In the past week I had something of a fling with The Sims 4. It felt rather interesting to come back to the series after a long absence, I played the first and second game a decent amount as a kid but kind of stopped as other games grabbed my interest in the intervening years; never really tried the third installment. It was quite interesting to see how much more things are in the new game (though much of that is undoubtedly due to my greater access to expansions now), as well as the annoyances that have crept in in the form of the whole “live service” model where the game keeps trying to sell you more things.
Still, I found my time with the game a decent amount of fun, though somewhat hampered by the amount of bugs. As an example, my sim ended up dying in a fire quite early on and becoming a ghost and later went on to become famous, unfortunately for her the whole fan meet & greet event that’s in the game is broken as a ghost so she couldn’t host it (she wasn’t in the list of celebrities available to host the thing). Ended up reincarnating as a vampire to work around that, but it did kill the mood somewhat.
Now, however, I’m at the point I tend to get to with these different simulation or open-ended games where I’m just kind of lacking a goal. I don’t really tend to get all that much out of just watching them go on with their lives, but building something cool is fun so it tends to be really interesting for me in the beginning, but once things start settling down I tend to kind of start losing interest. Same thing happens with something like Rimworld or Cities Skylines. It’s a bit of a strange feeling to have, since I do still kind of want to keep playing, I just get somewhat aimless once I do start the game up and close it again after a short while. Maybe I should look more into expanding the house or the like, hmm…