The Full Q&A Recap

Morgan (The Sims 4 Producer): Hello all! I’m Morgan, a producer on the Sims 4! Here today to talk about our upcoming patch which includes a really fun Quality of Life update for Live Mode Notifications & Phone Calls + a total of around 80 bug fixes. I’m glad to talk about what’s coming, how we got there, or anything you might have questions about pertaining to the patch or our ongoing quality of life efforts. Look forward to talking to you!

This Q&A was answered and hosted by The Sims 4’s Producer Morgan, Gameplay Engineer Carlos, and Game Designer Conor from EA.

Question: hi! my question is: what about the food updates? wasn’t this june update supposed to bring something related to this? and the thirst feature back?

EA Morgan: That’s something we’re working on for a future update! We aren’t ready to talk about when exactly yet.

Question: So Team, I have a question about fading relationships and how that will relate to the new relationship status needed to have certain phone calls come in? Like if sims were soul mates and then break up, and time fades them to below ‘friends’ will they no longer call each other? Thank you for your time.

EA Conor: As long as their friendship is still at or above Friends (I think Friendly Rel 35/100on the back-end), they should be valid for these kinds of phone calls

Question: Hiii, so i have two questions! The first is, are you guys planning to solve objects getting compressed in the distance? And when will the issue of sims performing actions way too late be solved? (i’m referring to the fact that, sims take way too long to do certain actions)

EA Morgan: I’m no aware of any highly community reported issues on compressed things in the distance, but I do know we use LoDs with objects in the distance to help game performance. Depending on your settings and computer this could appear differently, but is 100% something we and most games do on purpose. I learned a lot about that back when I was a QV tester testing art. However, if there is a bug please report it!

Question: are all mean actions no longer autonomous, or only mean actions as a result of a dynasty?

EA Morgan: We only touched the ones that were occurring because of the dynasty stuff. If there are other reasons a sim would be autonomously mean – that should still happen.

Question: I did have a question about the “I heard you became friends/ enemies/ good friends with blank. That’s cool” calls. Are they being removed completely or toned down. The LL wasn’t very clear about that

EA Conor: Those specific kinds of calls will be removed. Others are toned down

Question: I have question, what was the toughest bug to squash in this patch?

EA Carlos: I want to say it’s the first one on the laundry list! Windows and doors now display correctly and remain properly aligned with the walls across all graphics settings This took a long time, to get into a state in which it works in all graphics options.

Question: Will the hand fan from the recent event be functional now?

EA Morgan: I believe so. There was a ‘fan self’ interaction that was supposed to be happening that is now fixed.

Question: Will the custom tattoos be functional again? It always freezes the game and forces us to close.

EA Morgan: No more soft lock when downloading tattoos – yes, that’s fixed.

Question: Off topic question (Question for the gameplay Engineer), Is there a way to allow all ages to use the marbles from For Rent instead of it only be accessible to children? Please.

EA Morgan: So for something like making marbles for all ages – that actually would involve A LOT Of disciplines. It’d take animation work for each age group + design work to hookup. Because of this, we often prioritize animation work going towards content we feel players are most likely to want to engage with. That’s why a lot of age specific content might no always be available for all age groups.

Question: I do worry reducing the calls too much might make the game feel more lifeless. I understand getting rid of calls from sims that aren’t friends. Makes total sense. There isn’t anything specifically in the laundry list that worries me. Just wouldn’t want the reduction to become a trend that removes too much

EA Morgan: We’d love feedback after you play! I think the game still feels lively and hopefully the calls are also WAY MORE RELEVANT to the stories you’re telling now so when they do happen they’ll feel more impactful.

Question: sneak peak on what the animators are working on right now ?

EA Morgan: Secret stuff

EA Conor: 99% sure they’re working on animations

Question: Are there any plans to bring hula dancing and functional hammocks to Sims 4?

EA Morgan: Not that I know of, but I’d LOVE a Hammock death if we ever did.

