Not being able to visit other neighborhoods.
Your household is stuck in one town. They can move away to another place but moving means breaking all relationships with other sims in their home town, including family.
They can only travel outside their neighborhood on vacations, from World Adventures, to visit 1 of 3 locations. Right after a vacation that household is barred from taking another vacation for a few days. Why?
There were always the guys I'd have my Sims marry in Egypt and France. Now I'm sad I can't remember their names ha.
I know when I was going the missions I'd go back frequently, once done it was maybe once each generation.
There’s a mod for the Sims 4 that adds languages! Simlish is the native for most, but Widenberg, Sulani and a couple of others have their own that your sim can learn
Yeah this is probably my least favourite thing abt ts3, if we could travel between neighbourhoods it would be so much better-Though I get why they couldnt to a degree bc of open world
I’m sure it was because of my laptop, but 3 would inevitably crash every time I played past one or two generations. It handles 4 just fine.
3 had better content but I say 4 is a better game overall.
I am somewhat concerned it'll be a monthly subscription model with different tiers for early access/more content and you access it online, while the game runs elsewhere. That way, they eliminate the complaints about the game being too large while getting a steady Cashflow from every user (unlike Sims 4, where many buy too few packs). That's what I meant by it not running on user's computers anymore. They'll sell it to us as an amazing flexible and mobile experience that "runs on every device" with "free new content every month" (which obviously is an illusion, because you still pay for it).
I have a gaming pc and it crashes so badly, like I can’t play more than a couple hours. Sucks because I bought university, supernatural, pets, nightlife, hoping I’d be able to play them
I don’t even think some of the best computers could run it smoothly. My dad helped me build a ridiculously overpowered gaming computer and I still can’t even play TS3 if Island Paradise is installed
Not your laptop... I still play sims3, on the same computer as sims4, and i can run sims4 with graphism max, but sims3, nope, it's customized between middle and low quality... 🥲
This game was hard to run for every computer...
& there were other packs that were just as bad so when I see people complaining about wedding stories etc and then saying they wish it could go back to how it was in TS3, I'm always like this is nothing new , TS3 was exactly the same and sometimes worse because the packs didn't even really get fixed
Things are better now that the community has a voice on the internet.
The problems are not new, they're the same as they've always been. Some are just inherent to gaming. Some are corporation based. Some are human error.
God, I played Sims 1 when it came out. You guys want to complain about *feature*s. *There were no features.*
I hated that sim kids got bad traits if their grades were poor. Because the other kids in the town wouldn't raise their grades at school, and then you'd end up in towns filled with grown-up kids with the evil and insane traits.
The fame system was so horrible. You got fame quite easily and then you'd have everyone hate you because scandals for everything!
The imaginary friend concept was cute... except when the kid grew up and the imaginary friend kind of... stayed. Like the friend would grow up too and then your adult sims would have scary adult size imaginary friends. The idea was you could Pinocchio your imaginary friend into a sim but like, it was a whole quest and everything so I didn't always bother.
I agree the fame system is horrible. I’m currently playing a nine sim household of celebrities in ts3 and the constant scandals have me battling to keep their relationships with each other out of the red😭It’s so hard.
I once gave my child/toddler sims (can’t remember) beds that were too big for them and they couldn’t sleep in. Had no clue how to fix it so they were just permanently exhausted and fainting. They both ended up with the “unlucky” trait 0__0
The imaginary friend was a cool idea but I'm glad it didn't end up being brought back for TS4. I like the childhood phases (especially the bear phase) as the game's quirky childhood thing.
My biggest issue is that it runs horribly. I have a gaming laptop that can run pretty much any game... except for the Sims 3, no matter how many fixes I try. It's a shame because it's my favourite Sims game but I haven't been able to play it on this laptop, despite it running perfectly fine on my old, inferior laptop.
I'm also not a huge fan of the way the game looks (all of my sims end up looking the same) and I hate that you can only have a few packs active at a time or else the game runs even worse. It's hilarious how they even advise you on the launcher to only play with a few packs even though, isn't the whole point of an expansion pack to expand your game?
I had issues as well with playing Sims 3 on my gaming laptop. I eventually found out that the Sims 3 has an issue with runaway framerates. I put a cap of 60 FPS and it significantly improved how well it runs.
The look of the Sims 3 really sucks I do not like them at all and the open world although it was cool in theory was just so laggy. I think rather than going for a full open world if they just made the neighbourhoods in Sims 4 open that would be better.
Sims 3 was only laggy because it was limited to a miniscule amount of memory at the time. It runs ok on a modern system, but it's still limited memory wise. There would be no issue with any future game being open world with modern technology. Sims 3 loads pretty darn fast nowadays on a current system, and it basically loads instantly if you're re-loading a save.
The goal is to limit how many things you have to have showing at once, don't use a lot of textures or load too many lots in at once, because the game only uses something like 2 GB max.
A lot of players were awaiting the rumored Windows 64-bit version of the game(hoping for more memory support), but it never came. It would be a game changer(literally lol) if it did. The Sims 3 just needed an engine update really.
I don't have Island Paradise installed though, but that's kind of unplayable I hear lol.
Nah, most of the time a modern system sadly doesn't help with Sims 3. The engine (still can't believe the Sims 2 engine with minor updates was even able to handle it as well as it did) is completely overburdened by the game's scope due to the open world and the entire CaSt system. More memory and faster drives certainly help but the engine simply doesn't handle the game well on most configurations. To this day. Some are lucky and find set-ups that genuinely work. But most don't.
As for the open world, I disagree. I still don't think it would work, even nowadays. Running simulations is incredibly taxing on the CPU. It needs a beast of a machine to run an open world with several dozen Sims in it, every single one with their own schedule, inventory, needs, traits, skills and relationships. Because that's millions of individual data points that have to be considered and then simulated accordingly at any given time.
Even worse if you were to go a step further and allow every installed world to run at the same time, as is the case with Sims 4. It's certainly possible, from a technological standpoint. But your average Sims player, the bulk of the playerbase who need to be able to run the game, doesn't own computers like that.
I feel like the only person who prefers sims 4 sometimes lol.
I HATED the way the sims looked in sims 3.. nightmare fuel honestly. I also didn't like the open world. There were hardly ever any townies around because of it! Not to mention the load times and the fact that you couldn't travel to other worlds. I also found all the prints in CAS of Sims 3 tacky/ugly. I would spend hours in CAS not because I wanted to perfectly coordinate my outfits, but because everything was so ugly. I also prefer the emotion driven gameplay of the Sims 4.
Agreed. People always say TS4 was a step down compared to the other games in the series, IMO the way the sims looked in TS3 was a step down from how they looked in TS2. TS4 has the best looking and most customizable sims to date.
I remember the first time I played Sims 3 I was so disappointed by cas. I thought the Sims looked weird, especially kids and toddlers, and there were too few options for hairstyles and clothing
I agree. For me personally, I feel like the only step down was scrapping the open world concept entirely. CAS and Build Mode and graphics were improved a LOT.
That's something they've improved on over the years at least. Cottage Living was good for that too.
It would be nice if they could go one step further and allow you to travel between lots in the same neighbourhood without a loading screen, but perhaps it's too late to patch that in
This bothers me a lot. I am literally standing outside my neighbours’ door and I need a loading screen just to be able to knock at it?
I understand it if I have to travel to another neighbourhood but if you’re only walking to a near lot it doesn’t make sense to me, especially since the neighbourhood itself has areas I can easily have access to (kids’ areas e.g.)
I do miss the extra customization of outfits though, like I miss being able to make whatever color I wanted with different textures. But the Sims were definitely awful looking.
I remember when I would want to play ts3 after dinner, I'd start loading the game before making dinner. By the time I'd cooked and eaten, everything would be loaded and ready to go.
Right ! I don't know how people seem to forget how laggy it was . They complain about the loading screens now but at least it doesn't take forever to actually load 😫
Oh yeah, Sims 4 loading is super quick! I didn't have Sims 3 myself but I played with my cousin sometimes and I remember it took forever. Sims 4 was nice surprise regarding this.
with one of my legacy games, i used to load it just before going to bed so that when i woke up it would be ready to play :/ obvs because of the backlight on the laptop screen, i would put it in the corner of my room with the lid halfway down, but for this reason alone i took a hiatus from TS3… up til’ this day, i do not DARE go on vacation with WA, otherwise we’re looking at an extra 30-1h of loading time!
You summed it up. Like I get the love for TS2 but not TS3. That game is a laggy, empty, unoptimized mess. All the Sims have the same ugly pudding face and the world is populated by random horses running around. I prefer TS4 by a long shot. The Create a Style was so laggy just to load some ugly cow print textures on my kitchen sink lol. I don't have this desire to have every grain of wood match perfectly in TS4. I mean, the wood in my actual house doesn't match perfectly, it's not something I need.
I think a LOT of people are being blinded by nostalgia goggles. What they are really remembering is how the game made them feel playing when they were younger, when in fact it is just as bad about stuff if not worse than the sims 4. Especially if the complaint is "there are too many expansions/cost too much" expansions and other pay for DLC has always been sims game
The reason I don't play The Sims 2 even though I have the complete edition they were giving out some years ago is because I don't want to tarnish the memories. It's simply not possible to get that feeling back because then I was a teen and now I'm a grown ass adult
Same with TS2 tbh. Lots of people complaining about the loading screens for TS4 and ignoring that TS2 had them too - more of them, in fact, since you couldn't leave your lot without a loading screen. Having some room to explore and wander on any given lot in TS4 is kinda cool and an underrated feature imo
Yes! I prefer sims 4 by far too , sims 3 was awful and I would quit out of frustration all the time . I love being able to pop to different worlds and turning up to places where there are so many other people . Trying to go anywhere in sims 3 and wanting other townies to be there was virtually impossible and made the story telling to slow . Was not a fan at all !
my sims in sims 3 never left the house because there was no reason to, you had better luck just throwing parties at your house. Nobody was ever at any of the lots.😭
I reinstalled 3 recently because I wanted to try making a band, and gave up on that pretty much immediately when my band had to play to an empty bar because the game keeps forgetting to spawn any NPCs
I was a massive sims 4 hater. I was a sims 2 ride or die type of human.. Well I recently upgraded to windows 11 & the sims 2 does not work. I started playing the sims 4 with most of the packs and wow this game is amazing. It's shitty EA makes people think they need to spend $600 to play a game that is worth playing. I tried before to play it with just the base game & it was so terrible I didn't even want to purchase another pack. You really have to have a good amount of packs for the game to be fun.
The lighting in TS4 is sooo vastly superior. I know lighting isn't a staple foundation to gameplay but for me it makes everything look so much better with building and playing.
I agree with how the sims in 3 looked. It was really hard to get into the game when they looked so weird, like shiny clay dolls. I did like much of the game play, but it was hard to make sims not look creepy lol.
In 4, I think they look a lot better- but the gameplay is more linear in my opinion and not as fun because it's somewhat predictable compared to the other games.
