This has to be the most broken piece of code in the history of game programing, and it's been broken since, what, November of last year? Since the tutorial was introduced? I tried the tutorial back then and it fell at one of the first hurdles. I thought it would have been fixed by now so I decided to try it again. Big mistake. It's not just the aspirations you need to complete that are grayed out. 95% or more of everything else is too. So, Alex,being materialistic, needs to admire new possessions but she can't because she can't buy any. My sim, being of the athletic persuasion, gets tense at work because of 'not enough exercise' but at home she can't workout most of the time because nothing happens when I click on the gym equipment. This also makes it almost impossible to fulfill the 'workout' promotion task. She can't do anything at work except be there, even the options to work hard or slack off etc. being absent. And she can't escape the pointless grind by taking a vacation day, even though she needs one in order to progress. And while my sim is at work all Alex can do is sit at home, bored. She can't invite anyone over - no phone, and the relationships and clubs icons are disabled. She can't visit anyone or visit a community lot. There's interesting looking rocks just asking to be dug up but they can't be dug up. There's a conveniently local fishing spot where she can't fish. She can watch tv but can't pick a channel. She can just wait, hoping someone or something turns up, and when someone does turn up, even if she somehow gets flirty she can't flirt. All she can do is repeat the same few interactions over and over. The same joke about barnacles, over and over.
I've exited and repaired the game. I've tried the ctrl-shift-c stuff. I haven't restored from an earlier backup because that would take me back so far I might as well start again from scratch, and i haven't started from scratch because I like to see things through if I can. If i wasn't like that then I would have uninstalled the sims 4 long ago, never to be reinstalled, not just for this but also for the countless other inconveniences.
How did we get to this? The Sims is about having free choices. Even if there are several tasks that must be performed to complete an aspiration or get a promotion, you can choose the order to do them in or you can just decide that the aspiration or promotion wasn't all that important anyway. There's always plenty of other things you could be doing instead. The tutorial is the complete antithesis of this. It is as un-Sims-like as you can get. Everything must be done in the specified order, at the allotted times, and God help you if you get ahead of the game and reach a given point before you're supposed to. To try to prevent this happening they grey out almost everything, leaving a game that is almost devoid of gameplay. but you can't think of every contingency. There'll always be some unanticipated occurrences, unless you grey out everything, And then of course the things that are supposed to become un-greyed aren't. They stay grey, along with everything else in this the greyest of grey games. And that's the point we're at, and have been at for many months now.
