While everyone else out there is talking about build mode and missing colour customizations and the gameplay details, I knew that I had to come to the table with the machinima and photography perspective and start some discussions around where The Sims 4 will take us.

Emotions are definitely one of the features of the Sims 4 that has been creating a buzz around the Sims community, and for different reasons depending on the gaming style of the person playing. There is no question that emotions will add quite a bit of dimension to gameplay, but you wanted to know was what will emotions mean to machinima makers and photographers. So here we go.

Grant Rodiek gave us some detailed insider information

so here are some of the take aways:

EMOTIONS BASICS

Emotions and Traits are tightly linked. People will respond with different emotions to similar situations depending on their underlying traits. This is something you can use to your advantage when adding traits to your sim actors. As we learn more and discover the little details around this you may find that you can be crafty in your trait selection in order to trigger certain emotion based animations and interactions.

Emotions and Animations are interconnected - similar actions will appear differently, that is with a variation on the animation, depending on the mood of the sim. If using gameplay to trigger your animations you will want to become familiar with these emotional states and their outcomes.

DECOR AND EMOTIONS

Several types of decor objects are associated with an emotional "aura" - an emotional trigger of sorts. When your sim walks into a room with these objects then they will respond accordingly based on the associated emotion. For example a statue with a playful aura will inspire playfullness in your sim. These auras can be toggled off and on within the object menu when you click on it, and by default they are OFF so you won't randomly be caught off guard. For our purposes this may come in handy to trigger emotions - you can place several objects that have a similar emotional aura, toggle them on, and when your sim is in that room they will surely behave in the manner of that emotion. This is one way to give you some control without a hack or cheat in place.

Your Sim can even create objects and paintings - when creating something the emotion of the sim will be transferred to the objected created. For example if your angry sim paints an angry painting, it will likely evoke anger when viewed.

You can hover over the object description to learn how much emotional aura an object has, for those that do have it. Auras are not added to every object type.

EMOTION AND ANIMATIONS

There are a few ways that animations are affected by emotions

• painting, cooking and other creative ventures will produce different outcomes based on the mood or emotion of your Sim while they created it - for example they paint different types of paintings when happy compared to flirty - then the paintings themselves take on that emotional aura and can be placed strategically to evoke certain emotions where you need them

• there are different variations on the animations in many cases, so the actual animation will vary slightly with the emotional state of your Sim

• emotional states trigger "whims" which are ideas that you can use to guide you so that you can make the most of the emotional state your Sim is in

OTHER EMOTIONAL CONTROL OPTIONS

• there are potions to control moods

• tv shows can affect moods

• traits affect emotional response - a snob would be bored watching kid's TV but someone else might find it makes them playful

• instruments can influence moods

• you can use the voodoo doll to inflict an emotional state on a sim

While we know that modders are already getting into CAS and toying with hacks and mods, and surely one to control emotions will be on the top of the list of mods to come, it is good to know that there are a variety of options when it comes to manipulating the moods of our Sims to help us tell our stories.

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