#the sims 4 grave

[lovesickdeadsims]

Times passes, Jennyfer is a child. Marina keeps her grandma grave nice and clean.

[nervousgnome]

Mallory's wardrobe 🧪

[florwal]

where my current household lives :')

[thepettymachine]

Agnes & Robert

it was time for their couple portraits since they're adults now.

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

"An ideal Sims game would have Sims 2's gameplay mechanics, Sims 3's open world, and Sims 4's graphics!"

I absolutely despise this take, and I want to explain why. This is a very long rant and it is full of piss and vinegar directed at everything in the Sims 4. I'm gonna try to keep everything kinda professional as much as I can but I can't guarantee an unbiased opinion.

If you'll let me talk your ears off for a moment, I'd like to explain, from my own experience as an artist and a casual player, my issues with the art style and direction of The Sims 4 compared to The Sims 2. (I'm not really going to comment on 3 because I've never played it.)

I want to start off by explaining the difference between better graphics and higher resolution. The Sims 4 absolutely blows Sims 2 out of the water when it comes to textures and polygon counts on sims, no contest. But I'd argue that the graphics themselves... aren't better. They're worse, even, so much fucking worse. The biggest problems come from the stylization and the animations, in my opinion, so I'll explain what I mean.

Have you ever felt like the Sims in 4 just look... weird? Not quirky, not kinda strange, but off. Distressing. Uncanny. Whatever the fuck the kids call it nowadays. When you strip away the packs and the CC and the shaders, the sims in the base game look bad. They're very close to being human; they walk like us, talk like us, have families like us, but they don't look like us, not exactly. There's always something off about them, no matter how close you try to get. Proportions will be a bit off, or your eyelashes will be like three polygons for some fucking reason, and the jig is up. The illusion is gone.

This is one of the instances where a higher resolution and more detailed models and meshes work against you. You aren't making believe. You are beyond the point of pretending that the pixelated shapes are real clothes and bodies and faces, because at this point, they're close enough that you don't need to. There's no gap to bridge. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're lifelike, at least, not enough to be completely human. In some ways, they're still tethered to being cartoony and plasticky and fake. Just enough to frighten you. Enough to put you off. They're not using it to their advantage anymore, and instead, it's holding them back.

When the Sims 2 came out in 2004, the developers knew that they weren't going to make a perfectly accurate life simulator. They physically couldn't render every wrinkle in the face or fold in the clothing. In some animations, things clip strangely or the facial expressions are sort of janky or there's just some form of roughness around the edges. But that's okay; your brain doesn't need a perfectly accurate representation this time. That's not what you're here for, anyway.

The Sims 4 is basically Icarus-ing itself into disaster. The entire game sacrifices style for complete realism, a goal that was unachievable ten years ago, and is unachievable now.

The Sims 2 never thought of itself as a completely realistic life sim, though. It has cartoony, low poly meshes and exaggerated proportions and wild, raunchy storylines that would never occur in real life. BECAUSE IT ISN'T REAL LIFE. And it isn't like real life, not because it's failing to be, but because it doesn't want to be!

The Sims 4 is not ever going to completely replicate human looks or interactions or dynamics. And if it's trying to, it's doing a shit job of it. That shouldn't be the goal in the first place. If I wanted to watch a lonely college student talk to himself in the mirror to try and get better at interacting with people, I'd close the computer and go look at myself. It somehow highlights the most mundane parts of life without any of the whimsy and goofiness that the earlier installments had. It takes itself too fucking seriously for its own good, and it's killing both the gameplay and the art style.

The other point I'd like to bring up is the animation. The Sims 4 allows for much more customization of both sim and environments, but at the cost of dynamic animations. How many times is that grab animation reused? How many times is the same set of animations used for sims with wildly different personalities? Your sims barely feel alive with how little they express themselves.

Now, look, I'm a digital artist. I've dabbled in animation, but only briefly, and only in 2D. I've got no clue how 3D animation works, much less how it worked 20 years ago, but I can see the passion in every single animation in the Sims 2. The more niche interactions allowed for more expressive animations than in 4. They could afford to have a distinct animation for mean sims throwing the football extra hard to be assholes, rather than every sim using the same generic football-throwing animation to save time and money. I get where they're coming from. I get the idea. But in one move, you've both made the art style stiffer and less expressive, and you've made the personalities of the sims seem meaningless. Everyone acts the same, regardless of what their moodlets or their traits say. It's hollow. It's stifled. It's a waste of potential.

But for what Sims 2 lacks in polygons, it makes up for in smaller animated details. Quality over quantity. The sims have hair physics, they open the door before they get in the car, they take utensils out of the counters when they cook, they jump on the couch and the cushions smush under their weight. When they dance, the weight is realistic, and when they smile, it tugs at every one of the few dozen shapes that make up their faces. The sims are lively. They dance and sing and love and hate just like humans, and rather than being some strange attempt at mimicry, it's almost a tribute. They were made with love. You can tell that they were drawn up and rigged and animated by a bunch of people working together, studying each other and making faces in the mirror for reference and watching their kids and neighbors and dogs and hands for reference. The sims are not human, and not trying to be, but they're taking the most human parts of us and making them their own.

