CC Anonymous

I may not stick to this, but I'm going to try my best not to start downloading custom content (cc) for Sims 4. In reflection over what has made the game unfun for me in the past, I think a lot of it can boil down to getting cc. Custom content is great! It can be really amazing.  There are some wonderfully creative people out there who make things that just blow my mind. However, cc has some pitfalls, and I believe the pitfalls outweigh the benefits.

In reality, most custom content is harmless. Yes, some of it will occasionally have a virus or a weird trippy file. I while back, I had this file in Sims 3 that kept turning everyone in to centaurs (badly) and it took me forever to clean it out. However, that is the exception. If you go to legit sites that people trust, then the content you download is most often going to be safe. That was the past though. Now we live in an age of ransomware and it might be best not to take any chances.

No, the problem with cc isn't the cc itself. It's me and my addictive personality. You know, for a long time, people blamed THINGS for addition. "Alcohol is bad because you can become addicted to it." "Drugs are bad because they make you addicted." I think we're finally starting to realize that when someone has an addictive personality, ANYTHING can become an addiction. It isn't the THING, it's how we react to it, as in, how well we control our impulses.

Believe me; custom content can become an addiction. I'm not joking about this either. I can spend hours combing through websites, looking for stuff I want to add to the game. Hairstyles, building items, clothing, furniture. I'm also really bad about getting scenery items. "Oh look, 400 pieces of steampunk clutter!" I like my games to have a certain feel to them, and I'll talk myself into getting more and more cc.

It got to where I spent more time looking for content than I did playing my game. When I did play, it was only to see how the cc looked in the game. Then I would stop and go look for more. It was less about creating a story, and more about just making a scene look a certain way, which isn't really the point of this.......assuming there is one.

After a while, my game began to lag because of all the added stuff. Gameplay was so slow, it became frustrating to try and do anything. I started crashing after just a few generations, meaning I would have to start all over with nothing. Starting over was even more of a nuisance.

So what custom content really got me was some nice looking areas . . . that I couldn't play because they were so slow, that crashed my game due to content levels, that took me away from the game while I searched for them with feverish addiction. In other words, I let this ruin things for me. I really don't want to do that again.

The problem is, I think I knew this when I was playing Sims 2. I think I told myself this when I started playing Sims 3. We know how that ended.