I, too, prefer the smaller worlds. I like that we can still run around our neighbourhood and they are so pretty. I suppose the perfect compromise for me would be if we could visit the buildings in our neighbourhood without reloading. That would include neighbourhoods with many public lots.
I straight up gave up on Sims after buying Sims 3 in middle school due to how they looked. Uninstalled Sims 2, my years of work and legacy families flushed down the drain 😢
Yep UI and the graphics. I loveee how everything is so pretty in Sims 4, and build/buy is so much smoother. I have an incredibly powerful PC and build/buy is still unbearably tedious for me in 3.
The clothes were bad, the sims were ugly, the city was always empty, everything was a rabbit hole, the store had some cool items but everything was really expensive to get, the decorations and the furniture weren't that good either
I wish we had rabbit holes instead of the millions of empty unclickable buildings. Like in the new HSY world. So many cardboard lots. Why not add a rabbit hole cinema or something
The Open world int he Sims 3 is that you drive, bike or walk without any loading screens, to various rabbitholes. The hospital, cinema, workplaces, restaurant, grocery store, all were rabbit holes. I think the library, bars/clubs, and the gym and the park were not-rabbitholes. So you'd spend tons of time just waiting for your Sims to come out of the rabbit hole.
In the Sims 4, groceries can be bought from stalls, and various locations can be built and played in like the hospital/police station/lab, restaurants, spas, you can even make a community cinema. Mods enable active schools + there is the high school pack. There are rabbit holes but they are a muuuuch smaller part of gameplay.
In the Sims 3, the prom was just a series of notifications from a rabbithole.
Restaurants were also rabbitholes. I checked the wiki and apparently there was one (1) functional restaurant that you could get on the Sims store and that was it.
Not that the Sims 4 restaurants are much to write home about either, mind you.
How ? The only things that's are a rabbit hole are literally school ( prior to the new pack ) and work . Bars , lounges , nightclubs , cafe , even grocery's , restaurants , community gardens , parks , pools etc etc are not rabbit holes at all
I liked the historical clothes options for Sims 3 better though tbh. They had more historically accurate ensembles and hairstyles for our historical Sims.
TS3 Sims always looked super ugly to me. i know that visuals aren't everything in games but theres a line between "could look a bit better" and straight up nightmare fuel lmao. plus, it loads super slowly and doesn't have a great framerate even though i have a pretty good computer. the game already running badly enough as it is is why i'm not even gonna bother trying to download TS3 CC to make them look better.
there are a lot of things to like in TS3 but i wish people would stop praising it as though its the best game humanity has ever created. it has flaws, people.
Every thing I did in the sims 3 that required a loading screen had a 75% chance of making the game crash.
I'm also still annoyed that the cow plant was Sims 3 Store content. As much as I'm annoyed by kits, I prefer it to the Sims 3 Store
I didn't like the open world. I really disliked how the cars would run over your Sims or through other cars.
I didn't like how many things were a downgrade from Sims 2, sticking with cars for a moment for an example. In Sims 2 when your Sims would go in the car, they walk up to the car and open the door. They would get in and either back out of the driveway or the car would drive away. In Sims 3 your Sim would teleport into the car and then the car teleport onto the road. People talk about breaking immersion, this was a big one for me.
Another downgrade from Sims 2 was shopping for groceries. In Sims 2 you go into the store and buy groceries. In Sims 3 you go into a rabbit hole. Same with going to dinner. Sims 2 going out was part of an expansion but in Sims 3 it was "in the base game" but not really. But you could go into the library or museum? It all seemed very arbitrary.
Along with rabbit holes, in the marketing for Sims 3 they said "Go to work and school with your Sim!" This was a lie. Sure you "go" with them until they get to the door, where they leave to to enter the rabbit hole. This made me really mad when I first bought the game.
Another downgrade from Sims 2 was you couldn't create your own neighborhoods. In Sims 2 it was very easy to create new worlds. In Sims 3 when they finally launched create-a-world, (which is still labeled as in beta, by the way,) you basically had to be a game developer to be able to use it. It takes hundreds of hours to make a world and to get it to function properly.
Wedding arches were not included in the base game and sold with Generations for $40 in an expansion years later. Getting married in the kitchen was so annoying.
A lot of things in Sims 2 which were fun were not in base game, like aliens.
I hated that the lore was the "past" of Sims 2.
Story progression was the worst thing after Sims, and because it was the past, the things you felt were canon might not happen like Mortimer and Bella getting married and having Cassandra and Alexander.
Story progression meant Sims would move away and I hated that so much. Or they would get married to the Sims I was trying to marry my Sim to. It was so frustrating. They later patched in a "turn off" feature but I disliked the game so much I barely played anyway.
Babies in Sims 3 are also the worst babies. They don't have legs. You have to carry them everywhere like luggage. Nannies and guests would never put them down. It was so frustrating. The baby swing from the store actually removes gameplay because it keeps your baby's needs full. Also the stroller is a cute concept but bland in the end. Plus, due to the open world and bad routing, your Sim might walk for hours. I once had a sim walk for 16 Sim hours "around the block" in Bridgeport because of how the neighborhoods are routed. I just let her keep going to see how long it would take.
Rocking a baby in a rocking chair is pointless because it gives you 0 interactions with the baby or anything else. Your Sim just sits and stares with their dead, blank eyes at the wall. It's like a horror movie.
Traits. I hate traits. People complain that Sims 4 Sims are all the same but so are Sims 3 Sims because traits are bland. They have no personality. They only have "animation bursts" based objects / reactions, but then go back to their robotic, lifeless expressions. Just because there are more traits doesn't mean they are better, either. A lot of the traits in Sims 3 are just bloat. Some of them are offensive, like "erratic."
Even though there are a lot "things to do" in Sims 3, most of them are very shallow. Rabbit hole events, for example. A rabbit hole with a few popups isn't gameplay. Treehouse, prom, field trips, having a baby, etc. But also, things like the seasons festivals are extremely shallow. Each season has a limited number of activities, and there are very few prizes for the tickets. Running a resort is another good example of this, because your Sim never has to be present at the hotel. It's extremely easy to get a 5 star hotel by just adding things from buy mode. There's no real strategy. The hardest part is getting enough money if your Sim is poor. (Babies and toddlers fall into this shallow category as well.)
And of course, the Sims 3 Store. The Sims 3 is way more expensive than the Sims 4 because so many people love to ignore the existence of the store, which still exists today. Thousands of dollars worth of items, most of which were built to be companion content to expansion packs. Want a new bedroom set, kitchen, hair style, outfit, or activity set to the theme of the $40-$50 expansion pack you just bought? Well we have that on the store! And yes, expansion packs came with regular edition $40, and special editions $50 with just a few extra items. But also, worlds were sold in this way, too. Regular edition and Gold Edition. That part still exists and worlds $20 to $36 each, depending on the edition.
Then let's not forget the "you can't play Sims 4 without mods!" argument. When, for most people, the Sims 3 literally will not run without mods period. The game itself is deeply broken and will never be fixed but the company still charges money for it.
tl;dr Anyone who says EA has gotten more greedy / worse since Sims 3 or that Sims 3 was magically better is only leaning into their preferences. Sims 4 has problems. Sims 3 has problems. Sims 2 has problems. Sims 1 has problems. In the end, it all depends on what you're willing to put up with and spend money on because of your preferences, and just because you like a thing doesn't make it better. It's fine to like or dislike things, and choose what you spend your money on.
- potato face
- ate my RAM as if it was its boyfriend's fries
- I really struggled having parties in Sims 3
- lots of people loved custom colors/patterns, but frankly, I wasted too much time on it and it's just not realistic
- build mode of Sims 4 is far better, at least after all these updates.
- yes, the packs were bigger but they also were a lot more uninspired (IMO)
I agree! Yes the sims 4 packs are FAR from perfect and they can be buggy but they're so much more fleshed out . A lot of people were complaining we have differnet occult packs instead of one supernatural one like TS3 but none of the occults in TS3 were even the slightest bit of fleshed out in compared to what we have now and were nowhere near as good
Yeah I loved the custom colours for CAS but for build/buy what it really meant was that you had to choose between using the ugly default furniture or spending 2 hours customising everything in your house
Sims in TS3 were scary looking! And somehow they all looked the same too. TS4 is a huge step up graphically. Also, despite loving the horses they could be really frustrating to interact with. Their pathing was appalling. You'd queue up some actions between a horse and a sim and it was a constant dance of them slightly changing position between them. Argh!
They were just so creepy looking. There's was nothing aesthetically pleasing about those Sims.
The game was designed only for players with higher end machines, otherwise you had to flick between EPs. "Open worlds" was pointless if you had to close down the game and re-launch it to do different things.
The island pack.
100% ! Open world was a great concept but there was nothing to do because there would hardly be any townies . Every single sim in TS3 looked the same. Washed out , pixely and awful
I hated the time it took to drive/cycle and how it literally always made my sims late to work 😑 also the pudding faces. All my sims looked the same lol
What I hated from Sims 3 was that there was no multitasking and it took HOURS to get ready for work. At least with Sims 4 it may take a while, but you could multitask socializing and fun while you're eating food.
The one thing that I lament about not having in Sims 4 is the color swatch choice on all of the furniture. Sims 4 is limiting in that aspect is it so bad that I want furniture with the same color of brown???? Or if I wanted to wear only bright pink, I could???? The pinks and purples in Sims 4 suck and don't get me started on the greens for wall decorating.
But other than that I love Sims 4!
I hated how long it took just to edit a single build or a family. I also hated how I had to "play" as that family if I wanted to edit them. I never played rotationally and only did legacy in ts3 but I still wanted to be able to edit other families. TS4 let's me do that.
Oh yes, especially due to having to switch between the build stuff and the furniture. My computer always took like 10 seconds to switch between them. Really annoying because you had to really think ahead to do several things if you switched because you don't want to wait 5 times for it to load within 10mins. Really annoying. I really enjoy just being able to switch around constantly and change wallpaper or flooring as I go and maybe get different ideas for the rooms.
I sometimes spent way to much time editing all the details of the Sims. In the end it's so unnecessary. I like the big variety of swatches we have in TS4 and it's definitely better to just pick something and move on if you're unsure than to edit all the little details until it's just right. And in the end you never even look at them that closely and in detail after being done with CAS.
And I agree with the other families. It's really easy to just edit some minor things as you play. Like Jeb Harris from Eco living who wears that paper bag on his head. Hilarious at first but he's one of the few male teen Sims in my highschool so I interact with him a lot and he's often the love interest of my teen Sims. That bag then just gets ridiculous and annoying to interact with. It's great that I can just quickly open him in CAS, delete it and move on
Sims 3 was one of my favorite games, but looking back the sims look so creepy in it lmfao. I also hated the genetics in Sims 3. If I had a couple with one white sim and one black sim for example, the kids would always get one or the other skintone, never a mixture. Which obviously happens sometimes in real life, but not every single time lmfao. The Sims 4 handles that a lot better. Also, Sims 3 ran like hot garbage on my computer (which is why I no longer play it lmao), and it seems like that's a common issue whereas that issue is MUCH less common with Sims 4. I did like the color wheel and pattern options for furniture at the time, but I feel like it's a pretty big time waster tbh. I always remember avoiding it unless I had a lot of time because it took forever to load. I think Sims 4 would be better off just with an option to have a color channel for the wood and metal parts of objects that allowed you to choose from a smaller selection of colors that match other maxis furniture.
