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I agree with some of the other replies, and they probably articulate similar arguments far better than I could, but I’ll try anyway; I didn’t love how they implemented emotions in ts4. This is because of several reasons, but I think it’d be easier to talk about how they handled ts3 instead.
In ts3, they had moodlets, which allowed for sims to feel many things at once; A parent can be proud of their child graduating, but also feel betrayed by a cheating spouse and be in mourning from losing a loved one all at the same time. (Just one of these can cause multiple emotional reactions.) ts4 technically has moodlets as well, but they (as well as the “whims,” but that’s a conversation for another day) are constantly being overshadowed by the sim’s current “emotional” state, which feels like more of a hindrance to me than anything else.
The moodlets were able to show how your sim was feeling emotionally and physically, and they’d impact the sims’ overall mood (the red to green plumbob meter.) I never felt that the sims’ emotions were lacking before ts4; quite the opposite. They just weren’t expressly labeled one at a time and exaggerated. (Also I liked having the platinum mood in ts2 when sims were elated, it just added another level.)
So, in short, I’d rather have a moodlet-type system in the game that lets the players know what’s going on in a para’s life but leaves space for the overall interpretation. For me, customization and player freedom are 2 of the most important parts of games like these, and I’d like to maximize that as much as possible.
