gameplay notes on: lot decay, ghosts, and jail

on lot deterioration:

I guess all of these things in my monthly events posts—birthdays, anniversaries, health strikes, and home deterioration—fit a similar theme of aging. Which leads me to a new roll. For not having any ROS in my gameplay (as I so boldly proclaimed), I sure do have a lot of new ROS in my gameplay, lol!


I’m excited about adding the lot damage roll, which will happen every month along with the health strikes. I realized how unrealistic it is that our sims pass down these houses from generation to generation and they never age like the sims do. Also because we just got all of those neat decals with the vampires pack and lot traits and problems with the City Living pack. I want to have more of an excuse to be forced to use them!

In September, Tessa Morton was chosen for the first lot deterioration roll, which was to kill off three of her garden plants. Good thing she has so many!


on grieving:

What I missed most from TS2 in regards to death was how sims would remember that someone dear to them has died even after the initial sadness has worn off. Sometimes years and years later. TS4 sims don’t have any memories, so once their moodlet is gone, that’s it for them.

So I began working on a trait, and while I was shooting pics for Rebecca's birthday, it sprung up at the most heartbreaking moment. 

Just as Aurora lit the birthday candles.

😭

So, uh, that had the desired effect then!

It's a cheap approximation of the way sims remembered in TS2, but it's better than nothing. It really made me feel a connection there with that moment. She wasn't just some random blissed out sim, she was a widow. The memory hit her out of nowhere, and it's those kind of unexpected moments that make the grief feel most real. Otherwise, she would just be another blissed out sim, walking around like she never had a husband at all.

I hadn't planned for her to get sad when they gathered around the birthday cake, but it was very meaningful that it happened, and I wrote it into the story.

I'm still tweaking this trait, but I'll upload it by the time I'm finished with Aurora's story set.


On TS4 ghosts:

Death in TS4 is so weird. It’s either very impermanent (being dead is just a trait that can be removed with a simple cheat), or ultra permanent (being sent to the netherworld, never to be seen again). There is nothing like TS2 where you have the closure of knowing that the sim is really gone, but you also might still see their ghost from time to time at the graveyard. In TS4, if you send them to the netherworld, there is no ghost, no nothing, they are deleted from the game.

But if you don’t send them to the netherworld, if you keep their ghost around, it’s like they’re not even really dead at all.


Dead Joel is angry, I guess?


They haunt almost every night. It’s not rare at all. They aren’t very scary, just annoying because they break everything when they possess objects. They can have whole conversations, woohoo, play with their children, whatever. That is weird and unsatisfying to play. How do you have a family move on when their dead dad comes back every night to have a chat, watch some TV, and break the toilet? lol!

Also, I just don’t like seeing the dead sims in emotions. I like to imagine that they’re resting in peace, wherever, but then they show up angry or sad or embarrassed, as sims do. That’s not resting in peace! And it makes me feel so bad for them.

Especially these two scenes in particular, Dead Joel sprung up angry while Brady helped Zach with his homework and Meadow read Rebecca to sleep, like he's pissed off about all the moments he's missing. Ugh. I don't like that at all! I want to imagine him in the afterlife, somewhere else, happy and peaceful.

I can’t deal with all of this inbetweeny living ghost stuff. It’s just so weird to see them behaving like a normal sim and to know with just a quick click I could turn them back alive again. I guess what I’m getting around to is that I think, for my own game, I’m going to have to send my dead sims to the netherworld once they’re buried. Dead = dead for good.

I just wish the ghosts were more like in TS2. :\

So I have Joel’s urn in Aurora’s inventory at the moment until I decide that I'm ready to send him. His ghost is literally inside her, lol! So far, it seems like he won't haunt when he's in her inventory. But I haven't decided yet if I'm ready to send him on for good. I’m scared they'll patch something in later to make the ghosts better, then I'll wish that I'd kept him.


On high security prison:


But something TS4 ghosts are really good for—jail!

I've been trying to figure out how to make imprisoned sims stay in jail for a while, and I think I might have finally cracked it. I put a ghost tag on Max, knowing that death is not really death in this game until you send them, and it actually works to keep him from walking around town and showing up with his family at restaurants or shopping in retail stores.

As a ghost, his family can’t call him—that makes sense, he is in jail—but they can visit him, interact with him at the jail, whatever.


If I want to do a scene with him, the ghost trait comes off with just a click. When I'm done, I can put it back on with a click. He doesn’t even need to go through a force kill or death scene. Just a ghost trait. No death necessary. Then, when I'm ready to release him back to society, I just take the trait off and he's good to go.

See what I mean about how impermanent death is? It makes it feel even more wrong for a sim who has truly and actually died, always knowing that life is just a click away. But for sims in jail, sure.



My jail is completely underground. When Max is in ghost form, he can go through walls—human form, of course, he cannot—but ghosts won't teleport to another floor without any stairs. And this jail doesn't have any.

My cops can go between floors by teleporting via debug cheats.

Of course, when I'm actually playing this lot, I'll play Max as a human sim, not a ghost. The ghost is just for when I'm playing other households, so he won't show up around town. (I suppose if you wanted to have a sim who has really moved away, you could use that trick, too.)



Above ground, it looks like this. Just a bulldozed lot, lol!

For my jail, whatever is above ground doesn't really matter, and I had no other plans for this lot. Since we can't edit anything in the neighborhoods, this lot could really only be either a graveyard or a spooky vampire mansion, and I'm not doing those kind of vampires in my game. So graveyard it is. Perhaps I'll make it into a park/graveyard, with a maximum security prison underground. ;)