I do love SIms 4.

But I won't pretend that I'm happy with the size of the worlds. I'm used to Sims 2 where eery family can spawn as many successor households as they have children so of course I went out and most of my 8 households have a 2 children or more. Couple that with the fact that I can't inter-marry them all because of a uneven number of girls and boys (and that accounts for my gay teen couple) and I'm gonna have a problem in the foreseeable future. I already had a household spawn, if I move out Cassandra there will be yet another 10 households. Isn't that like half a world already full?

However I do love that the worlds are connected, which means once a CAW is released I'll never run out of space again. I already hope that the first expansion might introduce one or two worlds (probably just one, it's EA we're talking about and not the Maxis of golden olden Sims 2 days).
They also said the neighborhoods are, in theory at least, expandable. Let's hope a talented modder finds out how if EA won't let us.

And finally, I don't see how the small number of lots would point towards Sims 4's online origins (which I don't deny by themselves) Would this have been an MMO for just 26 players or something? I think the small number of neighborhoods was a consequence of the hasty overhaul into an offline game if anything.

You put too much faith in those people. Best stance to have when dealing with EA: "Skeptical until results are shown"

I think these problems will be solved in the form of EXPANSION PACKS.

I also am having problems. In the beginning it was magical lol Now I crash and lose progress almost every single game session. Which leads to me saving frequently. Half the time it crashes in the midst of saving. Which bums me out cause I really do enjoy the game. I've taken out ALL downloads and emptied my Tray and even that made no difference.

More on topic I also think we need bigger worlds. And I hate the fact that there are decorative houses in the distance. I need an actual usable house to move people into. Not some useless buildings for decoration that don't serve an actual function lol

One minute? Pff. My Sims 2 load times used to be around five times as long. Still loved the game.

Sure you could have. You just don't open the thing and return it. If someone had bought me a copy that's sure what I would've done. One time my sister bought me a video game for Christmas I had no interest in playing. I told her I hoped it wouldn't hurt her feelings but I was going to take it back and put the money toward something I did want, which was SimCity 4. She understood perfectly.

Now going to ETA:

@Simify: Just SMH at your posts. You just seem so clueless. I never did finish a single one (life got in my way) but I started several TS3 worlds and it would appear you have absolutely no understanding of what goes into using the Create A World tool, and all of the texture files involved in building something beautiful. I don't suppose you ever noticed how each expansion pack added new "worlds" (they really are just towns) with different looking roads in them. The vacation maps in WA alone had at least three different sets of textures for roads and at least a dozen completely unique textures from Sunset Valley or Riverview for the vacation destinations. The individual neighborhoods they sold added even more unique textures. Sadly the patterns those textures were made with weren't even good to begin with (there's a seam right down the middle of the grass with white flowers texture that came with Ambitions), in that they repeated so badly in CAW with a little zoom-out they looked downright horrible. Fortunately it wasn't as obvious in-game. In a lot of cases a distant terrain object was used but it is also quite possible to create a map with no distant terrain at all, then just block off areas where you don't want Sims to travel with routing paint, or in the case of an island just use no-camera paint around the edges to stop the camera since the Sims wouldn't have been swimming to the edge of the map, unless of course something was changed in a later expansion pack, of which I have no idea because I never got anything past Pets installed. As for the textures and objects placed in either TS3 or TS4 towns, those would be no different at all. They would all be painted and placed during the building process.

What loads in a TS3 game goes like this: first of all, of course, all the information has to load up with the town because there are a lot of things that go on in the background with the other Sims. As for the graphics, though, only one chunk at a time is ever loaded. I forget right off-hand just how many chunks the largest map size has, though. It seems like it's 8x8 but I could be wrong on that.

Now to the original question: my money is on the fact this game was originally being designed for online play and the sizes of the so-called worlds (towns, people, they really are just towns) was most likely Maxis' idea of how to have the thing run smoothly on a server.

I'm one of the people who has issues with my save of about 50 hours. SLOW load times. And no, it's not a low-end computer. I actually wonder how it runs on low-end computers after awhile. LGR I believe mentioned it started happening to him at 30+ hours. It's an issue, and one I hope will be addressed and fixed.

I actually like the game a lot, but since the loading screens now last a little over a minute, my sims don't go out very much. I'm debating just starting a new game, but I hate to do that especially since they'll start lagging again once I make it through a generation or two. Actually, I'm considering giving Sims 2 a try as I have found I absolutely love rotational game play.

I like the fact that we don't have to make a new game for every different world, it makes neighborhood integration a lot easier. We don't have to export a family from one world to import them in another. However I do think that the current neighborhoods are pretty small. Hopefully different worlds will have different sizes. I can't wait for the EP where we get to visit different countries. I hope that those are at least A LITTLE bigger. It would be disappointing if China were the same size as one of the suburbs.

If that's true (which I don't know & can't confirm or refute), it would be a stupendously ironic reversal of the behavior that caching is intended to provide. That is, the game only wrote all that stuff to cache files because it hoped that reading the files would be quicker than re-generating their contents. If that's not true, then... ?

The cache files for TS3 were definitely like that, in that the larger they got the more they could slow down the game and eventually they would all need deleted and started fresh. I know they're supposed to speed up load time and they do but only up to a point but once they hit that point they should be deleted.

Also, remember, this is Maxis coding we're talking about here and I think it's highly unlikely TS4 is programmed a whole lot better than TS3 was. Sure, they make a lot of claims but they've been known to claim things that weren't true before.

Just make sure if you want to delete files to move them to a temporary location then test-start the game just to be sure it's safe to delete them.

