper green on the performance bar. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing a promotion tomorrow!

And that is where I’m going to conclude this little show! I think we’ve covered all the basics of the new gameplay in TS4 now. Let me know if you want me to do another one, okay? If you do, what are some questions you have that you want me to cover? Anything you want to see?

Until then, happy simming!