KoboldOfArtifice

You hit on a point there I really missed out on in my comment. Sims 2 had that perfect unique character of being weird and endearing at every corner. I feel like Sims 3 frankly was losing it already and by the times of Sims 4 it had just felt entirely corporate already.

The games used to have a very delightful degree of strangeness that was only aided in by the eccentric but utterly iconic music it ran with. I was rather young when I played Sims 1, so Sims 2 is my nostalgia home turf, but I love both of their soundtracks. Mark Mothersbaugh's music in particular just puts me into an entire space of it's own when I hear it. Don't think there is music that more embodies the lightness of existence than that.

I miss the times when somehow they juggled making me feel like my Sims achievements are somewhat hard won and meaningful with the silliness of having my Sim dream of nothing but grilled cheese and living next door to plant people and aliens. Incarnations of Strangerville after Sims 2 just never quite hit the note that that game managed to nail.

I can pitch in that for me at least, Sims 4 was a large improvement in terms of the UI and UX in regards to both CAS and Build Mode. It has a lot of small stuff that makes the experience much more accessible for me, personally.

It also comes with a visual style that I myself quite prefer, but this is controversial itself.

I still find myself getting bored of actual play in Sims 4 rather quickly, since things just don't feel like they require much investment at all anymore. Being a perfect all-rounder of a Sim is utterly trivial in Sims 4 while Sims 3 and 2 back then made me feel like I had to work for it quite a bit. It may just be me being more capable, who knows.

I'll say, I can't say the business model of any of these games has appealed to me. I have purchased the base games for all the titles in the series, but have chosen to experience the DLC in a more budget friendly way. Yar har, et al.

It's a pity we've lost a lot of things that were great that they just didn't feel like building on. The neighbourhoods in Sims 4 feel terrible and I wish we'd have found some way to make Create a Style from Sims 3 work without bogging down the performance quite as much. At the time when Sims 4 rolled around, I was also happy to swap as my PC at the time just couldn't handle the game running smoothly anymore, either.

Sims 4 is not really a development that will do the series good in the long run, but it can't be denied that it has some really great changes that for me at least make building and decorating buildings feel much more fun.

Where is RTX being forced into? Haven't seen a game where it's not an option you have to toggle on first and it's not like RTX is a lot of additional work for the developer, seeing how it in fact reduces the work necessary to make a scene look the way it should.

Yes, it's stupidly expensive and not every game manages to benefit massively from it, but it can lead to some very pretty environments in games and it seems perfectly valid in those cases.

Also, some people do quite enjoy admiring the way the materials of various things end up looking. Maybe it's not the majority of players, but some people quite like looking at details in the games they play.

So that vision impaired people or people with whatever other impairment can enjoy the content. The text can be read out by a screen reader.

The point being made though was that the languages are well shown to be genuinely related through a common ancestral language from which they both deviated, just as have most languages in Europe and parts of the Near East. The connection is tangible and quite real, not something just based on some few similarities.