If you’ve come here for definitive answers on when TS4 will be available for us Mac users I’m afraid I don’t have any. Tremayne4260 has thankfully started an “official” thread over on the Mac forum for people to post/speculate/winge/whine about when TS4 is coming to Macs. Hopefully this thread will stop all the endless foot stomping threads that kept springing up (nice one Tremayne 😉 ). It doesn’t look like it’s coming to OS X on release day in September. This is actually a pretty good thing because it means that when our Mac version does finally hit the shelves, it should be more stable than the first release for Windows users as they should have fixed a few teething problems. I can only base that on TS1 and TS2 which always arrived a little later for our native versions and, of course, SimCity which arrived 5 months after the Windows version was released.

Of course, I am now speculating as we don’t even know if EA will be releasing a Mac version, or if it will be native to OS X. Maybe they’ve decided to leave us out as punishment for showing them up for being so hideously crap at anything Mac related with TS3?  Sorry EA, you decided to use Cider in the worst way possible and it has backfired spectacularly. Why can TS3 only use 2Gb RAM? Why didn’t you address this issue in a patch like you did for Windows users so this was upped to 4Gb RAM, the maximum possible for a 32-bit application? Why don’t you release patches to support more recent graphics cards? MacBook Airs, 13″ & 15″ MacBook Pros and Mac minis all have the same integrated graphics. iMacs and high end 15″ MacBook Pros have similar dedicated/discrete cards. It’s not like you have to support hundreds of cards for Macs. I could go on but I simply can’t be bothered, you get the picture.

Anyway, back to TS4. I think it looks crap. But I am primarily a builder, someone who rarely plays the game. I’m not interested in my Sims emotions, all I care about is if I can decorate a room in a nice colour palette with colours, patterns and textures that compliment each other. EA are always banging on about how much they love the creative community that exists because of the game, yet they have taken away CASt (Create-a-Style), one of the single, most important things they added into The Sims 3 which is the reason why many of us still play, 5 years later. You see, EA know best. And judging by SimGuruRyan’s blog post after E3 this month, they think we live just as lonely, miserable lives as they apparently do:

I’ve never felt so compelled to just sit back and watch what Sims are doing out in the neighborhood – they’re extremely expressive and I can’t help but wonder what each of their stories are. Did that bride in the gym get left at the altar? Was the stinky Sim looking for lost treasure in the garbage can?

Really? To those of us who use the game as a creative tool we couldn’t give a shit about some stupid bride at the gym or the smelly tramp scratching his arse outside someone’s house. I shouldn’t imagine those that actually play the game for hours on end really give a damn either. They’ll be too busy worrying about why their Sim is curled up in a hysterical mess on the floor and how to lift its emotions.

We won’t have pools straight away either. But not to worry, we’ll have “Dynamic Foundation Sizing”, “Wall Height Adjustment” (both things that could be played around with using CFE in TS3) and “Smart Windows”. So if you want a pool in your Sim’s house you’re going to have to wait for a future EP/SP/DLC, probably. And that will cost money, probably.

While we’d love for you to check out what the world of The Sims community has to offer (you make amazing things!), making the game that you want to play and giving you control is our priority.

Evidently not. The Sims 4 forum is full of people petitioning for swimming pools, toddlers, CASt, more than 3 floors to a house etc.

So there’s my take on TS4. I’ll be avidly watching the forums when it’s released to see the general feedback but at the moment it holds no interest for me.