Initial thoughts after about an hour of playing of Beta 4:
- Note: I haven't played since Beta 1, I noticed pretty significant performance issues which made me not want to play for too long, opted to play legacy version until performance issues were addressed. I'm running this on a gaming desktop with Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (8GB), AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Eight-Core Processor, and 32 GBs of RAM so there isn't much out there that will give me issues playing, so please take note of the obvious: results will vary for everyone.
- Performance: London is still pretty laggy on my setup, opted to play on the Central Bath map. Highly, highly recommend playing on Central Bath. Performance is incredibly smooth, map loaded quickly and actions were instantaneous. I don't have any custom maps installed as I opted to do a clean install (i.e. no mods installed except I took the age presets from LostLegends' set relationship V3 mod [great mod by the way, will install full mod later on]) I would avoid maps with a larger amount of activities/locations as they will bog down the game overall as actions will take longer and interior environments will load slowly. FPS on these maps even with PP, AA, and Shadow Quality at the lowest setting are low. I was able to play with full PP, AA, and Shadow Quality at its highest when playing the in the Central Bath map.
- Gameplay: I like the Sims-like approach with being able to interact with characters within the interior. Even including new actions such as introducing yourself, chatting, flirting, invite to hangout, offer a gift, etc. Seeing the PC interact with the environment is also pretty interesting and welcoming thing to see when comparing it to legacy versions.
- Bugs: Though I do still notice some bugs. For example, one of my first actions was to go to the bank and manage finances. After doing that action, I began to interact with an NPC and was interrupted by another event. During the event, the new NPC did not appear but the original NPC I was interacting with duplicated within the interior. Not game breaking but I didn't expect to see it. Another bug I noticed is that some stats will change after initially changing them. For example, I spawned in my sister, changed her appearance and stats. After changing them, I would go in to make sure they remained the same. The usual suspects that would change include the age (in stats) and last name and sexual preferences (in appearance).
- Overall thoughts: With the implementation of new mechanics shows that if played on a smaller map work very well. Still a few quirks here and there but overall I'm liking the direction the game is going. Looking forward to seeing the final beta update and what follows it.