Toddlers.

Everything else is not just nails in the coffin, it's the concrete around the shoes.

Telling instead of Showing:
- Young Adults made to look like teens and elders, instead of actual teens and elders.
- Fake deco houses and a big Townie population, instead of large neighborhoods.

Dumbing-down:
- No toddlers, and object babies you don't even need to care for. It seems you always get to choose your one trait as a child.
- Three traits instead of five. So TS4 adults have as much personality as TS3 children, and TS4 children are one-track minds.
- Flat lots with auto-foundations, all to make ploppable rooms possible.
- Free smartphones for everyone that do everything from get you hired to entertain you to teleport you.

Forcing the developer's intended play style* on the player:
- Unlocks, unlocks, unlocks, goals, goals, goals. While I appreciate the reasoning behind "oh, I'd rather not have rabbithole careers", the quests will probably get repetitive.
- No story progression means that it really is rotational again, unless I misunderstood how they're implementing aging on/off.
- Wish-fulfillment careers in the place of realistic options.
- Said wish-fulfillment careers being pre-themed. You're not just a businessman, you're a tech entrepreneur. Want to be in another industry? Tough.
- Filler-y things like the big-ass cupcake machine that somehow makes only one cupcake at a time.
- The free smartphones would go here too.
- The Bro Trait.
- Emotional deaths.

And last but not least, the overall laziness, and the nickel-and-diming seen in the TS3 Store being taken to a sadistic new level.

*Said play style being "My First RPG, in the High-Tech World of Rocket Man Dude Bro and his Weird Parties"

Toddlers. It's not because I care *that* much about kids, I don't even like or have kids in real life, but that was the symbolic moment when it became obvious that one or more of the following were true:

1) Game was being rushed to market for whatever reason (aborted online version)?

2) EAxis not willing to allocate enough time and manpower to game

3) EAxis completely out of touch with player base

4) Game was always intended to be a skeleton for DLC

Maybe all four.

Up till that reveal, I was a fence-sitter, but I was still cautiously optimistic and occasionally willing to play devil's advocate on behalf of EAxis. Since then, though, I'm done, and the info rolled out since has pretty much been the expected "worst case scenario".

I choose "All of the above" for $1000, gwynne.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was toddlers. Everything after that was more poo icing on the poo cake.

Horrible performance. I haven't recovered from that in Watch_dogs. I expect a game running like silk if I do a clean install-everything set to mimimum-no CC. I may be buying the base game...but no more money for EA (Maxis on this case) if they don't bother to at least optimize this thing.

It was removing CASt and the mandatory Origin for me. Soon after everything else just piled up into a big mountain of "Nope".

Basically, the world: I really liked having a seamless world, and I really liked the idea of story progression. I wanted to just play my Sims and be able to see the world change, grow and develop around them. Obviously these features had their problems, but I thought they would only be improved upon in TS4, not removed.

Also, create-a-style. I just want all my windows to be the same colour, dammit.

CAST.
No cast no buy. So at that moment I decided sims 4 wasn't worth my money.
And then they announced no pools. I'm a builder and I love to put some pools in my houses. So I they had a slight chance for me to change my mind that kinda made it.
And then, oh well, MAYBE i can live without pools and the look of the sims, but no toddlers. What? This game is not even worth pirating it.

Toddlers, the fact that the babies are pretty much objects stuck to the crib didn't help either.

CASt and Story Progression.

I basically made my decision when I heard there was no CASt and no open world. I can't live without them anymore. I still remember the wonder when I opened Sunset Valley the first time and wandered around.

I haven't changed my mind yet and I don't think I will.

Just toddlers to be honest. They were my favourite life stage in the game (even in Sims 3). The other stuff they have taken out like terrain tools and pools doesn't really bother me, although I realise how much this takes away from the building aspect of the game.

The deal breaker for me is that the game looks just like the sims 3 but with a LOT less stuff to do, same models, same old bad textures, now with a facebook style HUD!

It was CASt. I originally went "No CASt, no Sims" and decided I wasn't getting it (and I enjoy the open world).

Then I started to re-think things, and thought I might give it a try in a few months time when the price has dropped.

Then No Toddlers happened. And so I changed my mind again.

And then I got TS2UC and have been having loads of fun playing that, and so have decided that loading screens, as long as they're quick, might not be that bad... and maybe, just maybe, I can live without CASt if there are lots of recolours available... Only I can't live without toddlers. So I suppose that's my dealbreaker now.

Can't really pinpoint a specific aspect, but how the Sims 4 looks like it was designed as a tablet game is the biggest turn-off for me. Everything looks so plastic and fake from the grass to the wood textures, and there are shades of The Day the City Stood Still (aka Simcity 2013) in there aswell. Makes me ashamed to be a Sims player. The long list of cut features that needs a whole toilet roll to write down is just adding salt on the wound.