Generally you cache something to make it faster to retrieve for future use. Obviously I can't say for sure since I'm not EA, but it almost sounds like the game caches every object/texture/sim when you first encounter it for future use which would normally speed things up. The problem is that the longer one plays, if you never/rarely see it again and the game never flushes it's cache regularly, then the size of the cache just keeps increasing until it becomes unwieldy and actually becomes slower to use than to just regenerate the files from scratch.

That may be why deleting it once in a while helps speed things back up.

Just my two cents worth....

[B]I want my eighty dollars worth for sure

I like smaller size of neighbourhood, unlike earlier sims versions I can fully control this limited families. However it is bad they didn't give us option to create new neighbourhoods. I could even be okay with making copies of existing ones so I can change somethings without worrying loosing original feeling of the shiped neighbourhoods.

I guessed it was because that's how they intended to break up the multi-player world. I.E., you would have 4 neighbors that the game was keeping, shall we say, very-close tabs on. This theory is the only thing that explains to me why we have a loading screen to travel next door, despite being able to see many details prior to travelling. A live player would make changes very frequently, so loading would allow a changes to update the latest changes and sync with your live neighbors.

Anyway, smaller town makes for less data synchronization.

You're right, but this problem doesn't end there when it comes to TS3. I suspect TS4 will have similar issues later on, but we'll see.

Speaking from the TS3 side of things though, simply deleting cache files is not always enough. If mods are not in place to prevent auto spawning of vehicles and sims, the game can be brought to a screaming halt as there was never a script put in place to tell the game to stop spawning these things. If memories are allowed, those are another form of bloat that can slow down a game as every time a sim makes a meal, it is deemed a worthy memory.

Then there are things such as thumbnails shoved in the "Featured Items" folder that pile up if one uses the launcher. I no longer allow this folder to be written to, but I found the weirdest crap in that folder that has never been in my game before I knew better. There is also the junk that collects in the DCCache folder as well as the DCBackup folder.

I delete the more common cache files every other time I play. World cache files along with whatever crap is hiding in the DCCache and DCBackup folders get deleted once or twice a week depending on how much I've played. I don't allow memories, I keep my screenshot folder cleaned out ( another form of bloat) and thank Overwatch for 'cleaning house' at 3 AM game time. It doesn't clean up everything, but it certainly makes my life easier.

@GargoyleCat, what you're saying right there is exactly why people need to learn how to actually use a computer. People who drive cars usually at the very least take them in for things like changing oil and rotating tires. They might even clean the insides of their car. A computer's no different and anyone who uses one needs to realize that. They hoard junk, and the more ignorant programmers think users are the more junk is programmed to be hoarded. Games like TS3 was one of the worst I'd seen. Every time a person installed an S3Pack file a copy of it went into that DCBackup folder. Delete it from your game, delete it from the main folder, but never would it be deleted from the DCBackup folder unless it was done manually. I don't recall how much of that garbage I had in there before I finally realized it was doing that. I know, the folder is supposed to be a back-up for what you put in your game but if a person isn't familiar with what's actually on their hard-drive they would never even know it was there so fat lot of good having it backed up does. In retrospect I think I've been one of the luckiest people on the planet when it comes to maintaining a computer. I always ran computers that had a way smaller hard-drive than was average for the time and as such I had to make sure I learned how and what I could delete just to save space.

So the Pentium 4 players can run it

Disagree and agree. I don't have to change the oil because the engineers were incompetent. I do, however, have the responsibility to watch for recalls and take it into the shop when they discover an actual engineering problem.

Problems like bloated saves and most of the here-in noted errors, should be discovered quickly, and secondly, EA should be held liable when they refuse to fix it -- which is obviously the case for TS2 and TS3 documented yet persistent bugs.

In conclusion, it's difficult for me to state that everyone should know how to perform maintenance on a computer just because most application producers suck. ( <-- that's an attempt not to simply blame the programmers, or developers, as they still need support from producers, publishers and distributors to correct problems efficiently.)

Sims is the only game I play, so I don't know if there are other game (s) out there that collect so much crap in so many places or not.

I've been playing TS3 for around 3 years. I've never had issues with corrupt saves and other things people often complain about. I'm not lucky, I just don't act like a slouch when it comes to getting rid of stuff. All that stuff provides zero benefit to the game and acts like a wet blanket on performance.

TS3 is not a hands-off game. If one doesn't put in the time to clean stuff out, there is a price to be paid. I put up with it because I enjoy my game, but it's a 'gift' that I didn't ask for. Some of it I knew about prior to buying the game, the rest of it was learned from experience. Yet another reason why I'm staying away from TS4. I already have a high maintenance game in my life, I don't need another one.

I would not exactly call the 2 worlds gorgeous, although the words "pissy poo" come to mind. :p

WUT? ((forgive me for being ignorant and derailing the topic. I play Sims mostly to decorate houses and landscape yards.)) Is sim-inbreeding a thing that is possible? I thought Sims was a family game.

EA i am disappoint

No, actual incest is not possible. However Sims can marry a second cousin and even (I think) a first cousin once removed, many Sims 2 players (myself included) tended to do that in overcrowded Sims 2 neighborhoods to tie the branches of a large family back together (three cheers for Broke-Broke marriages!), that's what happycowlover means, I think.

https://twitter.com/SimGuruGrant/st...257528620290048

People didn't know they could travel in TS4?

SMH

Did these people get 'lost' in the open worlds in TS3? The worlds were bigger than a paper bag, so they couldn't find their way around. FFS

Yeah, so funny, especially since 'traveling' in Sims 4 just means leaving your home lot lol.

Reading the responses to that tweet, I don't know who Grant was talking to? Why would the game cater to those that don't like traveling in Sims 3. I call BS!

Also, if you don't like traveling in Sims 3 but enjoy loading screens to travel in Sims 4, I don't get the logic. *scratches head*