A lot of tests, a lot of guides and yet there are still surprises waiting in The Sims 4. Gloria keeps discovering new things for herself even in an eight-year-old game.
No game series has accompanied me as intensively throughout my life as The Sims. In my early twenties, I tried to patch up the crude relationship between Bella and Mortimer Grusel in the first The Sims, regularly drowning the spouses I wanted for my Sims in my pool.
With The Sims 2 I got bolder, tried a lot more and also got to grips with creating my own skins and clothes. So if you ever downloaded Bolian Sims – that skin is most likely mine!
With The Sims 3 the curiosity for writing came along and I created my first (pretty bad) guides to different game contents. The whole thing in better to The Sims 4 finally brought me along to GlobalESportNews and with it a whole series of tests on new DLCs. After playing for so long, there’s nothing I don’t know – I thought.
Crimes with system
My self-consciousness lasted until the moment I agreed with a friend to craft new sims that we would create especially for the swap. I gave her an overconfident opera singer with a latent tendency towards madness and eccentric behaviour, a total artist.
Her sim-wife was a Scottish woman called Siobhan McKellen, who at first glance looked like a shy office worker: her face hidden behind huge glasses, her red hair put up demurely, her clothes inconspicuous to boring.
But with the personality traits and Siobhan’s aspirations, the whole thing became interesting in the first place: I wouldn’t normally have made myself a genius materialist who is desperate to rake in a lot of money – especially not a kleptomaniac! Because I’ve never had much fun playing this trait.
I’m not a big fan of loading screens, which unfortunately abound in Sims 4. So with families that I create for pure fun and without a work background, I usually play in such a way that I have to leave my own property as little as possible.
But a kleptomaniac will only be happy if she has enough opportunity to live out her inclinations, so I had to make basic friends with the loading screens. For Siobhan, not only did she need a suitable job, but also enough people to serve as her victims.
I had her move into a well-populated neighbourhood and was promptly greeted by the people next door with delicious fruitcake and a lot of flirty smooching. Perfect, the first targets were found and even came over willingly! But wait a minute – smooches? That was a bit too intimate for a first meeting!
A look at the active neighbourhood action plans from the extension pack “Sustainable Living” quickly clarified the situation: “Free love” was active, whereby romantic actions are generally favoured. This is how you get to know your neighbours really intensively right away.
But my kleptomaniac generally gave me no peace: someone with so much love for money and possessions won’t get far without a job, so I put her straight into the criminal career. If you’re going to steal, then do it systematically! I also needed a new goal in life, because earning more and more money is pretty boring in the long run.
I therefore made Siobhan a budding enemy of the state, who would not only incur the wrath of other Sims, but also cause plenty of trouble. And it was an endeavour that I had never actually finished, because I always mutate into a soft biscuit in between and then play rather nice Sims again – but this time I wanted to make it!
So I got on the computer and went on the web to provoke all the people in the forums who had the misfortune to cross Siobhan’s digital paths. Soon I had pretty much pissed off the first sims and was very pleased with my rogue performance.
Claws for Happiness
The early days of Siobhan’s life passed quickly: she went to work as a petty criminal for the local don at night and occasionally brought home a few children’s books stolen at work. My goals for her were a little more ambitious, but as we all know, you should start small and then slowly increase. Time to take it up a notch! So Siobhan invited herself one by one to all the people she had met so far and looked for things she could steal.
However, a rather unpleasant surprise awaited me: In contrast to the neighbours, who had already cleared out half my place including the bathtub during the active neighbourly action plan “Sharing means caring”, Siobhan was only allowed to be active with small decorative objects for the time being.
How are you supposed to get rich as a rogue if the most you’re allowed to steal are a few paltry lamps or small statues? But as yet her rogue skill was simply not high enough; as a thief Siobhan had not had enough practice.
I decided on a radical change of course. Besides the conventional career path as a criminal, Siobhan should not only undertake her little pilfering actions to avoid inner stress, I also wanted to make her the most famous thief in the sim world. Thanks to the expansion pack “Become Famous”, the right equipment was also available.
Thanks to her gang crime job, Siobhan was able to afford a flying camera drone complete with video editing table, and henceforth was only able to travel with a recording companion while roaming through deco-rich rooms of her fugitive acquaintances. Siobhan’s first videos as a thief-fluencer were just stitched-together and poorly edited footage, but she quickly developed quite an enthusiastic following and eventually sent the Don and his unassuming thuggery packing.
The footage of nasty pranks, brawls and orgies of insults also went down really well with viewers. Just like on YouTube! At the same time, Siobhan’s rogue skill level increased quite a bit due to all her actions and enabled me to steal more valuable items, which were used to create new thief videos. Along the way, I also fulfilled the more challenging goals of her quest and made my little criminal quite happy as her bank account filled up nicely through royalties and sales of stolen items.
Comfort zone off, game on
From this point on, I realised for myself how much fun I was having with my crime experiment: Siobhan’s personality traits had forced me out of my comfort zone. I got to know a lot of sim houses and sims that had otherwise often just been a crutch for me to fill up my sim’s social bar. Having to get creative to get as much out of the feature and play options as possible made me break out of my often very focused play style.
Finally, The Sims 4 was my own personal playground again, no longer just a work environment, and it jolted me out of my acquired routine. I got back what had kept me playing for all those years, namely a world full of possibilities and chaotic events – and the desire to try out a lot more again. By the way, if you have any crazy Sims to give away, let me know. New experiments are very welcome!
