Sims4News

4eversims:

I know a lot of players had hoped that The Sims 4 would take a more realistic route, but I honestly feel like if they had, they would have sacrificed more of the gameplay such as SP, emotions, personalities etc. much like they did with TS3.

I think they opted for a more simple design that would allow them to add more detail and improvements without weighing down the game too much.

A discussion of the official forums prompted me to look into the changes in more detail, to look at what they’ve changed and why they might have done it.

EYES
The eyes no longer look lifeless, they’re brighter looking with better colouring and shading. The shaping of the eyes is more natural (and even though I’m just comparing these two images, I would like to add that in the clips we’ve seen so far, there’s lot more variation in shapes and sizes of both eyes and irises).

The area around the eyes has a LOT more definition. In TS3 you can only really see the eyelid, everything else looks rather flat. Unlike TS4 where you can see the curve of the brow, the depth under and in the corner of the eye. And whilst the eyebrows are still flat and solid, their shape has been improved slightly, making them look a little more natural and less like a pencil line. I will give one point to TS3 for eyelashes though because it looks like TS4 may have simplified them, not sure why but personally I miss the old ones.

FACE
The skin colour is so much better here along with the shading, giving the face a lot more definition than TS3. Just look at the bidge of the nose and between the eyebrows, the cheeks, chin and lips. The lips look a lot fuller with the extra subtle shading, unlike in TS3 when it didn’t matter how big you made the lips, they still looked rather flat, unless you downloaded CC makeup to improve them.

HAIR
I understand a lot of people were disappointed with this change, but I feel like it was necessary change for a few reasons.

Polycount - all those individual strands and curls tend to result in a higher polycount, and higher poycounts will put a strain on the game.

Design - personally, I think the design of TS3 hair resulted in some awful and sometimes bouffant hairstyles that I would never use because they were so absurd. I think the layers and the individual sections made it harder to create up-do’s without making it look too solid. Admittedly sometimes the hairstyles did look more solid than others, but sometimes they looked all the better for it.

Time - I imagine TS3 hair is a LOT more time consuming to create. I think TS4 hair will free up a lot more time for the team allowing them to make more or to focus on more important things or edit them to allow the use of hats (see ‘accessories’, below). Who knows, maybe they’ll even be cheaper to buy in the store (don’t bet on that one though!)

Accessories - As we’ve been told/shown, we can now add hats to some if not all the hairstyles instead of the hats already being attatched to certain styles. Doing away with TS3 design has probably allowed them to do this, because they now have the extra time to edit each hairstyle to allow the hats to be added.

Colour - I’m not sure about anyone else, but I think the colouring on the hair is much better, it may not be as ‘streaky’ as TS3 hair, but it certainly doesn’t look as bland.

This is an interesting post! I completely agree - the style is very stylized yet it, in many ways, is much more realistic and detailed than TS2 or TS3 graphics.