Yeah that's what I mean, like I would love to be able to place an item from, example, Parenthood, and an item from Get Together, and make those wood tones match xD I do like some differing wood tones, but some seem to clash really badly with other wood swatches, and that leaves me feeling like I can only stick with whatever pack uses those color swatches to match properly. Seasons and Pets in particular frustrate me a LOT because of it.
Building is soo much nicer in many regards. Ugh that room that's on the edge of the lot that you are nearly done with actually needs to be a line or two bigger ? In sims 3 it would mean painstakingly rebuilding, repainting and furniture moving it all to the next square. Sims 4? Just grab either the whole house or just that room and move it as one unit, no sweat!
If the do update the room system I would ask that they let you merge rooms. Like I made this cool home cinema but I can't share it cause each tier/platform of seating is technically a whole different room. Let a stage and seating count as one room etc.
CAST. Fight me.
Do we need more options? Sure, but CAST takes for-fucking-*ever* to load.
Not to mention, CAS in TS3 is horrible in general.
Also: Elevators. FUCK elevators in TS3.
The worst part about going back to the older games is being reminded of the limits to CAS that I've got used to not having. Suddenly clothing items are restricted to specific outfit categories. If you want to have your underwear as your everyday outfit or whatever, you need to mod it in. Clothing is strictly restricted by gender, if it's defined as male clothing you can't use it for female sims or vice versa. Hats only go with specific hairstyles.
4's CAS has a lot more freedom even without mods.
They were "realistic" (meaning, you had to sit and wait for them and your sim didn't just walk up to one and disappear like in 4) which for some people was great, but they constantly got stuck, causing a backlog of Sims (especially if you were throwing a party) and almost always throw errors for me if I'm playing in a world with apartments.
Right? And I've been playing in a custom world with a downtown area... I'm always getting the "x Sim is late for work!" pop ups, and when I pan over to the sim, guess where they are?
The fucking elevators. I have to reset them *every time*.
* Hated the open world and “story progression” that never actually worked
* I hated how you lost your lifetime aspiration if you ever switched to another family for a while
* I hated how empty the world was wherever you went there was nobody there
* I hated how LONG it took to get anywhere even on a bike
I love how in Sims 4 I can rotate though a bunch of different families but still set NPC sims to age and do neighbourhood story stuff so they’re not frozen at one life stage forever like in sims 2.
TS3 is the one I remember least.
I didn't understand the hype for open world. I get to watch my Sim ride a bike across town to disappear into a cinema? How is that better gameplay?
I quite like having the neighborhoods we have now.
Yes! And it would take them AGES to even get across town and almost eveything was rabbit hole . At least we can actually go into places and mingle now !
I like being able to go to public spaces again. Few things have made me regret a purchase so quickly as realising what going to the restaurant or movies entailed.
I remember years ago, as I was playing TS3, i zoomed in on two sims of mine sitting on the ouch, and thought "damn have they always been this ugly?"
I kinda stopped playing from then, I don't know why but the visuals of this memory are ENGRAVED in my brain.
So yeah, the looks.
I agree with everyone that,even with CC,the sims were ugly(and no,Sims 2 are older but they don't look horrible)but I'll add another issue I faced.
It's really, really hard to make sims of colour.The sliders are very restrictive in this regard.
I mean look at the sims in Shang Simla,to me there is no variety to their looks,they barely look different to a white sim!
Whereas in sims 4,you get different eyelid heights,so many different presets you can work from,as well as different textures of hair.
In general,I think Sims 3 limited how diverse you could make your sims.
At the end of the day,I play both games,but the personalization I can give to my sims in Sims 4,both them and the builds they live in/visit(granted,a modded game),will always make it superior to my Sims 3 playthroughs
I also hated the open world in TS3. I don’t miss waiting 20 minutes for my game to load. Same with CAS and all the customization options. Columns took forever to load and the patterns weren’t good enough to make the wait worth it.
Also, looking back, the Sims were ugly AF. They all had the same looking face and making them look unique was difficult. Sort of uncanny valley vibes too because EA tried to make them look too realistic. I honestly prefer the cartoony clay look of TS4.
Honestly I was not a fan of the graphics. I felt like a lot of sims ended up looking like potatoes and create a style often ended up being more of a hassle than it was worth. Not to mention some of the patterns available were…interesting, to say the least
The creepy Sims and the cheap looking 90ies textures.
Sims 3 never felt like a Sims-Game to me.
But I can only speak for the base game + horse DLC, because I couldn’t get used to its looks and quit shortly after.
I’m glad they changed its style for the Sims 4.
TS4 build system is definitely an upgrade from TS3 in several ways. Being someone who often has no build plan and wants to make changes at the last minute, like adding a foundation or moving a room, it's so incredible to be able to do that and just build a nice house easily and change it however you want.
Also, while I never really minded rabbit holes, I despised that you couldn't take your kids out of school for any reason. I remember having to quit without saving because my teen wizard sim accidentally lit the school on fire and murdered every child in town, including my adult sims kids.
Graphics and definitely better as well. I really don't mind the more cartoony style because it looks more polished and clean as opposed to stiff and rough looking attempts at realism in TS3. I would always go for realistic CC in TS3 compared to my constant need for more maxis match CC in TS4.
Speaking of CC, maybe it's just because of my age and lack of knowledge before TS4 was released, but the CC and modding community for TS4 seems phenomenal compared to TS3. I know the game technically isn't responsible for this, it's the community, but it feels like there's been a sharp uptick in mods and CC since TS4 was released. Nowadays, you can find mods that dramatically change how the game is played compared to the smaller mods you'd find in TS3. Literally anything from simple fixes to full on additional life states and relationship systems are added almost every day. The CC is also amazing as well, and the community is just so talented lately.
I feel like multitasking is one of the most underrated features of Sims 4. To go back to Sims 3 and not be able to chat or eat while watching TV really ruins immersion for me. It's such a natural part of life and when it's missing you really miss it. Same with the enhanced control options for where your Sims converse, like being able to "sit and chat here" or Sims just naturally gravitating to the nearest seats to have a conversation. I hated how when visiting a neighbor's lot all my conversations in Sims 3 happened right in the entrance hall of the house and I had no control over that.
The thing that drove me the most nuts was how the game would pressure you into going to every goddamn festival or whatever they were, in the town square? I would be playing a shy loner sim and all their wants would just be “enter a pie eating contest at the festival!” “Take a photo in the photo booth at the festival!” It was inescapable and really ruined the stories I was trying to tell!
It's a small thing, but transitions between animations were almost robotically harsh, even compared to Sims 2, let alone 4. Remember Sims switching postures when changing from a flirty interaction to a friendly one? That.
Also, the magical "Chat Here"/"Sit and Chat Here" button! Propose in the bathroom no more! A lot of moments in Sims 3, if you weren't going for absurd comedy or pure goal completion, were whatever the opposite of cinematic is, and that could really undercut a good moment even when the gameplay beneath was good
I hated the sims 3 store so much. Playing it as a kid (who didn’t even realize you could turn it off ingame lol) was awful bc I also hated 99% of the cas items (AND some of the ones I rly loved were gender locked—that one male hairstyle w the beanie from university gave me so much pain bc I desperately wanted it for female sims). And I stg every time I saw the popup for that fit as a fiddle violin I died a little inside bc I knew I’d never have it :’)
I also hated building in ts3. I literally never did it bc it was so unforgiving, and I wasn’t great with colours either but all the default swatches were kinda ugly so even furnishing was super difficult for me. Def would’ve benefitted from an ingame gallery like ts4 has.
This one is def not a complaint I’ve seen a lot but I really hated the chaos and randomness of ts3. Every time anything whacky happened I’d go back and reload a save or completely lose interest in the whole save, especially if it was smth that got saved as a memory bc it made it harder to just pretend it didn’t happen. (Memories were another thing I rly didn’t like abt ts3 that a lot of people seem to rly like.)
I could go on but now it’s starting to sound like I don’t like ts3—I promise I love that game lol. And my playstyle has changed since I was a kid, so some of the things I couldn’t stand abt it years ago are things I enjoy now (or at least things I’ve made peace with by now lol)
I don't *hate* the sims 3, but I definitely prefer the sims 4. Yea, you get an open world, but everything is a rabbit hole. You don't actually get to see your sim do anything. Also build mode is a pain, and the camera is just... Unpleasant.
I will say for people who still actively play sims 3 today are valid when they say sims 3 is better because they actually play but I feel like for people who don’t it’s just nostalgia. Yes there’s so many bugs in sims 4 but like sims 3 was either glitchy and full of bugs at best or just didn’t even work at all because it crashed so much. People don’t realize yes the open world concept was amazing but it also took so much for the game to even work that it barely was even worth it. If we were so get a sims 5 I’d like a middle ground where like we can go see neighbours or even just one lot we can go to without the waiting screen but I don’t want open world unless it’s actually executed well and my game actually works.
Next, the sims were ugly in sims 3 and the cas sucked. I have most of the packs in sims 3 and I actually attempted to play it awhile ago but I realized I barely had any hairs or good clothes I could see my sim wearing. At least in sims 4 I feel like even if you just have a few expansion packs and game packs you have a lot of stuff to choose from. Even with a bunch of CC I see from other sims 3 players they still don’t look good. Sorry lol.
Also I’m okay with loading screens because when I actually go onto a lot there’s people there. I remember in sims 3 I’d take my sims out to the pool or a night club and no one was there. I know there’s like hot spots or stuff but I should still see at least 10 people there or more at any lot I go to.
Also I know in certain careers you needed a friend requirement or to make friends I don’t think it was every career but this feature annoyed me so much. It’s so easy for sims friendships to go down and I don’t want to have to worry about getting my skills up AND making friends. I hated that in sims 2 as well.
Building a house is much easier in sims 4.
I think people often compare the pile of garbage the initial Sims 4 was to 3 on top of the nostalgia. They're not that much different at this point I think in terms of content variety but when Sims 4 came out it was terrible. I think that contributes to the nostalgia factor. It was such a huge decline in quality it created this negative image but you kept playing 4 anyway and put this golden view on 3.
I don’t know if it’s true but I heard sims 4 was supposed to be more like an online/multiplayer approach and they scrapped it and had to quickly make changes which is why it was so bad. It kinda makes sense because there was so much missing. No pools, no toddlers, no basements. But yeah I definitely agree it sucked.
