"Really needs to pee" analysis

[Salomon]

I think this is an interesting topic, specially considering how cut the game feels on interactions and animations when compared to previous games.

We get 2 hugging animations, 3 kissing animations, 1 flirting animation... We don't have any animation related to playing with another sim directly, no massages... Many of the interactions that were in previous games for different age groups are gone entirely...

The list of lacking content goes on an on, but when it comes to the "Really needs to pee" debuffs, this aspect seems complete.

My current theory is that one of the developers of TS4 is an omorashi (which means, people that feel pleasure when they see other people being desperate to pee), and they had a lot of fun working in this aspect of the game.

Let's take a look at it:

The game has an entire emotion only accessible when the sim's bladder is in the red, the "very uncomfortable" state which I haven't seem them have in another way, and which, if followed, leads to animations where it seems as if the sim is enjoying to hold their pee (in detail, sims with a great urge to pee switch to this emotion and have a whim to take a bath, and if you do it, the sim, siill bursting, switches to the happy emotion and it's shown laughing while taking the bath).

The game has 2 related debuffs, the "needs to pee" and "really needs to pee" ones which affect how the sim walks and to which of the animations below it has access.

One may think "well, that makes sense and seems easy to program", but that's where the rabbit hole starts.

There are two different animations for when the sim whines because they have a full bladder, depending on how full it is, one where they wave at the camera.

There are two different animations for when the sim is standing and struggles to hold their pee. In these animations, the sim sighs at the end as in "Phew! I though I was going to piss over myself on that one! But I could control it!" One of them is lengthy and detailed, as if they got a model that really needed to pee for the game.

There are two different animations when the sim is sitting and realizes they need to pee, one including a complain. Previous games would have an animation that would play when a sitting sim was low in a need, or couldn't reach a place they wanted to go, or an object they wanted to use was unavailable, and the sim would recycle that animation. It gets its custom one this time around.

The pissing pants animation is unique instead of being a recycled one.

There's an extra animation, that doesn't seem to have a reason to be there, unless a developer really had nothing better to do with their time: sims now "pee dance". This animation meshes well with the walking animation, and it's rare. As the sims is walking, it puts both feet together, then steps back and puts both feet together again, before resuming walking, all while keeping their legs closed and twisting their body to hold it. I may be the most cute animation in the entire game, but makes me wonder how much time it was spent on this for show.

The thing doesn't end there, on previous games, where sims had a low bladder, there was some kind of urgency to use the toilet, at least, there was some point at which the sim would get obsessed with using a toilet if their bladder was red enough. Not so here, the sim will happily choose to go to sleep with a low bladder, or taking a shower then going to sleep while their bladder is low (on previous games, a sim in the bathroom with a low bladder would always choose to use the toilet).

There's even a mod out there that forces sims to use the toilet before going to sleep just to avoid waking up in the middle of the night.

When two sims entered the bathroom, the one needing to use it badly would shoo away the other and use the toilet. Here, it may go like "oh, there's someone here. I really need to go but that's impossible, guess I'll go get a drink instead."

The toilet may break now, and it may do so right before a sim that really need to go sits on it, and they will just stand up and refuse to use it, and if it's the only toilet on the house you may need to buy a new one, see the sim pee themselves, or watch as they fix it while on pee desperation (very suspicious, just like omorashi videos that show people holding it while doing other things) which is unavailable for children.

And speaking of children, in TS2 children would almost never go into pee desperation, unless it was a weekend. The reason for this was that they would use the school's toilet every day, and otherwise, they could use the schoolbus' toilet so you could ignore it entirely.

TS4's children behave differently, coming from school with a bladder full enough that you can see them desperate every day if you focus on doing other things. My guess is they made all these new animations for children that needed to go and it would have been a waste if the bladder worked like in the old system.

And finally, there's toilet cancellation. In TS2, a sim that had already started releasing, if stopped, would go to at least 3/4 empty bladder. In TS4 there's a clock that appears around the toilet that you can stop at any point, so a cancelled sim may go from very red to just red.

While the sims of TS2 were just terrible at bladder management causing accidents often enough to need a Toilet Uses You mod, TS4 is more about showing the sims in the pee desperation stage and being very detailed at it. And it seems done on purpose.

It may seem some of this stuff is caused by being careless about it, such as lack of shooing, but I wonder, would adding shooing to the game have taken more effort than adding so many animations about it?

I think this is relevant because, one could possibly think that the lack of other kinds of interactions and animations was caused mainly because of laziness, lack or time, or lack of resources, but this means the time and resources were just used on this instead.

