The Sims has come a long way since its first iteration where removing the ladder from a pool was the cruellest thing a player could do.
The game has evolved dramatically and the player base has grown rapidly, sitting at over 30 million at the time of writing.
But with great growth comes growing pains. The Sims 4 will celebrate its fifth birthday in September 2020 and we still do not know for sure what happened to Bella Goth. Just kidding. Sort of.
The Sims 4 still has some fundamental flaws to the game. The lack of representative skin tones and hair is something that has taken until very recently to be acknowledged and the team has promised that these aspects will be improved on in the coming months.
But five years down the line and The Sims 4 still has no bunk beds, no cars (even if Sims are thinking and talking about them a lot recently)?we could write a whole separate article on that all on its own.
Every player is likely to give you a different answer if asked what their biggest bugbear is with the game. While there is no disputing that the list of bugs that need fixing is long and annoying, this is not that sort of article. Not entirely.
This is no way meant to ?throw shade? (we?re told that’s what the kids call it) at The Sims 4. We love this game and we know that game development is by no means easy.
Over the years, there have been some marked improvements. Most recently, the ability to place windows and doors freely by holding ALT. We only had to wait five years. Worth it, though.
If you are not a Sims 4 player and you are thinking about joining the club, we absolutely encourage you to do so.
It remains one of the most expressive and absorbing games out there ? even if some of that comes from custom content and mods.
Like with all games, though, there are some really irksome things about The Sims 4. Some of them have become a sort of inside joke with Simmers. Not all players will find all ? or even any of them ? irksome.
But just like imagining what The Sims 4 would be like if their little worlds were affected by a pandemic, we also like to imagine what the game would be like without some of these bugbears.
Many of these can be fixed through the MC Command Centre mod for the Sims 4. We certainly could not play our game without it. But oh what a time to be alive it would be if we could.
The eyeball ring from hell
There is actually a mod to fix this particular issue. As we said, modders do the most for the game. The Sims 4 eyeball ring is the most annoying unnecessary accessory to ever grace the game. We are convinced that the sole purpose of its existence is because the devs wanted to irritate players.
If you are not familiar with this atrocity, it does what it says on the tin. It is a ring that looks like an eyeball that seemingly always ends up in at least one outfit of a Sim.
Irritating NPCs
From Vlad welcoming you to his ?neck of the woods? to those pesky Eco Lifestyle campaigners, NPCs that fit the storyline can get a bit much. It is not that we don’t want to be friends with them when we start a new game, it’s just that we don’t want to be friends with them in this save.
Irrational love for big bulky things
From the coffee tables to the candle making station and that pot thing from Realm of Magic? objects in The Sims 4’s build/buy mode all seem irrationally? large. Sure, they can be resized by using the [ and ] keys, but then we wouldn?t have anything to moan about, would we?
Why always Sunday
Every new game starts on a Sunday. The Sims 4 seasons expansion pack allows you to choose which season you start a new game in, can we not be trusted do the same for days of the week?
Nobody’s got time for this
We know patience is a virtue, but it is not a trait you can find in CAS. Sorry, not sorry. Some of the interactions in The Sims 4 take far too long to get through. We know a Sims hour is way off a real-world hour, but not even the slowest sloth will take an hour to eat a bowl of cereal and end up being late for work because of it.
The creepy baby object
On the list of common complaints about The Sims 4 is the whole babies being stuck in their cribs thing. While limiting interactions with babies is not a problem in itself, the fact that they show up as a really creepy object in debug is just a bit, well, creepy.
So smart yet so stupid
One of the big selling points from the makers of The Sims 4 is that they are far smarter than their predecessors.
This is partly true. Sims can (mostly) autonomously existing without murdering themselves within the first five minutes of a game.
And yet, they still can?t figure out that standing up and watching the TV is perhaps not their best choice. Even if they were perfectly happy watching the TV from the sofa a few Sim moments ago. You are a Sim. You are not going to grow taller if you stand.
If you don’t listen to me, you will freeze
In the same bracket as the above mentioned, Sims will sometimes refuse to do what they are instructed to do. You know, like go inside a building when it is snowing.
Repeating the same old thing
We are starting to think that Sims might not be that smart in The Sims 4. While some of the extreme repetitions have been fixed, Sims still repeat the same thing over and over again far too often when left to their own devices. Sit in front of the computer, eat, sleep, repeat. Wait, ok, that’s us too.
Fire all the caterers
If your Sim is planning on having a wedding or a birthday party or anything that requires a caterer, you are better off cooking everything before heading off to the venue and putting the grub in your inventory. Because chances are the caterer won?t show up or act like you are paying them to socialize at the party.
Caterers just do not serve their purpose as they should. Aside from pre-cooking and adding things to your inventory, you can also cheat by adding the offending caterers to your family.
Once they have been instructed to do the cooking rather than living their best life, you can remove them again. But that’s not exactly how they are supposed to work, is it?
Townies
The outfits. Just. No. All their mothers are llamas.
Open worlds and the rest
Other than the above, the loading screen for visiting an adjacent apartment, the lack of an open world, not being able to create your own world and not being able to edit the exterior of apartments all rank on the list of eye rolls in our eyeball rings.
For builders, the auto-generated thumbnails are the eyeball rings of builds. Their ability to ruin your day by showing off the worst possible angle of your build is infuriating. Ditto for the inability to multi-select and delete several items from the gallery at once. Using The Sims 4 Tray Importer does make managing this a bit easier, but it’s not ideal.
But even with all these irritations, there is no game we?d rather spend our days playing.