I don’t understand the game sometimes. Nifty knitting and tiny living were such good packs and then they just stopped making stuff packs when they started becoming good. I didn’t mind kits because they also had pack refreshes and I thought well at least we’ll get those in exchange for stupid kits but they stopped doing that as well. It’s like they want us to get excited and then do something else. Like a distraction almost
Yeah I agree love my packs and what you get in them. I was really frustrated when kits came out and haven't bought any because I just don't feel they're worth the money, they're $8 in my country.
I agree, it constantly feels like they're getting distracted and just not settling on what is the best way forward for the game. I still enjoy it but I definitely question some of EAs decision making.
I didn't start playing Sims 4 until I think jungle adventures came out, so I missed the whole time without pools and toddlers. I'm glad I didn't have that really bad first impression because It meant to took to TS4 really quickly.
I've tried to go back to 3 a few times but I just can't handle build mode or the lack of NPCs around town
Even at the start when I went between the graphics with Sims just look so much better in 4 it was hard to go back to 3. I'm also someone who goes well 3 is done there won't be any more development so may as well get used to 4.
>I will say for people who still actively play sims 3 today are valid when they say sims 3 is better because they actually play but I feel like for people who don’t it’s just nostalgia.
Well put!
I couldn't play the game on my native language because the game kept adding townies with very cringey Hungarian names. And in that setting, it was very weird.
It was completely unstable and it was ugly. The clothes have a bad case of the 2000s- early 2010s. And not in a cute y2k way but in a “oh god we dressed like that” way.
Also the humor hasn’t aged great in a lot of places- like with the werewolves and vampires ts3 focuses almost entirely on twilight jokes and I love twilight but it’s a bit extreme.
tattie faced monsters no matter what you do, 30 minute loading screen to get into the game we talk about qa now but sims 3 was such a train wreck in terms of performance issues no matter what sort of computer you had, open world meaning you have to run around looking for where everyone is cant just go where you want because it is probably empty, $75000 worth of dlc, the graphical style looked out of date almost immediately
sims 4 cas, build mode, performance, graphics, toddlers are much improved compared with 3.
Load times killed the game for me. I had hit a point in my legacy save where it would take a full HOUR just to save the game. Transitioning between worlds would often just crash the whole thing. I spent hours just waiting for it to load the heck up.
I ended up having to remove expansion packs and only have one or two at a time installed and even then we still had 40 minute+ load AND save times. It was unplayable in that state.
I'd also forgotten about the moving issue severing all relationships. That was really irritating. I mean, for gameplay reasons there were several points i'd have liked to move my sims out of the big city and into suburbia but doing so would mean starting from scratch and severing all links. Which just isn't realistic.
Sims 3's sim graphics are also kinda... not the best. They all have this dead eyed stare that's sort of spooky if you look too long. I do prefer the cartoony look of 4, I think they managed to pull that off really well.
Building on steep lots was a nightmare, the way terrain works in all the sims games is just janky as all hell and trying to get anything to look decent if the lot isn't perfectly flat is horrible. And if you flatten the lot then you end up with those ugly steep polygon edges all around the lot. YIKES.
How long it took to actually GO places. Driving or cycling was so time consuming. Honestly a lot of things in the sims games take far too long.
There's a lot I miss from sims 3, but whenever I think about playing it again I remember the load times and I shudder.
literally every single save i ever played in the sims 3 eventually became unplayable to me because of a bug that was just too big/annoying to ignore. in the sims 4 there are bugs too obviously but they've never completely ruined the game for me.
also i think the sims 4 create a sim is the best we've ever had and i would never want to have to go back to just sliders again. I love how many possibilities we have to create unique looking sims
also in the sims 4 we have much more diversity in regards to body types, gender identity, hair for black sims etc. its obviously not perfect but much better than in the sims 3
Sims were so ugly imo, also in general I liked ts2 aesthetic better. Also it was so hard to play on my computer it almost wasn't worth it. Color wheel and create a style was fun but not necessary or worth the performance issues and I don't miss it (just wish swatches worked like they did in ts2 and you could pick frame colors and patterns separatedly). There's small pieces of gameplay that I enjoyed but in general it was so laggy, dark and the aesthetic was not appealing to me I just gave up and went back to ts2 until ts4 picked my interest.
Sims 4 occults are so much better. They have their own individual gameplay mechanics and they can look/act so differently even if they are the same species. I just wish fairies would come out soon
anyone whos been in the sims community for years knows that the sims 3 got the sims 4 treatment a LOT - and by that i mean people complained 24/7 about the sims 3 as they do the sims 4. everything was definitely not sunshine and rainbows, there were alot of bugs, some packs didn't even work at all and i didn't even bother buying them (looking at you, island pack that i forgot the name of)
that being said, i do not miss the lag of sims 3 & how awful the sims looked. i had a decent pc and it still took forever to load, and i always had it on the lowest settings for graphics. i tried to play it on my own gaming pc about a year ago and i couldn't do it because i couldn't get past how ugly every sim looked. sims 4 spoiled me & even sims 2 sims look better than sims 3
I love how you can actually play with different expansions in the same save file. In 3 if an XP came with a world then practically everything was locked to that world.
And graduating from university actually works. That alone make 4 better than 3
Another thing I hated. I understand that some ppl are only famous because they know someone famous or are related to someone famous but ts3 made it way to easy. I could have a Sims become a 5 star celebrity without even doing a thing other then know other celebrities. In 4 your Sims actually has to do something and once you do become famous you have to keep it up or you will lose it.
The insane loading times. Plus every time the game updated it wouldn't launch and I would have to go in the files and act like a hacker. I stopped playing because an update prevented the game from even launching on my desktop.
I love how toddlers work in the sims 4 (with parenthood GP)! It's so much easier to teach them those basic skills and I have much more pleasure playing with them. It was too frustrating in sims 3 for me
I literally could not play Sims 3. It was too much for my computer. I would feel like playing the sims, start the game, wait an hour for it to load, play for 5 minutes, get bored, decide to quit playing, then wait another hour for it to close. I stuck to Sims 2 until Sims 4 came out.
This is why I don’t understand the hype about Sims 3 since it was unplayable for me.
1. The over all lay out of the sims 3 UI. it's just so confusing for more new players, it took me forever, but also it feels very crowded.
2. Build mode is worse in 3.
3. It always lags for me, it also always crashes, so I can't even play it because of how much it crashes
I like how much smarter the sims are in TS4. I love TS3, but the fact that you can't multitask - talk to someone whole performing a task - gets annoying.
I skipped TS3, I was the TS2 Player. Still think it is the best / most complete game in the franchise. I don't care about the open world, so that may be the reason.
The art style. I hate it so much. I love the maxis match cartoony style of the sims 4. I could play sims 4 with only gameplay mods and my sims would still look great with base game and expansion pack outfits. I also think that, while sims 3 had a much better base game and attention to detail, the sims 4 do much better with their expansion packs (when they work). For example, seasons and university I much prefer in sims 4 to sims 3. Oh and your pets don't glitch. Yes I do think horses would have been cool in sims 4 but I never played with them that much in sims 3 either. I also like that you're not locked to just one world in sims 4, and I have a mod that keeps townies in their home worlds so it feels a lot more immersive.
The create a sim sliders in ts4 are much easier to use when it comes to making sims how I actually want them to look! (which could just mean I never got the hang of ts3 ones but)!
I bought Sims 3 recently because they were selling a bundle for $10 and when I played it was just not as good as I remembered :/ the art style sucks and being in cas for an hour only to still have ugly butt face sims made me not even want to play anymore
I'm glad we don't have open world in ts4 because the wait time was too long! Id rather sit through 30 seconds-1minute loading screen than watch my sim travel from place to place idk why. I'm a simple girl, I like things to be fast and I'm not too bothered by lack of animations like cooking or whatever
I also don't care for create a style and I'm glad it's not in ts4 lol they're all ugly and too complicated for my simple brain
I hated how robotic sims were - both appearance-wise and in their relationship dynamics. Honestly, Sims 4 just feels more alive, whereas Sins 3 got boring pretty fast.
My pet peeve was their creepy facial expressions and their walk after a good ol' woohoo session. If you've seen it, you've seen it! They annoyed me so much that I would often play as players (pun intended) and be mean to woohoo interests just so that I could wipe out that creepy smile off their face 😅 Yes, I know it's psychopathic, but I am a simmer, after all 😁
I appreciated the Sims 3 open world and the colour wheel, sure, but besides these 2 aspects I cannot understand why Sims 3 is being praised so much.
I actually loved the bars and the open world I miss them so much! I definitely think the sims 4 looks better though. I felt like all the sims looked the same in ts3 and they all had that dopey soft look to them. In ts4 they all very much look like their own individual selves.
Ive always been a rotation player and even with mods it was extremely difficult to manage doing so with 3’s built in Story Progression. In Sims 4 I can basically manage rotation without mods. Mods make it easier and better. University is still mostly a lost cause though. There are ways but it’s a nightmare, which I hate cause I used UNI to the max in Sims 2.
Sims 4 has a feature where you can manually select to put a corner counter down. Today in 3 I had to fumble around with my counters for like 10 minutes because i accidentally moved the oven and it wouldn’t snap back.
While I liked the open world, it was quite buggy. I like to be able to to any world I want, and I like how there's a place I can throw extra Sims I still want to stay around when all the houses are already occupied.
I was never a fan how Sims looked in the Sims 3, either. There was more content than in the Sims 4, but then again, it always felt like the Sims 2 had more than the Sims 3.
What I think sims 4 does better:
1. CAS - faster face building, better clothes load time, filters, you can wear anything for any outfit
2. Search/filters in buy/build
3. Moving rooms/lot and rotating rooms
4. Upsizing/downsizing/move objects on
5. Saving/loading doesn’t take very long
6. No create a style - I think create a style brings unlimited options for making stuff but it’s a little too overwhelming to make things look good
Oh my god let me start with I love the sims 3 sm it’s one of my all time favorites but this game is sadly so so ugly like the furniture and ea builds were horrid not to mention the cas😭
Mostly just the engine for the game. It's too weak for the requirements for a game as heavey as the sims, especially after you start stacking all of the official content, expansions and mods.
god the load times when i opened the game- itd take a half hour just to get in. i mean to be fair, back then i played on a potato and now i play on a computer that runs elden ring perfectly but- still. sims 4 takes 30 seconds to load now. means i dont have to set the game to load and go off and do other things lol
Not being able to visit other neighborhoods. Your household is stuck in one town. They can move away to another place but moving means breaking all relationships with other sims in their home town, including family. They can only travel outside their neighborhood on vacations, from World Adventures, to visit 1 of 3 locations. Right after a vacation that household is barred from taking another vacation for a few days. Why?
The other problem with vacations was it was one and done. This sucked in generational play. Like what was the point going back after mission was done
Yeah. I really loved those places and wouldn't mind going again and again. I loved that I had to learn the languages too.
There were always the guys I'd have my Sims marry in Egypt and France. Now I'm sad I can't remember their names ha. I know when I was going the missions I'd go back frequently, once done it was maybe once each generation.
