German magazine Games Aktuell, has published a new Sims 4 Build mode preview, where they confirm Pre-Made homes and the ability to sort homes by style. Click here to read Part One of this preview.
Big Thanks to Crinrict for providing the translated article. 🙂
Search Terms ‘Staircase’
You want to be completely on your own when decorating the interior? No Problem. There are many ways to do that: For example you can click on an object like a rug or a sofa which can be found by clicking on an icon of a house or room. This way you’ll find all available objects of that type. This is not always that intuitive though. “In Sims 3 all furniture is sorted by room”, says John Berges, “you’ll find a desk and an office chair in the office category but how about a computer or a birthday cake?”
Curtains for the new search function: Just type the name of the object like you would on Google and you’ll be presented with many results. The numbers of entries you get does depend a lot on which search terms the game knows. We wanted to connect our two stories with a staircase and because of that we typed ‘staircase’ as search term – the list of results stays empty; a search for the term ‘stairs’ would have been a lot more successful. Aaron Houts and John Berges are aware of this issue: They intent to add a lot more search terms until the game is released.
More new stuff
The more time we spend in build mode, the more details and new stuff we find. There are foundations and walls in different heights and different roof parts can have different textures or can be decorated with spandrels. You can build however you want; building does not have to be realistic. This is not a disadvantage because this way you can have constructions where the second story stands way out of the first one – without columns to support that.
In reality you would not have gotten a good to go on this house since it would collapse instantly. Sims and furniture is no longer in the way while building. Sims automatically move aside and furniture is moved to your inventory as mentioned if you do some major reconstructing.
Houses and rooms you like the most, can be shared with other players in the new gallery. “This makes sharing of content easier than ever before”, says John Berges. Forget the times where user created content had to be cumbersomely uploaded or had to be unpacked to the correct folder after downloading. Can we offer our own designs for money in the gallery? Aaron Houts laughs: “Interesting idea but that is not our intention. Up- and downloading will be free. You only need to spend virtual Simoleons to place the room. “Experimenting is encouraged: Just give it back if you don’t like a chair or the whole room and the spend Sims-Currency is returned to you.
On top of the new function like the new detailed premade houses and rooms, you get many big and small improvements [Source: EA]
Our Conclusion
If you belong to the group of players that loves to build homes and houses, Sims 4 will give you a powerful tool. Even players that only build occasionally will be rewarded with a good looking house in only a few minutes. On top of the new function like the new detailed premade houses and rooms, you get many big and small improvements like the possibility to move the whole building with all components like trees and bushes. You can tell though that this game is far from finished.
Next to the already mentioned search function issues, the placement of stairs is a pain in the neck – also because there are only classical stairs at the moment and no spiral staircase. Sometimes we would also have liked to change the camera angle since walls don’t become automatically invisible when zooming in on the building. But this can still be corrected until the game comes out at the end of the year. We’re looking forward to the 4th installment of the Sims and encourage you to read the big Sims 4 preview in our upcoming PC-Games edition.
