The TS4 Demo: First Impressions

Well, if you don't know it by now, the demo for The Sims 4 is officially out now, available at Origin. I've been playing with it a lot over the past few days and if you're curious, here are my thoughts on and impressions of Create a Sim.

What's Changed About Create a Sim
CAS in TS4 is very different from CAS in TS3. Here are the biggest and most notable changes:

• No Create a Style--no ability to add colors and textures to hair and clothing. It's all preset. Even hairstyles that have streaks in them can't be retextured.
• The ability to shape your sim's bodies and facial features by clicking and dragging (called "push/pull")
• Customized walks--now each of your sims can have a distinctive walk, ranging from "goofy" to "snobby."
• More realistic ethnic faces
• More skin colors and tints, ranging from a yellowish pale tint to dark charcoal brown
• Can't save sims individually, can only save households
• Relationships limited to spouse/sibling/roommate/parent

What's Good About CAS

Great Looking Sims

The first thing that blew me away about CAS was how amazing the sims looked. I already knew from screenshots that the sims were going to look better in TS4, but not this much. I mean, they look absolutely amazing, very warm and lifelike.

TS3/TS4 side by side comparison

Keep in mind that this isn't a knock on how the sims from TS3 looked. I actually love the way they look as well. But the TS4 sims are definitely an improvement. Textures are smoother, colors are a lot warmer and hair feels thicker and fuller.

CAS is Super Fast
Compared to TS3, CAS in TS4 loads and handles super fast--like blazingly fast. There's virtually no lag, and it takes the presets just milliseconds to load as soon as you click on them.

Creating Households Is Faster
Once you get the hang of CAS, creating households does seem to go a lot faster than it did in TS3. It used to take me hours to complete a really large household in TS3 but took me less than an hour to do that in TS4.

You Can Edit Households in Your Library
Remember what a PITA it was to work on a really large family in TS3? If you were like me, at some point, you became so tired that you just saved all your bins for your household to the sim bin. Then when you were ready to resume your household, you would bring all your saved sims back into CAS, which was a nightmare if you had hundreds of sims in your bin.

Well, guess what? You don't have to do that anymore. This is because households in TS4 can now be edited after you save them. So if you want, you can create a "rough draft" of your household, save it when you get tired, then go back and tweak it as many times as you'd like.

Randomizer is a Lot Better
Remember how when you used to generate random sims in CAS, you'd get all kinds of weird looking, ugly sims? And sometimes the skin color and hair would be really off, too, like you'd get really dark-skinned sims with orange hair and green eyes. Well, when you click the randomizer to generate sims in TS4's CAS demo, most of the sims come out looking pretty decent. Even hair color and ethnicity matched more or less, so no more dark sims with bright blue eyes and flaming red hair.

Random sims. As you can see, you get pretty decent sims--no weird color and hair combinations, and all fairly attractive.

What's Not So Good About CAS
Here are some of the things I had issues with.

Sims Move Around a Lot
Sims move around constantly in CAS--smiling, making goofy expressions, or just mugging for the camera. It can be a bit annoying. You can just click on them to stop moving, but it would make more sense to have them behave as they did in TS3, where they'd just wave or smile the one time and stand still. My only guess as to why the devs implemented this was to showcase how lifelike the sims are in TS4, since the number one complaint in TS3 was how lifeless the sims looked.

Push/Pull Great in Some Aspects, Frustrating in Others
The whole push/pull way of creating sims is nowhere near as smooth and easy to grasp as the devs would have you believe. In some instances, it does make tweaking sims easier and faster. In other cases, it can be a lot less convenient to use than presets. For example, it just seems easier to me to have a preset of different shaped heads than it is to have to tweak the head with push/pull.

Another problem with push/pull right now is that it's very difficult in the beginning to figure out how to tweak some features, because you have to click in a very precise area of the face that isn't immediately obvious to the player. For example, I had a hard time figuring out how to widen or shorten the entire head or how to bring the eyes closer or farther apart, because you're supposed to click in very specific hot spots--inside the forehead and pupil.

Same thing with making eyes bigger or smaller. The "hotspot" for this is very precise--you have to click on the outside corner of the eye. But how would you know that on first glance?

You're supposed to click around *there* to enlarge the eyes...

...but then click *there* to move them up or down or apart from each other.

Once you figure out where all the hotspots for the face are, push/pull is a snap. But until you do, you'll be doing a lot of fruitless and frustrating clicking in the process.

Not Enough Hair and Clothes
There are some great hair and clothes in CAS, but not nearly enough to satisfy the average simmer. This is especially true of male hairstyles. Hopefully in the actual release we'll be seeing a lot more than what's being offered in the demo. But if not, may God have mercy on EA's soul, lol.

Only Three Traits
In CS3, you could give your sims five traits. Now it's down to three, and a few from TS3 don't seem to have made it over to TS4. For example, there's no "rebellious", "dramatic" or "grumpy" trait.

On the flip side, there are some new interesting traits that we didn't see in TS3 (such as "materialistic"). Also, some of the traits in TS3 were so superfluous that the sims might as well have had only three traits, anyway. So I'm not really sure that traits being whittled down from five to three will make that much of a difference. I guess we'll have to see.

Teens are the Same Height as Adults
This is not really a dealbreaker for me, but it's bound to be a major disappointment to some.

Can Only Create Four Types of Relationships
You can no longer create fiance or boyfriend/girlfriend relationships. You're limited to just the basics--spouse, parent, roommate or sibling.

The Stahma Tarr Smile
If you watch Defiance, then you know who Stahma Tarr is. She's an alien female who has an odd way of smiling in order to show deference to her superiors. Unfortunately, the sim models seem to suffer from this very odd smile. Some players call it the joker smile. I prefer to call it the Stahma Tarr smile.

They all look like this...

This, I think, is the biggest issue right now with the sims in CAS. They're perfect in every way possible EXCEPT for this one problem. I guess it's something I can live with, but if it were up to me, I'd fix it. It looks okay on some sims but just plain awful on others.

Censorship Problem
Apparently, the game blocks you from creating households with offensive names or descriptions. That's all well and good. Problem is that what it censors seems completely off the mark. For example, in trying to save this character, I got a pop up message telling me that the name or description had a "disallowed word." Others have reported the same issue, with one guy claiming that he couldn't save a household because it was called Kiker. Hmmm...

Uh oh! You've done something naughty. But what?

So Far, So Good
In spite of little issues here and there, I think that TS4's CAS is heads and shoulders above than in TS3. Yeah, I know, I know--everyone's flipping out over the lack of a color wheel and Create a Style and all that jazz. But honestly, I think it's a decent trade off. If not having CASt and a color wheel means CAS loading up in under two seconds and allowing for speedier household creation, then so be it. Besides, the amazing look of the sims more than makes up for their loss, IMO.