Question: i wonder what was the reason for the cuckoo clock death? i really liked it, was there an inspiration behind? it feels so the sims

EA Morgan: I didn’t work on that pack to know, but we do normally try to think of fun, wacky deaths for each pack that’d fit our theme, so I’m sure that’s how the idea came about.

Question: Are phone calls going to be from sims from inside the sims household when it comes to a new sim?

EA Morgan: I know that has happened in the past but its a bug. We fixed one instance of this happening with Formative Moments.

Question: How much did you decrease invite calls from npcs? Personally, its a thing I really enjoy and would love to keep happening

EA Morgan: Oh it’ll keep happening for sure! Our goal wasn’t to remove calls, but to make the experience feel less overwhelming.

Question: What was your favorite bug to fix?

EA Carlos: Its a weird one for me, but the festival notifications were enjoyable to work on, lots of different festivals to go through, so was a nice little tour of the game

Question: Just checking , will my sim be able to adopt their stepchild without becoming siblings with their partner in the new update? The wording was kind of vague

EA Morgan: We fixed an issue where partnered Sims could form an inappropriate relationship upon leaving Create a Sim. There are a few permutations of this bug, but we’ve made a lot progress against them with a few different fixes (both in last patch and now this patch). I think there is still one more permutation we’re investigating.

Question: the festival notifications update is a lifesaver (im looking at you, highschool years). is there any chance of adding the Sulani festivals to this list?

EA Morgan: Right now that isn’t something we’re looking at since they don’t have notifications. That means we’d need to create notifications, then also add the options to turn off. For this update, we only made it so you can turn off ones that already exist.

Question: Adding notifications would be great, since I didn’t even know there were festivals in Sulani!

EA Morgan: It would be! I know its something we’ve talked about it, but it would have taken a little more time than we had before this patch came out. We’re always open to feedback around this though! Those festivals can be hard to know they’re happening and they’re SO GOOD.

Question: back on the topic, notifications being less annoying on day to day sims life is a huge improvement!

EA Conor: This was a personal pet peeve too, I especially didn’t like the ThriftTea ones so it felt very satisfying

Question: I’d like to thank you for the Laundry List. My favorite feature is the ability to turn off festival notifications. So here’s my question: Does turning off notifications also remove the festivals from the calendar? 🙂

EA Carlos: It does not change anything in the calendar. They will show up and be scheduled as normal, just the notification won’t be sent.

Question: Can y’all possibly take the meshes from the child & Toddler hairs and transfer them to adults please. I love some of those hairs. The same way you transfer adult hairs into child hair. Please.

EA Morgan: Doing this is always possible and its something we’ve been trying to do more than we used to. Originally, we were afraid players wouldn’t like this so we avoided it, but after finding out how much everyone likes it, we do consider it when adding new hairs!

Question: General thoughts: I’m really excited that we’ll be able to turn off notifications for events, I love having settings and options to be able to customize things. Some of the special phone calls seem to only happen once per save, so after you start a new save, you get a lot of stuff happening in a short amount of time. Kyle stayover, neighbors staying over, wealthy weirdo, Bess calling, Eleanor calling to visit to take care of infants, etc. I love having random stuff happen and I see that the laundry list mentions that stayover calls will have a chance to pop up after 14 day cooldown. I think that is awesome! I hope that maybe it will be considered for other special event phone calls to happen after a cooldown too. Even if it’s a long cooldown, that would be fine. But having these events happen shakes up gameplay a little bit and I really enjoy that.

EA Morgan: I think wanting calls to happen more frequently is 100% the sort of feedback that’s really helpful for us to get!

Question: Yeah, I only bought Life & Death for the build and buy. I have no desire to join the festival. Glad I won’t be getting notifications for that.

EA Morgan: Yeah! You know, I feel that way on different saves. There are always some festivals I don’t want to be notified about and some I do. It’s going to be really nice to customize it.

