Meaningful Stories Preview: More Interesting Conversations

The Meaningful Stories Preview has been updated to v1.1.0.0-5.0-preview, and includes a new feature that will hopefully be the beginning of a larger overhaul of sim autonomy. 

Meaningful Stories Preview | Download link for patrons  

When More Interesting Conversations is enabled, sims in conversation will autonomously choose specific social interactions more often, and use idle chat animations less.

You might have noticed that when sims are left to their own free will in a conversation, you can see them talking, but their action bar won't be showing any particular topic or action being taken. This is 'idle chat', and is what sims will mostly choose to do in a conversation when you aren't directing their actions. Only very occasionally will they gossip, or enthuse about a new show, or flirt, or claim to be a criminal mastermind.

With More Interesting Conversations enabled, you will see sims spend more of their conversation time choosing specific social actions, allowing their personality to show through a little more, and hopefully surprise you sometimes. When sims are capable of having a real conversation without your help, it becomes a little easier to imagine them as having their own mind.

The feature is similar to the effects of the mod Have Some Personality Please by Polarbearsims. But where Personality Please eliminates idle chat entirely, More Interesting Conversations in Meaningful Stories will still let sims idle chat briefly inbetween other social interactions. This means all of the varied animations and speech bubble topics associated with idle chat can still be seen, and there is a small buffer between autonomously-chosen social actions which you as the player can use to step in and change the flow of conversation if you choose.

Meaningful Stories Preview also now has a dedicated section in its in-game settings menu for new features. 

Friends and +3 Inspired patrons have been testing various forms of this More Interesting Conversations feature for the past few months, and their feedback has improved it a lot. Now that it is part of the Meaningful Stories Preview, the plan is for it to stay there until I'm confident it is as good as it can be, and it is joined by the other autonomy improvements I have planned. Once I'm happy with my autonomy overhaul as a whole, I will set a date for its public release.

Once you've had a play with it, let me know what you think in the comments below, or on the Discord server!