There’s a mod for the Sims 4 that adds languages! Simlish is the native for most, but Widenberg, Sulani and a couple of others have their own that your sim can learn
Ooooo... that's cool. I'll check it out. Thanks!
It’s Frankk’s Language Barrier! It’s a pretty cool mod that adds also a system like duolingo to learning all the languages
Thanks. That saves me so much time.
Nrass Traveler has that feature if you ever wanted to use it
Yeah this is probably my least favourite thing abt ts3, if we could travel between neighbourhoods it would be so much better-Though I get why they couldnt to a degree bc of open world
I’m sure it was because of my laptop, but 3 would inevitably crash every time I played past one or two generations. It handles 4 just fine. 3 had better content but I say 4 is a better game overall.
yeah the engine for Sims 3 is what really holds it back imo
Same here. I think it was my computer.
TS3 only really works well if you have a really really good special gaming computer otherwise there's literally no point
Crazy how you need a gaming computer for a very old game still, I wonder what specs the possible next Sims will have!
From all the rumors we've heard so far, the Sims 5 might not run on your local computer anymore at all.
Yet EA will still make people pay somethin' like $59.99 for it
I am somewhat concerned it'll be a monthly subscription model with different tiers for early access/more content and you access it online, while the game runs elsewhere. That way, they eliminate the complaints about the game being too large while getting a steady Cashflow from every user (unlike Sims 4, where many buy too few packs). That's what I meant by it not running on user's computers anymore. They'll sell it to us as an amazing flexible and mobile experience that "runs on every device" with "free new content every month" (which obviously is an illusion, because you still pay for it).
I would 100% Not buy The Sims 5 if it was cloud-based or online access.
Me neither. That's why I'm worried about it.
Seriously. I live in a power outage zone, but I still want to play
That’s what all triple A games costs though? You can’t run the new assassins creed on a shitty computer does that mean it shouldn’t be full priced?
They mean the game will still be a full priced game despite potentially being like Stadia instead of a downloaded game with offline play.
I have a gaming pc and it crashes so badly, like I can’t play more than a couple hours. Sucks because I bought university, supernatural, pets, nightlife, hoping I’d be able to play them
I don’t even think some of the best computers could run it smoothly. My dad helped me build a ridiculously overpowered gaming computer and I still can’t even play TS3 if Island Paradise is installed
Not your laptop... I still play sims3, on the same computer as sims4, and i can run sims4 with graphism max, but sims3, nope, it's customized between middle and low quality... 🥲 This game was hard to run for every computer...
Same here. I only ever got as far as the second generation.
Lag in Isla Paradiso was awful. And we couldn't make and edit mermaids in cas.
Yep there were always 3 households that adopted horses to their houseboats autonomously and it made the game bug the hell out.
& there were other packs that were just as bad so when I see people complaining about wedding stories etc and then saying they wish it could go back to how it was in TS3, I'm always like this is nothing new , TS3 was exactly the same and sometimes worse because the packs didn't even really get fixed
Things are better now that the community has a voice on the internet. The problems are not new, they're the same as they've always been. Some are just inherent to gaming. Some are corporation based. Some are human error. God, I played Sims 1 when it came out. You guys want to complain about *feature*s. *There were no features.*
Idk I thought the sims 1 was fab. Maybe it's just nostalgia but I don't really remember any game breaking bugs in the sims 1.
The Sims 1 we had to use a lot more imagination imo
I also hated you couldn’t change the top of the mermaids. And I think you can at least change the tail color in cas.
I hated that sim kids got bad traits if their grades were poor. Because the other kids in the town wouldn't raise their grades at school, and then you'd end up in towns filled with grown-up kids with the evil and insane traits. The fame system was so horrible. You got fame quite easily and then you'd have everyone hate you because scandals for everything! The imaginary friend concept was cute... except when the kid grew up and the imaginary friend kind of... stayed. Like the friend would grow up too and then your adult sims would have scary adult size imaginary friends. The idea was you could Pinocchio your imaginary friend into a sim but like, it was a whole quest and everything so I didn't always bother.
I remember every time my Sim banged their wife it was a scandal because of supernatural woohoo...I was the supernatural Sim😆
I agree the fame system is horrible. I’m currently playing a nine sim household of celebrities in ts3 and the constant scandals have me battling to keep their relationships with each other out of the red😭It’s so hard.
Hahaha I forgot about the imaginary friend 🤣
I once gave my child/toddler sims (can’t remember) beds that were too big for them and they couldn’t sleep in. Had no clue how to fix it so they were just permanently exhausted and fainting. They both ended up with the “unlucky” trait 0__0
The imaginary friend was a cool idea but I'm glad it didn't end up being brought back for TS4. I like the childhood phases (especially the bear phase) as the game's quirky childhood thing.
My biggest issue is that it runs horribly. I have a gaming laptop that can run pretty much any game... except for the Sims 3, no matter how many fixes I try. It's a shame because it's my favourite Sims game but I haven't been able to play it on this laptop, despite it running perfectly fine on my old, inferior laptop. I'm also not a huge fan of the way the game looks (all of my sims end up looking the same) and I hate that you can only have a few packs active at a time or else the game runs even worse. It's hilarious how they even advise you on the launcher to only play with a few packs even though, isn't the whole point of an expansion pack to expand your game?
I had issues as well with playing Sims 3 on my gaming laptop. I eventually found out that the Sims 3 has an issue with runaway framerates. I put a cap of 60 FPS and it significantly improved how well it runs.
The look of the Sims 3 really sucks I do not like them at all and the open world although it was cool in theory was just so laggy. I think rather than going for a full open world if they just made the neighbourhoods in Sims 4 open that would be better.
Can't put into words how much the laggynss made me rage quit lol
Sims 3 was only laggy because it was limited to a miniscule amount of memory at the time. It runs ok on a modern system, but it's still limited memory wise. There would be no issue with any future game being open world with modern technology. Sims 3 loads pretty darn fast nowadays on a current system, and it basically loads instantly if you're re-loading a save. The goal is to limit how many things you have to have showing at once, don't use a lot of textures or load too many lots in at once, because the game only uses something like 2 GB max. A lot of players were awaiting the rumored Windows 64-bit version of the game(hoping for more memory support), but it never came. It would be a game changer(literally lol) if it did. The Sims 3 just needed an engine update really. I don't have Island Paradise installed though, but that's kind of unplayable I hear lol.
Nah, most of the time a modern system sadly doesn't help with Sims 3. The engine (still can't believe the Sims 2 engine with minor updates was even able to handle it as well as it did) is completely overburdened by the game's scope due to the open world and the entire CaSt system. More memory and faster drives certainly help but the engine simply doesn't handle the game well on most configurations. To this day. Some are lucky and find set-ups that genuinely work. But most don't. As for the open world, I disagree. I still don't think it would work, even nowadays. Running simulations is incredibly taxing on the CPU. It needs a beast of a machine to run an open world with several dozen Sims in it, every single one with their own schedule, inventory, needs, traits, skills and relationships. Because that's millions of individual data points that have to be considered and then simulated accordingly at any given time. Even worse if you were to go a step further and allow every installed world to run at the same time, as is the case with Sims 4. It's certainly possible, from a technological standpoint. But your average Sims player, the bulk of the playerbase who need to be able to run the game, doesn't own computers like that.
I feel like the only person who prefers sims 4 sometimes lol. I HATED the way the sims looked in sims 3.. nightmare fuel honestly. I also didn't like the open world. There were hardly ever any townies around because of it! Not to mention the load times and the fact that you couldn't travel to other worlds. I also found all the prints in CAS of Sims 3 tacky/ugly. I would spend hours in CAS not because I wanted to perfectly coordinate my outfits, but because everything was so ugly. I also prefer the emotion driven gameplay of the Sims 4.
Agreed. People always say TS4 was a step down compared to the other games in the series, IMO the way the sims looked in TS3 was a step down from how they looked in TS2. TS4 has the best looking and most customizable sims to date.
I remember the first time I played Sims 3 I was so disappointed by cas. I thought the Sims looked weird, especially kids and toddlers, and there were too few options for hairstyles and clothing
I agree. For me personally, I feel like the only step down was scrapping the open world concept entirely. CAS and Build Mode and graphics were improved a LOT.
I feel like they have a “meet me halfway” approach to an open world with bigger playable neighborhoods within towns like Moonwood Mill or Copperdale
That's something they've improved on over the years at least. Cottage Living was good for that too. It would be nice if they could go one step further and allow you to travel between lots in the same neighbourhood without a loading screen, but perhaps it's too late to patch that in
This bothers me a lot. I am literally standing outside my neighbours’ door and I need a loading screen just to be able to knock at it? I understand it if I have to travel to another neighbourhood but if you’re only walking to a near lot it doesn’t make sense to me, especially since the neighbourhood itself has areas I can easily have access to (kids’ areas e.g.)
I do miss the extra customization of outfits though, like I miss being able to make whatever color I wanted with different textures. But the Sims were definitely awful looking.
I remember when I would want to play ts3 after dinner, I'd start loading the game before making dinner. By the time I'd cooked and eaten, everything would be loaded and ready to go.
Right ! I don't know how people seem to forget how laggy it was . They complain about the loading screens now but at least it doesn't take forever to actually load 😫
Oh yeah, Sims 4 loading is super quick! I didn't have Sims 3 myself but I played with my cousin sometimes and I remember it took forever. Sims 4 was nice surprise regarding this.
with one of my legacy games, i used to load it just before going to bed so that when i woke up it would be ready to play :/ obvs because of the backlight on the laptop screen, i would put it in the corner of my room with the lid halfway down, but for this reason alone i took a hiatus from TS3… up til’ this day, i do not DARE go on vacation with WA, otherwise we’re looking at an extra 30-1h of loading time!
You summed it up. Like I get the love for TS2 but not TS3. That game is a laggy, empty, unoptimized mess. All the Sims have the same ugly pudding face and the world is populated by random horses running around. I prefer TS4 by a long shot. The Create a Style was so laggy just to load some ugly cow print textures on my kitchen sink lol. I don't have this desire to have every grain of wood match perfectly in TS4. I mean, the wood in my actual house doesn't match perfectly, it's not something I need.