No toddlers
Everyone growing a smartphone in-utero
The announcement then the months of silence with no further information beyond Create-A-Sim
*~Emotions~* (specifically, I saw PC Gamer's playthrough -- the sim's anger is interestingly done, but the fact that he seemed to flip is lid the instant he talks to his younger brother? Are sims going to always flip emotions so suddenly?)
The UI (again, PC Gamer's video). I admit, I'm so used to having large UIs taking up things [I play more than a fair few strategy games which overload with information] that I saw barely any UI and went "where is it?"
The job offerings. All a bit quirky -- a point for keeping in chef and journalist, but where's business? Military? Law Enforcement? Science? Medical? Come on: athletic, business, law enforcement, medicine, military, politics, and science had all been in the game since day one.
No CASt.
Supposedly still Lamarkian genetics
LOL RANDOM!!! Amber
Teens being the same height as adults
Babies being objects

And probably more besides. I gave up checking on scraps of news and now the embargo has ended, the news flooding in is not promising to me at all. I had been thinking "oh, I might get TS4 in a few years" but now...

The Sims 4 is no longer a life simulation game, as everybody expected it to be...

• There are 2 life stages: child and teen-YA-adult-elder. Babies don't count, because they're basically objects. And they left toddlers out.
• No normal careers, only wierd stuff nobody (except for, maybe, 12 year olds) cares about.
• Smartphone makes playing too easy. Why can't we go back to TS2 style cellphones?
• No good genetics, I guess.
• Buggy emotion system.
• Too much unlockable content in-game. Well, it made sense for career and aspiration rewards, which were not essencial for playing TS2... But for completely regular objects, with just a different style, well... That's a bummer.
• The return of TS3 style memories (I guess) and aspiration rewards.
• Ridiculous aspirations which made the game goal-oriented, unlike TS2's, which just defined the wants/fears and lifetime wish. The TS4's set goals to complete, literally.
• Did I mention that babies are objects?
• Build mode with some funny restrictions (no pools, no split leveling, annoying to remove singular floor tiles, no ceilling paint, foundations restrict construction, only 3 floors...)
• No translation for my dialect
• Good UI rules broken (messy, vertical text, meh)
• Giant microscope... It may be funny and ironic, but I want a regular one, if it'd be possible
• Astronauts. Everywhere.
• 60€ to 70€ depending on the version (it was a right price for TS2 and TS3 at launch, but not for this)
• Rushed game due to time constraints (most likely hypothesis)
• Wierd skills
• Wierd stories TM
• Forced humor
• A Live mode lesson about BUGS
• Hair could be better sculped and textured (as proven by some of the best hairstyles)
• Teens are no longer a unique life stage
• No swimming at all in the game
• Good gardening, which could be replaced by something REALLY useful, and be better implemented lately in a seasons EP
• I expect too much DLC (I mean, I'm not obligated to buy it, but I guess some essential features will be implemented as such)
• Tiny usable worlds
• Ridiculous story line with no purpose (TS2's had the purpose of teaching new players how to handle different situations)

There you go

The Grim Reaper has become hip and uses an iPad to do his job.

No playable wind instruments, once again

No, I mean I am ticked off about that and all, but I was already maximally peeved with The Sims 3 in that regard, so there wasn't much of anywhere left to go. lol.

The real deal-breakers for me are the combination of there being absolutely nothing to make this game a worthwhile sequel (the only 'major' feature is emotions), along with the thought of spending all of that money on Expansion Packs again. They didn't even try to make it a better game than The Sims 3. The good things about The Sims 3 are gone, but yet the bad (like closed restaurants/stores) remain.

And they expect me to spend hundreds of dollars on Expansion Packs? Including features that have have been around since The Sims 1 (Pets) and The Sims 2 (Seasons)? The Expansion Pack routine has worn me out. It might have taken quite a bit to make me excited for another sequel, but I'll just say that The Sims 4 didn't even try. It's like the perfect product to make me end the addiction.

No more open world

My deal breaker was the craptastic careers they've got at launch.

For me was going from Open world all the way down to having to load each lot (was hoping for at least open neighborhoods) Since then every other bit of news Toddles pools and all the other omission we have found out post creators camp just reinforces my decision.

After read all this threads I was very sad and desapointed...
I think i'm going back to Sims 2.
For everything that I have read, Sims 4 has no really live at all. There is no family spirit. There is no basic simple things that people do every day, like go shopping, go to the doctor, go for a walk with the little kids...
Jobs has no sense at all too. Interactions between sims are too clowny and they walk weird, weird...
After all what is the real purpose of Sims 4? A game just to entertain a 8 years old kid?
The Sims started to be a great game. But EA is killing it year after year...

The lack of toddlers, definitely.

I keep seeing people mention Origin, but I thought that it was only required for the digital game (and the demo) and the disc version wouldn't require it, just like how the disc version of TS3 doesn't require Origin. I definitely don't want Origin anywhere near my computer, so if it's true that it's even required for the disc version, then I'm never buying it, even if they add toddlers.