You could never have a game with the Sims 4's graphics and the Sims 2's gameplay. The gameplay and graphics are inexorably connected, and the Sims 2 just has so much glorious detail baked into it, that you could never really make it work underneath the limitations of the later games. The developers of 2 knew what their limits were, and they worked tirelessly to make the game as full and complex as they could within those limits. The developers for the Sims 4 just did not have those guidelines, and thus, the drive to bend the rules was no longer there. They didn't go wild in rebellion because they were never told they couldn't in the first place. They spent the entire time chasing a goal they couldn't meet, and lost sight of what made the series fun to begin with.

It wasn't the realism you came for; you had realism already surrounding you. It was the caricature of it that made it interesting.

[bunnithechubs]

forgotten hallow appreciation post

[aliengirl]

annd it killed him :/ willow was very sad

[panicsimss]

Sage Graves-Vatore for @ethicaltreatmentofcowplants's Simply Lilac BC

Yeah, I'm taking another chance with ANOTHER Graves legacy spare after sending Tempest out to the Mad About Dodo BC ! I did say that Tempest would return home and brag about her experience lol. She definitely pushed her little sister into this one since her big brother Timber is married and other brother Benjamin isn't into women. Sage is her last hope. SO ANYWAY I hope you like her!!

Name: Sage Graves-Vatore Age Group: Young adult Pronouns: She/Her Orientation: Bisexual Hometown: Windenburg Occupation: eSports competitor  Traits: Kleptomaniac. Cheerful, Geek Aspiration: Computer whiz Life State: Vampire (prime vampire rank) Likes: Video gaming, photography, programming, dancing, S-pop/Pop music, the colors gray and purple Dislikes: Cooking, fitness, classical music, ranch music, the color yellow Gifts: Tamed cowplant skull, emerald, snowglobe (I forgot to add stuff to her inventory i’m sorry) Bio:  Often the most overlooked child in her big family, Sage has found solace in joining online communities for occults. Her brothers and mother are werewolves, her big sister gave up vampirism in favor of fitting in with humans and her father is… well, he’s Caleb. It’s lonely in this big world and she’s made it her mission to find like-minded people. It’s partly why she chose to pursue a career in gaming, to host livestreams and curate a little online bubble for those who enjoy video games AND monsters. She’s just a sweet, nerdy girl who probably needs to touch grass from time to time. This challenge may just give her just what she’s looking for in life, a chance to make more friends and disconnect from the online world that she’s clung onto for so long…and finding love along the way wouldn’t hurt either!

Watcher

Are you comfortable with your pixel person:

Flirting with other contestants?  [Y]

WooHooing other contestants? [Y]

Flirting with/and or woohooing NPCs?  [Y]

Flirting with the host?  [Y]

Changes to traits via gameplay prompts? (ie. Evil to Good, depending on what your Sim does, or adding traits)  [Y]

[morrigan-sims]

Judgement

upright: resurrection, reflection, reckoning, judgement, and awakening. reversed: lack of self-awareness, doubt, self-loathing.

Yet another tarot card edit, this time for my Curse of Strahd character, Avra! She's a shadar-kai/reborn phantom rogue who was brought back from the dead by the Raven Queen to serve as her chosen assassin. She was sent to Barovia to kill a rogue lich, but one of the people meant to help her (a raven given human form by the Raven Queen) has made a bargain with him instead...

Her epithet in my notes is "the revenant", and I think it's pretty obvious why. And also pretty obvious why she gets the Judgement card. (Resurrected from the dead, brings her goddess's judgement upon people, etc.)

In this case the reversed version of the card is also fitting, or at least it most likely will be as her arc progresses... (Though the "lack of self-awareness" is pretty accurate, given recent events in the campaign.)

Oh, and of course I had to include a raven looking down on Avra. The Raven Queen does keep a very close eye on her, even now that she's in Barovia...

[living-undead]

Mutual's Sims in My Simstyle These amazing sims belong to: @matchalovertrait @ruthplaysthesims @thosegothsims @simstoyourdismay

Hi, Hello! 👋🏽

Recently, I noticed that I just hit 100 followers! I'd just like to take a moment to thank everyone that's followed me, everyone that's passed by and given my posts some love. All of you mean so much to me and I'm extremely thankful for the people I've met through Simblr. 💜

Plus, a lil' sum special below the cut 🤭

[tricoufamily]

1st draft of some ocs i've been thinking about writing or doing some art of. 1920s. moderately religious professor/single father and his very sickly from birth son. things start getting really bad for the son. he's going to die, and nothing can save him. dad goes crazy and becomes a serial killer for human parts to make these black magic remedies that keep him alive.

[thosegothsims]

image transcript:

blake: where did he go??? taron: [toddler giggles]

[nervousgnome]

Mallory Grave // Paranoid + Genius + Socially Awkward

[florwal]

[thepettymachine]

With Robert reaching level 4 of his career, it was time for him to move in with Agnes

[edmunderson]

what if... i was a vampire... and i turned you into one too and we got a lil frisky in the graveyard 😳 haha just kidding....... unless? 👀

for @gloomiegalaxie's vampire femboy friday!