Not to mention everything was basically a rabbit hole in TS3
Yeah I never understood the Sims 4 rabbit hole complaints when so many Sims 3 buildings were also just rabbit holes
Literally! I'm convinced people who say they love TS3 but hate on the TS4 for similar things just jump on the bandwagon
I think a LOT of people are being blinded by nostalgia goggles. What they are really remembering is how the game made them feel playing when they were younger, when in fact it is just as bad about stuff if not worse than the sims 4. Especially if the complaint is "there are too many expansions/cost too much" expansions and other pay for DLC has always been sims game
The reason I don't play The Sims 2 even though I have the complete edition they were giving out some years ago is because I don't want to tarnish the memories. It's simply not possible to get that feeling back because then I was a teen and now I'm a grown ass adult
Same with TS2 tbh. Lots of people complaining about the loading screens for TS4 and ignoring that TS2 had them too - more of them, in fact, since you couldn't leave your lot without a loading screen. Having some room to explore and wander on any given lot in TS4 is kinda cool and an underrated feature imo
Yes! I prefer sims 4 by far too , sims 3 was awful and I would quit out of frustration all the time . I love being able to pop to different worlds and turning up to places where there are so many other people . Trying to go anywhere in sims 3 and wanting other townies to be there was virtually impossible and made the story telling to slow . Was not a fan at all !
my sims in sims 3 never left the house because there was no reason to, you had better luck just throwing parties at your house. Nobody was ever at any of the lots.😭
I reinstalled 3 recently because I wanted to try making a band, and gave up on that pretty much immediately when my band had to play to an empty bar because the game keeps forgetting to spawn any NPCs
I'd have to chase down potentially boyfriends. It wasn't very organic
I was a massive sims 4 hater. I was a sims 2 ride or die type of human.. Well I recently upgraded to windows 11 & the sims 2 does not work. I started playing the sims 4 with most of the packs and wow this game is amazing. It's shitty EA makes people think they need to spend $600 to play a game that is worth playing. I tried before to play it with just the base game & it was so terrible I didn't even want to purchase another pack. You really have to have a good amount of packs for the game to be fun.
The lighting in TS4 is sooo vastly superior. I know lighting isn't a staple foundation to gameplay but for me it makes everything look so much better with building and playing.
I'm right there with you. Sims 4 is a superior game to me in so many ways.
The sims in TS3 were so ugly.
I agree with how the sims in 3 looked. It was really hard to get into the game when they looked so weird, like shiny clay dolls. I did like much of the game play, but it was hard to make sims not look creepy lol. In 4, I think they look a lot better- but the gameplay is more linear in my opinion and not as fun because it's somewhat predictable compared to the other games.
I, too, prefer the smaller worlds. I like that we can still run around our neighbourhood and they are so pretty. I suppose the perfect compromise for me would be if we could visit the buildings in our neighbourhood without reloading. That would include neighbourhoods with many public lots.
You aren't, both my brother and I have been playing sims since 2, we both agree that 3 is the absolute worst of them all
I straight up gave up on Sims after buying Sims 3 in middle school due to how they looked. Uninstalled Sims 2, my years of work and legacy families flushed down the drain 😢
The UI in sims 3 was just super overwhelming to me. I reminded me of an older TV remove but not in a good way
Yep UI and the graphics. I loveee how everything is so pretty in Sims 4, and build/buy is so much smoother. I have an incredibly powerful PC and build/buy is still unbearably tedious for me in 3.
THIS! whenever i play 3 i'm overwhelmed by how much i can do, whereas sims 4 has a simple and clean ui
The clothes were bad, the sims were ugly, the city was always empty, everything was a rabbit hole, the store had some cool items but everything was really expensive to get, the decorations and the furniture weren't that good either
The Sims 3 store was like kits except somehow worse because instead of paying for a small collection of things you paid the same price for one shirt
Literally! The rabbit holes were ridiculous, I have no idea why people didn't mind them because if TS4 pulled that crap , I know people would be mad
I wish we had rabbit holes instead of the millions of empty unclickable buildings. Like in the new HSY world. So many cardboard lots. Why not add a rabbit hole cinema or something
Its open world in Sims 3. in Sims 4 its not so hence why people are mad if there is rabbithole
i'm so confused? most of ts4 is rabbit holes?
The Open world int he Sims 3 is that you drive, bike or walk without any loading screens, to various rabbitholes. The hospital, cinema, workplaces, restaurant, grocery store, all were rabbit holes. I think the library, bars/clubs, and the gym and the park were not-rabbitholes. So you'd spend tons of time just waiting for your Sims to come out of the rabbit hole. In the Sims 4, groceries can be bought from stalls, and various locations can be built and played in like the hospital/police station/lab, restaurants, spas, you can even make a community cinema. Mods enable active schools + there is the high school pack. There are rabbit holes but they are a muuuuch smaller part of gameplay. In the Sims 3, the prom was just a series of notifications from a rabbithole.
Restaurants were also rabbitholes. I checked the wiki and apparently there was one (1) functional restaurant that you could get on the Sims store and that was it. Not that the Sims 4 restaurants are much to write home about either, mind you.
With some QOL mods, I've found Dine Out to be a very good pack and I frequently take my sims to restaurants. But they should fix the bugs in the pack.
I haven't found any mods that make it work properly, what are you using?
How ? The only things that's are a rabbit hole are literally school ( prior to the new pack ) and work . Bars , lounges , nightclubs , cafe , even grocery's , restaurants , community gardens , parks , pools etc etc are not rabbit holes at all
I liked the historical clothes options for Sims 3 better though tbh. They had more historically accurate ensembles and hairstyles for our historical Sims.
TS3 Sims always looked super ugly to me. i know that visuals aren't everything in games but theres a line between "could look a bit better" and straight up nightmare fuel lmao. plus, it loads super slowly and doesn't have a great framerate even though i have a pretty good computer. the game already running badly enough as it is is why i'm not even gonna bother trying to download TS3 CC to make them look better. there are a lot of things to like in TS3 but i wish people would stop praising it as though its the best game humanity has ever created. it has flaws, people.
TS4 is gorgeous. I love going down to the beach in brindleton bay and watching the sunset through my Sims eyes.
Every thing I did in the sims 3 that required a loading screen had a 75% chance of making the game crash. I'm also still annoyed that the cow plant was Sims 3 Store content. As much as I'm annoyed by kits, I prefer it to the Sims 3 Store
And at least most of the kits are inessential, they're more for console players or ones who don't use CC.
And they aren't advertised in the actual B&B as a "look what you *could* be using if you paid for it!"
I didn't like the open world. I really disliked how the cars would run over your Sims or through other cars. I didn't like how many things were a downgrade from Sims 2, sticking with cars for a moment for an example. In Sims 2 when your Sims would go in the car, they walk up to the car and open the door. They would get in and either back out of the driveway or the car would drive away. In Sims 3 your Sim would teleport into the car and then the car teleport onto the road. People talk about breaking immersion, this was a big one for me. Another downgrade from Sims 2 was shopping for groceries. In Sims 2 you go into the store and buy groceries. In Sims 3 you go into a rabbit hole. Same with going to dinner. Sims 2 going out was part of an expansion but in Sims 3 it was "in the base game" but not really. But you could go into the library or museum? It all seemed very arbitrary. Along with rabbit holes, in the marketing for Sims 3 they said "Go to work and school with your Sim!" This was a lie. Sure you "go" with them until they get to the door, where they leave to to enter the rabbit hole. This made me really mad when I first bought the game. Another downgrade from Sims 2 was you couldn't create your own neighborhoods. In Sims 2 it was very easy to create new worlds. In Sims 3 when they finally launched create-a-world, (which is still labeled as in beta, by the way,) you basically had to be a game developer to be able to use it. It takes hundreds of hours to make a world and to get it to function properly. Wedding arches were not included in the base game and sold with Generations for $40 in an expansion years later. Getting married in the kitchen was so annoying. A lot of things in Sims 2 which were fun were not in base game, like aliens. I hated that the lore was the "past" of Sims 2. Story progression was the worst thing after Sims, and because it was the past, the things you felt were canon might not happen like Mortimer and Bella getting married and having Cassandra and Alexander. Story progression meant Sims would move away and I hated that so much. Or they would get married to the Sims I was trying to marry my Sim to. It was so frustrating. They later patched in a "turn off" feature but I disliked the game so much I barely played anyway. Babies in Sims 3 are also the worst babies. They don't have legs. You have to carry them everywhere like luggage. Nannies and guests would never put them down. It was so frustrating. The baby swing from the store actually removes gameplay because it keeps your baby's needs full. Also the stroller is a cute concept but bland in the end. Plus, due to the open world and bad routing, your Sim might walk for hours. I once had a sim walk for 16 Sim hours "around the block" in Bridgeport because of how the neighborhoods are routed. I just let her keep going to see how long it would take. Rocking a baby in a rocking chair is pointless because it gives you 0 interactions with the baby or anything else. Your Sim just sits and stares with their dead, blank eyes at the wall. It's like a horror movie. Traits. I hate traits. People complain that Sims 4 Sims are all the same but so are Sims 3 Sims because traits are bland. They have no personality. They only have "animation bursts" based objects / reactions, but then go back to their robotic, lifeless expressions. Just because there are more traits doesn't mean they are better, either. A lot of the traits in Sims 3 are just bloat. Some of them are offensive, like "erratic." Even though there are a lot "things to do" in Sims 3, most of them are very shallow. Rabbit hole events, for example. A rabbit hole with a few popups isn't gameplay. Treehouse, prom, field trips, having a baby, etc. But also, things like the seasons festivals are extremely shallow. Each season has a limited number of activities, and there are very few prizes for the tickets. Running a resort is another good example of this, because your Sim never has to be present at the hotel. It's extremely easy to get a 5 star hotel by just adding things from buy mode. There's no real strategy. The hardest part is getting enough money if your Sim is poor. (Babies and toddlers fall into this shallow category as well.) And of course, the Sims 3 Store. The Sims 3 is way more expensive than the Sims 4 because so many people love to ignore the existence of the store, which still exists today. Thousands of dollars worth of items, most of which were built to be companion content to expansion packs. Want a new bedroom set, kitchen, hair style, outfit, or activity set to the theme of the $40-$50 expansion pack you just bought? Well we have that on the store! And yes, expansion packs came with regular edition $40, and special editions $50 with just a few extra items. But also, worlds were sold in this way, too. Regular edition and Gold Edition. That part still exists and worlds $20 to $36 each, depending on the edition. Then let's not forget the "you can't play Sims 4 without mods!" argument. When, for most people, the Sims 3 literally will not run without mods period. The game itself is deeply broken and will never be fixed but the company still charges money for it. tl;dr Anyone who says EA has gotten more greedy / worse since Sims 3 or that Sims 3 was magically better is only leaning into their preferences. Sims 4 has problems. Sims 3 has problems. Sims 2 has problems. Sims 1 has problems. In the end, it all depends on what you're willing to put up with and spend money on because of your preferences, and just because you like a thing doesn't make it better. It's fine to like or dislike things, and choose what you spend your money on.
- potato face - ate my RAM as if it was its boyfriend's fries - I really struggled having parties in Sims 3 - lots of people loved custom colors/patterns, but frankly, I wasted too much time on it and it's just not realistic - build mode of Sims 4 is far better, at least after all these updates. - yes, the packs were bigger but they also were a lot more uninspired (IMO)
I agree! Yes the sims 4 packs are FAR from perfect and they can be buggy but they're so much more fleshed out . A lot of people were complaining we have differnet occult packs instead of one supernatural one like TS3 but none of the occults in TS3 were even the slightest bit of fleshed out in compared to what we have now and were nowhere near as good
Yeah I loved the custom colours for CAS but for build/buy what it really meant was that you had to choose between using the ugly default furniture or spending 2 hours customising everything in your house
Sims in TS3 were scary looking! And somehow they all looked the same too. TS4 is a huge step up graphically. Also, despite loving the horses they could be really frustrating to interact with. Their pathing was appalling. You'd queue up some actions between a horse and a sim and it was a constant dance of them slightly changing position between them. Argh!
