Sneak Peek at Consequential Fears

Hey Guys, I want to let you know I'm working on a new mod and it's one I'm really proud of, I called it "Consequential Fears", you might ask yourself, "What does it mean? Is it a mod that makes fears more annoying?" the answer is... YES, but hear me out.

When fears have been introduced in the buggy HSY patch I was so excited to see how they work and how much depth it would have been added by such feature, but of course it ended up being shallow and the only thing they do is give you a negative buff when facing them and that's it. I like the fact that sims don't start with fears but actually develop them over time, I find it quite realistic but I didn't like the fact that sims are able to confront their fears, to me that's a useless mechanic that completely destroys the fears themselves and I'll explain you why:

• Most of those confrontation goals are way too easy to achieve because all it takes to get rid of the fear is doing some basic interactions like talking to random people or have a particular mood etc.

Ex: If your sim fears death you can just talk to a random sim and the fear will be gone, or if your sim has the fear of being cheated on they will just want to talk to their partners and PUFF, the fear is gone while a Don Lothario sim continues cheating on your sim, or fear of dead end job which requires you to click on your sim and select the "regain passion" interaction before going to work and many more.

• Confrontation goals give you strong buffs,100 satisfaction points and the removal of the fear (like we don't have enough positive things happening in this game already!) after their fear is confronted successfully, giving the player an incentive to make bad things happen to be rewarded.

Ex: If extinguish fire is rolled I'm more open to set my house on fire to get points, confident and happy buffs and also get rid of the fear.

• The fear can return even when confronted before, which doesn't make sense to me, in fact when a sim confronts a fear they will have a 1 day immunity to not get that fear, but once that day passes, they can get that fear again.

So what I did is changing the confrontational fears goals by making them ACTUAL FEARS TO AVOID, WITH ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES. Take a look:

My sim here realized a fear and she lost her mind.

I took inspiration from my beloved Sims 2 where sims that realize fears go into aspiration failure and lose their sanity. In this case since we don't have an aspiration metre I just made my sim go into "aspiration failure" by realizing her only fear (fortunately fears in Sims 4 are all big ones so I think it's appropriate to make them instantly lose sanity when they are fulfilled). For now I just replaced the fire confrontation goal but I intend to replace most confrontation goals with actual fears. For example I'm thinking of having for sims that fear of being cheated on, the fear of witnessing your spouse flirting/woohooing with another sim, for sims that are afraid of the dark, the fear to stay in a dark place too long, and so on.

You may ask yourself: "Ok great, but how can I get rid of the fear now?" you can now only get rid of fears by drinking the "Fear-B-Gone" potion from the rewards store, finally that potion will be useful in our gameplay and incentivizes the player to fulfill wants to buy those potions to get fears removed.

Now I'm going to explain what is going to happen to your sims when they realize their fears. As you saw in the GIF your sim will firstly become Possessed (Strangerville is required obviously) for 2 hours which means you cannot do any interactions besides "sit", "go here" and talking weirdly to other sims (they will autonomously wander around and stare blankly at things), in this state the needs will decrease 2x faster than normal (normally when a sim becomes possessed all their needs are maxed out and locked, I removed that), you will lose X amount of satisfaction points, lose a bit of reputation (Get Famous), all the positive buffs that your sim has in that moment will be removed, and for children and teens all of their character values will decrease a bit. After the possession buff your sim will become dazed for other 2 hours, this will be the phase when they slowly start to regain a bit of their sanity. In this phase all their needs will decrease 1.5x faster than normal, will have a hard time making friends and romance and learn and level up skills, but character values and reputation will stop decreasing. After that I intend to make a "realization" phase where the sim becomes Stressed where he/she realizes his/her fears have become true where sims will have uncontrollable emotional idles and be overall tense. Needs will decay at a normal rate and this buff should last for 1 day.

That's it for now, hope you like what I'm doing and I hope to launch the mod as soon as possible, I also have planned an update for buffs rebalances that will hopefully become available next week, Sul sul!