[J. M. Pescado]

It sounds like you know a lot about this subject, though. Imma make this your schtick if I start filling with selfsims again. I mean, really? There's an entire genre of video about this? One that has its own word, which sounds Japanese? And you know what's in them? You sound ilke an expert. You are our new resident Weeaboo Pee Specialist.

[cwurts]

I blame MATY for all this. During TS2 and TS3, there was that long story on here with nothing but sims fighting and peeing themselves. It had a negative influence on the developers.

[jezzer]

Please stop posting long-winded assburgery rants about stupid things.

[HomeschooledByTards]

Our previous TL;DR was much more LULZy. This one is just a snooze-fest.

[wizard_merlin]

Why are you even playing TS4?  All you seem to do is bitch, whinge, whine and moan about anything and everything in the game.  Have you considered abandoning TS4 in favour of TS3 or even TS2?  It is as bad as everyone who played TS3 then bitched and moaned incessantly at every opportunity about how they hated the open neighbourhood concept.

[cwurts]

The open neighbourhood concept did suck though, and it hasn't changed for the better in TS4.

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, it was changed in the sense that rather than having a giant open neighborhood of a hundred lots that would chew up CPU and bloat loading times, they made it a neighborhood of about 4 lots, so instead of loading the entire neighborhood, it's like if you loaded the sim's house and immediately neighboring lots, but that's it. Leaving the immediate environs then works like TS2.

So, the flirting is way down, you say? Still no assgrabbing? No asymmetrical relationships?

[Salomon]

You are our new resident Weeaboo Pee Specialist.

Not the peeing part, I only saw it once in the TS4 and it was an accident. Really, all this can be gathered upon with normal gameplay, unless players cancel stuff the sims are doing and sending them to the bathroom (which doesn't seem a priority when sims have whims to take baths at that point despite their hygiene being fine.)

Please stop posting long-winded assburgery rants about stupid things.

Who said I was ranting? I find it fine the way it is, just find it odd where their stuff has been focusing. It's as if they had special animations and group gathering, and emotional stages, and specific whims for the TV, with specific channels to pick from and entire simulated TV series and movie sequels. It'd feel weird given the lack of content elsewhere. Yet, the TV works mostly the same, like most other things that haven't been expanded, but have been reduced in variety and interactivity. And then we got this.

Why are you even playing TS4?  All you seem to do is bitch, whinge, whine and moan about anything and everything in the game.

I think all my complains have been related to whims? And lack of content. I'm playing it because it's fun, and I'm reporting my annoyances because there's a thread asking for them, and, they have been well received by Pescado, who has been even discussing how to fix the annoyance, why are they annoying and how can they be made even more annoying (er, to avoid such fixes), so I think a whim fix is coming (by... the third expansion?) and I'll be the first to download it and use it.

And I just can't stand TS3's sims look, they look like... pudding. Even the most custom content enhanced ones, that people carefully designed to use as avatars around the communities, look terrible. TS4 sims look actually attractive, out of the box - in TS2 a custom content enhanced sim would look beautiful, like, a painting, but what was about it. TS4 sims actually have some sex appeal, even the fugly ones that are auto generated (after one fixes their make-up.)

So, the flirting is way down, you say? Still no assgrabbing? No asymmetrical relationships?

Yup, they made woohooing actually boring, I don't know why they made it an immediate option (if your selected sim can woohoo with another, as you click them you'll get options like Brighten Day, Tell Joke, and Whoohoo, without regards to anything else - and upon clicking the sims will look for the nearest bed and do it, like zombies. Actually an effective way to fill the Fun bar, but that's it.)

[J. M. Pescado]

Not the peeing part, I only saw it once in the TS4 and it was an accident. Really, all this can be gathered upon with normal gameplay, unless players cancel stuff the sims are doing and sending them to the bathroom (which doesn't seem a priority when sims have whims to take baths at that point despite their hygiene being fine.)

I'm not talking about TS4, I'm talking about how you know all these points of reference to compare it to

Yup, they made woohooing actually boring, I don't know why they made it an immediate option (if your selected sim can woohoo with another, as you click them you'll get options like Brighten Day, Tell Joke, and Whoohoo, without regards to anything else - and upon clicking the sims will look for the nearest bed and do it, like zombies. Actually an effective way to fill the Fun bar, but that's it.)

That's always been there. That's how it works for me, too. But the list of not-woohoo interactions is way down, eh? No assgrabbing, nothing?

[Crash]

TS4 really has alot of interactions, but many of them are mood dependent. The 'Kiss passionately' interaction don't appear unless the sim is flirty, and you either have to do basic romantic interactions like flirt first, or have an object with a flirty aura in the room. In that sense interactions also become room based. While Basura has a point that some interactions appear to be missing, there are also interactions that have been added that before there were none.
As for woohoo, it gets more interesting when the sim has had it a couple of times - it's definitely a hidden skill - apparent also by hidden woohoo skill books.