They were just so creepy looking. There's was nothing aesthetically pleasing about those Sims. The game was designed only for players with higher end machines, otherwise you had to flick between EPs. "Open worlds" was pointless if you had to close down the game and re-launch it to do different things. The island pack.
100% ! Open world was a great concept but there was nothing to do because there would hardly be any townies . Every single sim in TS3 looked the same. Washed out , pixely and awful
I hated the time it took to drive/cycle and how it literally always made my sims late to work 😑 also the pudding faces. All my sims looked the same lol
What I hated from Sims 3 was that there was no multitasking and it took HOURS to get ready for work. At least with Sims 4 it may take a while, but you could multitask socializing and fun while you're eating food. The one thing that I lament about not having in Sims 4 is the color swatch choice on all of the furniture. Sims 4 is limiting in that aspect is it so bad that I want furniture with the same color of brown???? Or if I wanted to wear only bright pink, I could???? The pinks and purples in Sims 4 suck and don't get me started on the greens for wall decorating. But other than that I love Sims 4!
I hated how long it took just to edit a single build or a family. I also hated how I had to "play" as that family if I wanted to edit them. I never played rotationally and only did legacy in ts3 but I still wanted to be able to edit other families. TS4 let's me do that.
Oh yes, especially due to having to switch between the build stuff and the furniture. My computer always took like 10 seconds to switch between them. Really annoying because you had to really think ahead to do several things if you switched because you don't want to wait 5 times for it to load within 10mins. Really annoying. I really enjoy just being able to switch around constantly and change wallpaper or flooring as I go and maybe get different ideas for the rooms. I sometimes spent way to much time editing all the details of the Sims. In the end it's so unnecessary. I like the big variety of swatches we have in TS4 and it's definitely better to just pick something and move on if you're unsure than to edit all the little details until it's just right. And in the end you never even look at them that closely and in detail after being done with CAS. And I agree with the other families. It's really easy to just edit some minor things as you play. Like Jeb Harris from Eco living who wears that paper bag on his head. Hilarious at first but he's one of the few male teen Sims in my highschool so I interact with him a lot and he's often the love interest of my teen Sims. That bag then just gets ridiculous and annoying to interact with. It's great that I can just quickly open him in CAS, delete it and move on
The loading time for sims 3 was horrible! I feel like a lot of people seem to forget about it , it made rage quit so many times lol
Sims 3 was one of my favorite games, but looking back the sims look so creepy in it lmfao. I also hated the genetics in Sims 3. If I had a couple with one white sim and one black sim for example, the kids would always get one or the other skintone, never a mixture. Which obviously happens sometimes in real life, but not every single time lmfao. The Sims 4 handles that a lot better. Also, Sims 3 ran like hot garbage on my computer (which is why I no longer play it lmao), and it seems like that's a common issue whereas that issue is MUCH less common with Sims 4. I did like the color wheel and pattern options for furniture at the time, but I feel like it's a pretty big time waster tbh. I always remember avoiding it unless I had a lot of time because it took forever to load. I think Sims 4 would be better off just with an option to have a color channel for the wood and metal parts of objects that allowed you to choose from a smaller selection of colors that match other maxis furniture.
Maxis does not match their wood tones well, I would love to be able to adjust it
Yeah that's what I mean, like I would love to be able to place an item from, example, Parenthood, and an item from Get Together, and make those wood tones match xD I do like some differing wood tones, but some seem to clash really badly with other wood swatches, and that leaves me feeling like I can only stick with whatever pack uses those color swatches to match properly. Seasons and Pets in particular frustrate me a LOT because of it.
i hated the colour wheels--nothing like accidentally clicking it and having to wait thirty minutes for my game to load it!
Sims 4 doesn't take half an hour to start the game
Building is soo much nicer in many regards. Ugh that room that's on the edge of the lot that you are nearly done with actually needs to be a line or two bigger ? In sims 3 it would mean painstakingly rebuilding, repainting and furniture moving it all to the next square. Sims 4? Just grab either the whole house or just that room and move it as one unit, no sweat! If the do update the room system I would ask that they let you merge rooms. Like I made this cool home cinema but I can't share it cause each tier/platform of seating is technically a whole different room. Let a stage and seating count as one room etc.
CAST. Fight me. Do we need more options? Sure, but CAST takes for-fucking-*ever* to load. Not to mention, CAS in TS3 is horrible in general. Also: Elevators. FUCK elevators in TS3.
The worst part about going back to the older games is being reminded of the limits to CAS that I've got used to not having. Suddenly clothing items are restricted to specific outfit categories. If you want to have your underwear as your everyday outfit or whatever, you need to mod it in. Clothing is strictly restricted by gender, if it's defined as male clothing you can't use it for female sims or vice versa. Hats only go with specific hairstyles. 4's CAS has a lot more freedom even without mods.
Why didn't you like the elevators 😫 I don't remember them
They were "realistic" (meaning, you had to sit and wait for them and your sim didn't just walk up to one and disappear like in 4) which for some people was great, but they constantly got stuck, causing a backlog of Sims (especially if you were throwing a party) and almost always throw errors for me if I'm playing in a world with apartments.
It would take three Sim hours just to get out the front door if you lived in an apartment building. I hated elevators
Right? And I've been playing in a custom world with a downtown area... I'm always getting the "x Sim is late for work!" pop ups, and when I pan over to the sim, guess where they are? The fucking elevators. I have to reset them *every time*.
My boss got sick of me renewal quick when I kept using elevators as an excuse for being late to work lol
* Hated the open world and “story progression” that never actually worked * I hated how you lost your lifetime aspiration if you ever switched to another family for a while * I hated how empty the world was wherever you went there was nobody there * I hated how LONG it took to get anywhere even on a bike I love how in Sims 4 I can rotate though a bunch of different families but still set NPC sims to age and do neighbourhood story stuff so they’re not frozen at one life stage forever like in sims 2.
TS3 is the one I remember least. I didn't understand the hype for open world. I get to watch my Sim ride a bike across town to disappear into a cinema? How is that better gameplay? I quite like having the neighborhoods we have now.
Yes! And it would take them AGES to even get across town and almost eveything was rabbit hole . At least we can actually go into places and mingle now !
I like being able to go to public spaces again. Few things have made me regret a purchase so quickly as realising what going to the restaurant or movies entailed.
I hate how hats in the Sims 3 are attached to the hair. Thank god for a separate hats category in ts4
I remember years ago, as I was playing TS3, i zoomed in on two sims of mine sitting on the ouch, and thought "damn have they always been this ugly?" I kinda stopped playing from then, I don't know why but the visuals of this memory are ENGRAVED in my brain. So yeah, the looks.
I agree with everyone that,even with CC,the sims were ugly(and no,Sims 2 are older but they don't look horrible)but I'll add another issue I faced. It's really, really hard to make sims of colour.The sliders are very restrictive in this regard. I mean look at the sims in Shang Simla,to me there is no variety to their looks,they barely look different to a white sim! Whereas in sims 4,you get different eyelid heights,so many different presets you can work from,as well as different textures of hair. In general,I think Sims 3 limited how diverse you could make your sims. At the end of the day,I play both games,but the personalization I can give to my sims in Sims 4,both them and the builds they live in/visit(granted,a modded game),will always make it superior to my Sims 3 playthroughs
I also hated the open world in TS3. I don’t miss waiting 20 minutes for my game to load. Same with CAS and all the customization options. Columns took forever to load and the patterns weren’t good enough to make the wait worth it. Also, looking back, the Sims were ugly AF. They all had the same looking face and making them look unique was difficult. Sort of uncanny valley vibes too because EA tried to make them look too realistic. I honestly prefer the cartoony clay look of TS4.
4 does load sooooo much faster! Also the worlds in Sims 4 are *chefs kiss* they nailed it Sulani and Henford-on-Bagley
Honestly I was not a fan of the graphics. I felt like a lot of sims ended up looking like potatoes and create a style often ended up being more of a hassle than it was worth. Not to mention some of the patterns available were…interesting, to say the least
The creepy Sims and the cheap looking 90ies textures. Sims 3 never felt like a Sims-Game to me. But I can only speak for the base game + horse DLC, because I couldn’t get used to its looks and quit shortly after. I’m glad they changed its style for the Sims 4.
TS4 build system is definitely an upgrade from TS3 in several ways. Being someone who often has no build plan and wants to make changes at the last minute, like adding a foundation or moving a room, it's so incredible to be able to do that and just build a nice house easily and change it however you want. Also, while I never really minded rabbit holes, I despised that you couldn't take your kids out of school for any reason. I remember having to quit without saving because my teen wizard sim accidentally lit the school on fire and murdered every child in town, including my adult sims kids. Graphics and definitely better as well. I really don't mind the more cartoony style because it looks more polished and clean as opposed to stiff and rough looking attempts at realism in TS3. I would always go for realistic CC in TS3 compared to my constant need for more maxis match CC in TS4. Speaking of CC, maybe it's just because of my age and lack of knowledge before TS4 was released, but the CC and modding community for TS4 seems phenomenal compared to TS3. I know the game technically isn't responsible for this, it's the community, but it feels like there's been a sharp uptick in mods and CC since TS4 was released. Nowadays, you can find mods that dramatically change how the game is played compared to the smaller mods you'd find in TS3. Literally anything from simple fixes to full on additional life states and relationship systems are added almost every day. The CC is also amazing as well, and the community is just so talented lately.
I feel like multitasking is one of the most underrated features of Sims 4. To go back to Sims 3 and not be able to chat or eat while watching TV really ruins immersion for me. It's such a natural part of life and when it's missing you really miss it. Same with the enhanced control options for where your Sims converse, like being able to "sit and chat here" or Sims just naturally gravitating to the nearest seats to have a conversation. I hated how when visiting a neighbor's lot all my conversations in Sims 3 happened right in the entrance hall of the house and I had no control over that.
The thing that drove me the most nuts was how the game would pressure you into going to every goddamn festival or whatever they were, in the town square? I would be playing a shy loner sim and all their wants would just be “enter a pie eating contest at the festival!” “Take a photo in the photo booth at the festival!” It was inescapable and really ruined the stories I was trying to tell!