Question: How many fixes were NOT included in the LL? And any you would like to share here? (If you can)

EA Morgan: In total there are about 80 bug fixes in this patch.

Question: What’s one bug that you wish you could have left in?

EA Carlos: Beard baby. (But thats way older)

EA Conor: Throwing infants across the lot.

EA Morgan: Beard Baby. That is all.

EA Morgan (Cont.): Another bug I didn’t want to fix. There was this weird thing happening with suntans where in certain circumstances the character portrait at the bottom would start to look really cute and silly, and I didn’t want to fix that. But we did. (And yes, that is a picture of Ron Lumberjackson my favorite Sim of all time.)

EA Morgan (Cont.): This is Beard Baby btw.

Question: I am curious if fixing the gallery lots problems causing save corruption. Is gonna cause more. guess we’ll see

EA Morgan: It shouldn’t – we did extensive testing around it to check that one specifically.

Question: Some chaos is lovely. I just need someone to do something about the pop up adds making the game literally unplayable. They constantly leave a weird gray filter over the screen that means I cant do anything but force quit. The only way to play the game is to mod them out and its a pain on patch days.

EA Morgan: We’ve been investigating that one. It’s been hard to nail down though because it doesn’t happen regularly when we try to reproduce it internally. We recently found a lead, but aren’t ready to talk about it more yet.

Question: I’m glad you’re cutting back on the phone calls congratulating a sim on making a new friend. Half the time I use relationship cheats…..it’s not really an accomplishment, lol

EA Morgan: When we were looking into the ‘glad you became friends with notifications’ we found like four different feedback threads on it with a lot of very passionate notes. XD

Question: when the grim reaper calls you on the phone, you can select the career you want to join instead of joining the death career automatically, this breaks the immersion, was that fixed? i saw something related to the grim reaper on the laundry list so maybe it was i just want to be sure

EA Morgan: with how our career join UI works, that was how it had to happen. We haven’t updated that aspect. We’ve changed it so that the Grim Reaper will only call Macabre sims now to ask so it makes more sense for story. But to also be clear, any Sim can still join this the manual way.

Question: [To Carlos] If there was one single interaction crossover that you could make happen between two packs, or base game and a pack, to sneak in to this update, what would it?

EA Carlos: I wouldn’t even know! Right now the focus is on fixing bugs!

Question: We want more behind the scenes office shenanigans!!

EA Conor: All the designers used to sit in one giant pit in the middle of the office floor, and we were so loud we got constant complaints from our neighbors. On one hand I really enjoyed everyone’s company back then, on the other I understand a bunch of friends together chatting would be really annoying to sit next to

Question: When a Sim offers you a job with a higher level (ex: criminal) this doesn’t happen though, you automatically will join the selected job, this only happens with grim… Can you pass the note to the team, pleeease?

EA Morgan: Ahh i see what you mean. Yeah it was implemented through a different way. It’s good feedback! As always please feel free to report that feedback on the forums where we can track it! We look at that a lot.

Question: I understand! You guys have been doing great, I bet it has been fascinating to suddenly realize EXACTLY what is causing some of the bugs! I can hear the revelation from here “THAT?! DUDE that hasn’t been touched in X years, how?!”

EA Morgan: OH yeah – I love hearing how bugs get fixed. It’s always quite interesting.

EA Morgan (Cont.): My favorite is when a dev fixes a bug and is like: “… I might have caused that.” And they get all shy about it. There was one bug’s comments where I found the dev admitting to accidentally making the bug and the QV person swearing they wouldn’t tell anyone that they caused it. But it’s like publically in the comments where I’m actively reading it. So funny. I sent the evidence to them both and blackmailed them and now I am rich. (I’m partially joking – about what you’ll never know.)

EA Morgan: Thanks all for coming today! I hope we got to your questions! Looking forward to you all getting your hands on this update! Dag Dag!