Caffeinated Gaming: The Sims 4

I love The Sims, brainchild of Will Wright that hit store shelves in February of the year 2000. At least as far as I know, it was the first of it's kind, taking the world management of Sim City and making it all about the people and their lives. As the franchise went on, it got more and more elaborate, becoming not so much a game about simulating day to day life for digital entities, but putting said digital effigies you created into crazy situations and telling stories with them.
Why else would you kill off an entire family dressed up in stereotypical indian costumes, just so you could move in a new family and have the ghosts of the previous family haunt them as though it had been built on an Indian burial ground?

Whereas the original focused solely on the household, and later on in it's expansions, visiting community lots to shot, eat, date, shag, and play, you were always sort of tied down to one area of wherever you wanted to go. It eventually began to open out starting with The Sims 2, until the Sims 3 presented to us a seemless open world to explore with our Sims, even taking control of their jobs directly.

Now it's fourteen years later and with the release of The Sims 4, gone now is the open map, as well as a good many other things, on top of the cool things that you can do. But underneath it all, I have begun to sense a return to the series roots in the original, for better or worse.
For starters, the Open World is gone, as I pointed out, a fact that sticks in my craw. Instead, we are given the ability to explore the surrounding neighborhood our Sims occupy, littered with the expected collectibles. The focus is more on the Sims, because they are ten times more lively than they have ever been thanks to multi-tasking. We can do up to three things at once if they're manageable. You can read on the toilet. You can have a drink and watch TV while talking with the bae.
You can tell some very personal and interesting stories with The Sims 4. For instance, I made a sim with the Bro quality, who wrote Bro-related books, and romanced a local hottie. They saw a lot of each other, and had a great time...but when they got married, because of their work schedules, the only time they saw each other, was when they were going to bed. It was sad, and almost too real a situation.

Though, then I reflect on The Sims 3, where my Sim would get home from work, have a quick bite, and then pop down to the watering hole for a bit. To do that, my Sim would just get in his car and drive across town to the bar. In The Sims 4, with the removal of the open world, we have to go through a loading screen to get to the community lot where said bar exists. If you wanted to check on your other Sims in Sims 3, you'd just right click their portrait and it would just zoom in on them, because they still existed in the same game space zone. Sims 4 has to load the lot they are in. It's all minor annoyances, done for the sake of making the game run smoothly and require as little from computers as possible. And I appreciate that, but all the changes feel like such a step back. Three generations back...As though I'm playing a retro version of the original Sims. There is little reason to visit community lots at all except when your Sim wants to via their Whims. You can fill your Sims social needs just hanging out in your neighborhood, and unless your Sim is just really keen on doing stand up at the local bar, your day to day will be a lot of going to work, and coming home.
That is unless you get in on a good crafting ability to make money from home. Like writing books, or writing songs, or selling the collectables that spawn around your neighborhood (like magic, at dawn there are a slew of new fossils, crystals and ores. Laws of physics and geography be damned)

Granted, we are in the age of Vanilla Sims 4. Pre-Expansions. The expansions have always been what makes the series shine, expanding on existing features and heaping on new ones. I have some serious high hopes for whacky and insane adventures to put my Sims through in the years to come, just as the Sims 3 and previously, The Sims 2, had before it.


Should you buy it?
If you're a Sims fan, you've already bought it. If you're on the fence, to be honest, I'd wait and see what expansions come down the pipe to flesh out the experience.