The moodlets are the main way to discern how a sim is feeling, and while there are no shortage of animations to go with them, they manage to highlight the lack of animations aswell. Probably because when we see a sim is sad or bored, we expect them to show it, and when other moodlets overpower those emotions, the only way to know is by the moodlet icons. The emotion system is advanced under the hood, but the devs have had problems making it apparent - to some degree. Making something more complex makes it harder to tune.

For me personally, it has been a matter of playing to become used to the way the game displays emotions etc. The one thing I do want more of is emotion animations of the individual sims when they have a certain moodlet that not necessarily is the primary one. If a sim displays Happy, but also is still a little sad, I want them to show the sadness with a short animation or facial expression. Otherwise the emotion system is pretty cool.

[RaeKira]

hidden woohoo skill books.

Say what?

[Crash]

hidden woohoo skill books.

Say what?

I haven't found them myself, but someone found it in debug mode -  it's most likely a non-finished object - somewhere along the line they decided against having a woohoo skill visible. Such a shame, that would have been cool.

[Salomon]

The 'Kiss passionately' interaction don't appear unless the sim is flirty

Next thing you're going to claim is that Sims can make out.

Oh, yeah, if you're flirty enough, you can get Sims to do an animation called "make out", and they will kiss several times, but calling it a shadow of what it used to be would be giving it too much credit.

It's not just that two sims can no longer relax on the bed to have fun, it's that the fun that they can have is lacking and basically not there. Thus, Woohooing is boring and they can no longer make out, even though there's a whole system "under the hood" there, and things called how they were called before, I've always played the sims based on their animations, not "what is supposed to be happening".

It's as if there was in fact an ass-grabbing animation and the sim was like "oh, you grabbed my ass, I get it" - I'd want an actual ass-grabbing animation.

Seriously, can this be fixed? Like, importing animations from previous games? (they did away with playing with each other animations like "Punch You, Punch Me", by making telling jokes be fun, so presumably we could import those into the game and make think the game that they're telling funny jokes while they play.)

The point of this thread is pointing out that they got rid of several animations, the animations that are there are a joke when compared to previous games, and then there's the whole RNTP game stage that is fully developed, and it shows, as when you play premade families one member will be on very low bladder so you don't miss all this.

[wizard_merlin]

Thus, Woohooing is boring

When was woohooing anything but boring?

[J. M. Pescado]

It's not just that two sims can no longer relax on the bed to have fun, it's that the fun that they can have is lacking and basically not there. Thus, Woohooing is boring and they can no longer make out, even though there's a whole system "under the hood" there, and things called how they were called before, I've always played the sims based on their animations, not "what is supposed to be happening".

To be fair, sim woohoo has ALWAYS been boring, not to mention weird and a little creepy. The only thing funny about Sim romances is when they're set up like Pepe Le Pew, and when they dumbed down the relationship value to a single value instead of two one-way values, there were no more Pepe Le Pew romances.

[Salomon]

To be fair, sim woohoo has ALWAYS been boring

Okay, I guess I'm talking about all the foreplay available in TS2. You can really create some very sexy moments before Woohoo, what with 4 different Make Out animations, in bed, standing, dancing, sitting... You can do a lot of flirting before getting down to it for a great athmosphere.

Heck, I didn't remember the "peck" animation when sitting together was so hot, the sim fakes an it's over then goes to kiss the other in the neck...

Anyway, back to topic, I found a two new ones, exclusive for children:

When children are doing their homework with a low bladder, they will do a special "on knees" pee desperation animation, sometimes waving, sometimes not.

Why is this relevant:

I didn't know, but Pescado's "Don'twaveatme" hack actually disables Pee desperation animations in TS2, because they only do it when they wave at you. Instead they go to the toilet ASAP.

It means that if he ever does a Don'twaveatme hack for TS4 that disables those animations, he has to be aware of all these things to kill. Though frankly, I like them, compared to those, TS2 Sims don't seem to care much about their bladder (just like it's no apparent when a Sim is hungry, or low on social, etc. - low bladder is something you can tell without looking at the need bar.)

PS - After playing TS2 again, I can say the bladder need drops twice as fast in TS4 or something. Specially, in TS2 the Sims basically can't pee themselves unless you cancel going to the toilet every time. TS4 Sims WILL pee themselves if you don't have enough bathrooms for everyone, specially if one of them breaks, even if you micromanage them. I can see a Bathroom Uses You hack fighting with the engine and losing having the Sims pee themselves despite all efforts