how do you stay interested in your saves/stories?

[bunsenburner181]

i always want to do long playthroughs with my sims and that sort of thing but for whatever reason i just...can't. I feel like i lose interest really quickly, and that everything tends to move too fast. I feel like my sims always befriend people too easily...how does everyone make all these crazy, drama-filled stories? and how does everyone stay interested?

I suppose a start would probably be actually making sims with negative traits, LOL...but my question still stands.

[flybox]

1 hour ago, bunsenburner181 said:

i always want to do long playthroughs with my sims and that sort of thing but for whatever reason i just...can't. I feel like i lose interest really quickly, and that everything tends to move too fast. I feel like my sims always befriend people too easily...how does everyone make all these crazy, drama-filled stories? and how does everyone stay interested?

I suppose a start would probably be actually making sims with negative traits, LOL...but my question still stands.

The answer will be different for everyone. For me, it was opening myself up to rotational play. If I try to play a legacy, I rarely get through the second generation. It just gets boring. But if I'm bouncing around between 20 or 30 different households, I can tell a lot of different types of stories at the same time without the need to start a new save for each of them. Plus, I can skip things that get frustrating (for example, I play on a very extra long life setting, in which pregnancies are 12 weeks long - no way in hell I'm going to play all the way through a 12-week pregnancy).

[FauxFurry]

Part of it is rotational play, part of it is leaving aging on. The crop of sims is constantly being switched out (especially with Neighborhood Stories turned on as it has such a high attrition rate) keeps everything nice and fresh.

It is still unfortunate how no 'life sim' game varies architecture and technology over time, something that comes across even odder for The Sims since it is an off-shoot of Sim City. All that can be done for now is to mod it into the game.

[SilentAegis]

Little late to this, but... 

My main hobby in real life is writing. So in the Sims, I craft very long, detailed, kinda epic, and pretty "porny" stories and I let the story dictate the gameplay. Leads to some very long saves. I have two major stories active right now, which gives me plenty to do for... pfft, the next several months, at minimum. Longer as life gets in the way and such. 

[FauxFurry]

16 hours ago, rarino5 said:

I stay invested mostly because I'd never limit myself to a single household. I play tons of houses in my community - competing interests will fuel drama and their autonomous background actions will give you tons of ideas. 

There are even certain features that are locked behind that form of rotational play, namely home break-ins (enabled by For Rent) and Vault Heists (made possible by Get Famous). It really does seem to be the optimal way to play as suggested by the advertisements from back when The Sims 4 base game was sold for money.

[MizuTS4]

my motivation.