So reading some of the reviews and finding a $20 coupon has gotten me waaaayyyy more interested in this game. Some of aspects of it really sound fun, like the crafting, they variety of interactions available to the sims, the split between friendship and romance, and the emotions have always intrigued me. But the missing things really bug me. Like no NPCs, teens being the same height as adults, no toddlers, object babies, etc...

On the one hand I'm thinking different game different stuff on the other hand I don't know that I can get over some things. The teen height thing seems small, but it really bugs me. And the lack of NPCs....The nannies sucked in previous games and I was left on my own sometimes as a kid, but at the same time its seems really unreal that you would regularly leave a kid home alone for hours.

I just don't know. For those of you who were really put off by some of the missing features, but decided to buy it anyway what do you think? Are you happy or do you regret it? And what missing features were the biggest turn-off for you?

I was never one of the people that made a moral stand of the game, so I guess I'm not disappointed or regretful. I am a little sad to see where the series has come, but this by no means the terminus of the Sims 4. We'll still get a dozen expansion packs and I'm still pretty confident that it will be a good game eventually.

It's just really sad that we have to wait for them to release the rest of the game and we spent about $60 for a game engine. But to say I didn't expect this and didn't know what I was getting into is disingenuous. Besides the fact that "it's EA," it's also just the best and pretty much the only way a game with the potential depth of the Sims could operate (not the bare bones base game, that's still pretty inexcusable, but the whole DLC, expansion pack thing)

Well, let's just say I don't think it was worth the about 90 USD I paid for the digital deluxe version.

It's not the worst game, and it does have a few good ideas, but... I dunno, it's not even as much that there are missing features compared to even the base game of previous The Sims games, let alone the expansions, it's that... it also got boring for me faster than I expected, tbh. Part of it does have to do with, well, having less to do in it, but it's also that it never got balanced and most stuff that DID get included is either really unnecessary or can be trivially gamed.

E.g., I'm hard pressed to find a reason to either garden, or push forward with learning cooking, or save for the top tier fridge, when just plopping a magical item that costs 110§ makes my sim produce top quality pancakes at any skill and with the cheapest fridge and stove at that. And it's not from some mod, it's right in the game.

People seem to use gardening just as yet another way of gaming it, namely the fact that produce sells for more than what you'd get in most jobs in the same time, so essentially it's a money mine instead of having anything to do with cooking like in previous games.

The emotions stuff sounds grrreat in theory, but in practice you can get any emotion you want by either plopping magical aura items (my sim now gets Focused in the computer room, Inspired in the kitchen, Energized in his exercise room, etc, just by entering the room, because of the overlapping auras), or by just clicking an item. E.g., the tea brewing machine literally gives you any emotion you want. Just pick your magic potion and there you go. "Hmm, I'm going to the bar, I want to be Confident for social interactions, I'll just click there and become confident." Or, "Hmm, I'm going to work in an hour, I'm a Tech Guru, I need Focused, I'll just click there and become focused." It's literally as trivial as that.

Not only there isn't much reason to raise skills or balance your daily routine and interactions to get the right mood for the job, but even traits seem to be largely pointless. Other than maybe Cheerful, which helps, it's so trivial to get whatever mood you want anyway, that there's no point in even trying to think about what traits you get for a sim.

In fact, some of the mood traits are actually more detrimental than useful, since they can force you into a different mood than you want at the moment. E.g., taking Self-Assured on a sim (or whatever that one is really called) because it seemed like the kind of guy I wanted him to be, actually does nothing more than force him randomly into Confident mood, when I needed for example Focused at the time. Given how trivial it is to get any mood when you want it, the traits that are supposed to help you with that, actually just get in the way.

TS1 to TS3 weren't THAT free form. Sure, you could role-play or make movies with them, but there was a game underneath that too. There was a point in raising your skills, saving for better items, or doing stuff like fishing to fertilize your grapes to make better wine, etc. Here you just plop some magic aura item, or one where you can click to get the mood you want, and there you go, that trumps everything else.

Which is boring.