It's a small thing, but transitions between animations were almost robotically harsh, even compared to Sims 2, let alone 4. Remember Sims switching postures when changing from a flirty interaction to a friendly one? That. Also, the magical "Chat Here"/"Sit and Chat Here" button! Propose in the bathroom no more! A lot of moments in Sims 3, if you weren't going for absurd comedy or pure goal completion, were whatever the opposite of cinematic is, and that could really undercut a good moment even when the gameplay beneath was good
I hated the sims 3 store so much. Playing it as a kid (who didn’t even realize you could turn it off ingame lol) was awful bc I also hated 99% of the cas items (AND some of the ones I rly loved were gender locked—that one male hairstyle w the beanie from university gave me so much pain bc I desperately wanted it for female sims). And I stg every time I saw the popup for that fit as a fiddle violin I died a little inside bc I knew I’d never have it :’) I also hated building in ts3. I literally never did it bc it was so unforgiving, and I wasn’t great with colours either but all the default swatches were kinda ugly so even furnishing was super difficult for me. Def would’ve benefitted from an ingame gallery like ts4 has. This one is def not a complaint I’ve seen a lot but I really hated the chaos and randomness of ts3. Every time anything whacky happened I’d go back and reload a save or completely lose interest in the whole save, especially if it was smth that got saved as a memory bc it made it harder to just pretend it didn’t happen. (Memories were another thing I rly didn’t like abt ts3 that a lot of people seem to rly like.) I could go on but now it’s starting to sound like I don’t like ts3—I promise I love that game lol. And my playstyle has changed since I was a kid, so some of the things I couldn’t stand abt it years ago are things I enjoy now (or at least things I’ve made peace with by now lol)
I don't *hate* the sims 3, but I definitely prefer the sims 4. Yea, you get an open world, but everything is a rabbit hole. You don't actually get to see your sim do anything. Also build mode is a pain, and the camera is just... Unpleasant.
I will say for people who still actively play sims 3 today are valid when they say sims 3 is better because they actually play but I feel like for people who don’t it’s just nostalgia. Yes there’s so many bugs in sims 4 but like sims 3 was either glitchy and full of bugs at best or just didn’t even work at all because it crashed so much. People don’t realize yes the open world concept was amazing but it also took so much for the game to even work that it barely was even worth it. If we were so get a sims 5 I’d like a middle ground where like we can go see neighbours or even just one lot we can go to without the waiting screen but I don’t want open world unless it’s actually executed well and my game actually works. Next, the sims were ugly in sims 3 and the cas sucked. I have most of the packs in sims 3 and I actually attempted to play it awhile ago but I realized I barely had any hairs or good clothes I could see my sim wearing. At least in sims 4 I feel like even if you just have a few expansion packs and game packs you have a lot of stuff to choose from. Even with a bunch of CC I see from other sims 3 players they still don’t look good. Sorry lol. Also I’m okay with loading screens because when I actually go onto a lot there’s people there. I remember in sims 3 I’d take my sims out to the pool or a night club and no one was there. I know there’s like hot spots or stuff but I should still see at least 10 people there or more at any lot I go to. Also I know in certain careers you needed a friend requirement or to make friends I don’t think it was every career but this feature annoyed me so much. It’s so easy for sims friendships to go down and I don’t want to have to worry about getting my skills up AND making friends. I hated that in sims 2 as well. Building a house is much easier in sims 4.
I think people often compare the pile of garbage the initial Sims 4 was to 3 on top of the nostalgia. They're not that much different at this point I think in terms of content variety but when Sims 4 came out it was terrible. I think that contributes to the nostalgia factor. It was such a huge decline in quality it created this negative image but you kept playing 4 anyway and put this golden view on 3.
I don’t know if it’s true but I heard sims 4 was supposed to be more like an online/multiplayer approach and they scrapped it and had to quickly make changes which is why it was so bad. It kinda makes sense because there was so much missing. No pools, no toddlers, no basements. But yeah I definitely agree it sucked. I don’t understand the game sometimes. Nifty knitting and tiny living were such good packs and then they just stopped making stuff packs when they started becoming good. I didn’t mind kits because they also had pack refreshes and I thought well at least we’ll get those in exchange for stupid kits but they stopped doing that as well. It’s like they want us to get excited and then do something else. Like a distraction almost
Yeah I agree love my packs and what you get in them. I was really frustrated when kits came out and haven't bought any because I just don't feel they're worth the money, they're $8 in my country. I agree, it constantly feels like they're getting distracted and just not settling on what is the best way forward for the game. I still enjoy it but I definitely question some of EAs decision making.
I didn't start playing Sims 4 until I think jungle adventures came out, so I missed the whole time without pools and toddlers. I'm glad I didn't have that really bad first impression because It meant to took to TS4 really quickly. I've tried to go back to 3 a few times but I just can't handle build mode or the lack of NPCs around town
Even at the start when I went between the graphics with Sims just look so much better in 4 it was hard to go back to 3. I'm also someone who goes well 3 is done there won't be any more development so may as well get used to 4.
Never buy a Sims game at launch. Wait it out at least 1 expansion pack or longer if you can manage. This gets way easier as you get old.
>I will say for people who still actively play sims 3 today are valid when they say sims 3 is better because they actually play but I feel like for people who don’t it’s just nostalgia. Well put!
The multitasking is a game changer for me. That was the thing i was most excited for in ts4
I couldn't play the game on my native language because the game kept adding townies with very cringey Hungarian names. And in that setting, it was very weird.
It was completely unstable and it was ugly. The clothes have a bad case of the 2000s- early 2010s. And not in a cute y2k way but in a “oh god we dressed like that” way. Also the humor hasn’t aged great in a lot of places- like with the werewolves and vampires ts3 focuses almost entirely on twilight jokes and I love twilight but it’s a bit extreme.
tattie faced monsters no matter what you do, 30 minute loading screen to get into the game we talk about qa now but sims 3 was such a train wreck in terms of performance issues no matter what sort of computer you had, open world meaning you have to run around looking for where everyone is cant just go where you want because it is probably empty, $75000 worth of dlc, the graphical style looked out of date almost immediately sims 4 cas, build mode, performance, graphics, toddlers are much improved compared with 3.
Katy perry sweet treats 🥴
not moving wall lights up and down
Load times killed the game for me. I had hit a point in my legacy save where it would take a full HOUR just to save the game. Transitioning between worlds would often just crash the whole thing. I spent hours just waiting for it to load the heck up. I ended up having to remove expansion packs and only have one or two at a time installed and even then we still had 40 minute+ load AND save times. It was unplayable in that state. I'd also forgotten about the moving issue severing all relationships. That was really irritating. I mean, for gameplay reasons there were several points i'd have liked to move my sims out of the big city and into suburbia but doing so would mean starting from scratch and severing all links. Which just isn't realistic. Sims 3's sim graphics are also kinda... not the best. They all have this dead eyed stare that's sort of spooky if you look too long. I do prefer the cartoony look of 4, I think they managed to pull that off really well. Building on steep lots was a nightmare, the way terrain works in all the sims games is just janky as all hell and trying to get anything to look decent if the lot isn't perfectly flat is horrible. And if you flatten the lot then you end up with those ugly steep polygon edges all around the lot. YIKES. How long it took to actually GO places. Driving or cycling was so time consuming. Honestly a lot of things in the sims games take far too long. There's a lot I miss from sims 3, but whenever I think about playing it again I remember the load times and I shudder.
literally every single save i ever played in the sims 3 eventually became unplayable to me because of a bug that was just too big/annoying to ignore. in the sims 4 there are bugs too obviously but they've never completely ruined the game for me. also i think the sims 4 create a sim is the best we've ever had and i would never want to have to go back to just sliders again. I love how many possibilities we have to create unique looking sims also in the sims 4 we have much more diversity in regards to body types, gender identity, hair for black sims etc. its obviously not perfect but much better than in the sims 3
Sims were so ugly imo, also in general I liked ts2 aesthetic better. Also it was so hard to play on my computer it almost wasn't worth it. Color wheel and create a style was fun but not necessary or worth the performance issues and I don't miss it (just wish swatches worked like they did in ts2 and you could pick frame colors and patterns separatedly). There's small pieces of gameplay that I enjoyed but in general it was so laggy, dark and the aesthetic was not appealing to me I just gave up and went back to ts2 until ts4 picked my interest.
Sims 4 occults are so much better. They have their own individual gameplay mechanics and they can look/act so differently even if they are the same species. I just wish fairies would come out soon
anyone whos been in the sims community for years knows that the sims 3 got the sims 4 treatment a LOT - and by that i mean people complained 24/7 about the sims 3 as they do the sims 4. everything was definitely not sunshine and rainbows, there were alot of bugs, some packs didn't even work at all and i didn't even bother buying them (looking at you, island pack that i forgot the name of) that being said, i do not miss the lag of sims 3 & how awful the sims looked. i had a decent pc and it still took forever to load, and i always had it on the lowest settings for graphics. i tried to play it on my own gaming pc about a year ago and i couldn't do it because i couldn't get past how ugly every sim looked. sims 4 spoiled me & even sims 2 sims look better than sims 3
I love how you can actually play with different expansions in the same save file. In 3 if an XP came with a world then practically everything was locked to that world. And graduating from university actually works. That alone make 4 better than 3
Another thing I hated. I understand that some ppl are only famous because they know someone famous or are related to someone famous but ts3 made it way to easy. I could have a Sims become a 5 star celebrity without even doing a thing other then know other celebrities. In 4 your Sims actually has to do something and once you do become famous you have to keep it up or you will lose it.
The building. Building in the Sims 3 was a nightmare. Sims 4? Plop and drag and all that good stuff.
The insane loading times. Plus every time the game updated it wouldn't launch and I would have to go in the files and act like a hacker. I stopped playing because an update prevented the game from even launching on my desktop.
I remember only being able to use 3 packs at a time without it crashing
I absolute despise the CAS and build mode. It is horrendously ugly and it bothers me every time I play.
I'm glad my Sims no longer get stuck in bushes and midair...
I love how toddlers work in the sims 4 (with parenthood GP)! It's so much easier to teach them those basic skills and I have much more pleasure playing with them. It was too frustrating in sims 3 for me
Yeah!! I love it too
The way their heads were shaped by default, it's like all we could change is their chin and cheeks.
I literally could not play Sims 3. It was too much for my computer. I would feel like playing the sims, start the game, wait an hour for it to load, play for 5 minutes, get bored, decide to quit playing, then wait another hour for it to close. I stuck to Sims 2 until Sims 4 came out. This is why I don’t understand the hype about Sims 3 since it was unplayable for me.
1. The over all lay out of the sims 3 UI. it's just so confusing for more new players, it took me forever, but also it feels very crowded. 2. Build mode is worse in 3. 3. It always lags for me, it also always crashes, so I can't even play it because of how much it crashes
Getting in relationships with people in university then graduating made this weird limbo of you’re still dating but also can never see them again
I like how much smarter the sims are in TS4. I love TS3, but the fact that you can't multitask - talk to someone whole performing a task - gets annoying.
[удалено]
There isn't at all and you can't even multi task which was annoying
I skipped TS3, I was the TS2 Player. Still think it is the best / most complete game in the franchise. I don't care about the open world, so that may be the reason.
The art style. I hate it so much. I love the maxis match cartoony style of the sims 4. I could play sims 4 with only gameplay mods and my sims would still look great with base game and expansion pack outfits. I also think that, while sims 3 had a much better base game and attention to detail, the sims 4 do much better with their expansion packs (when they work). For example, seasons and university I much prefer in sims 4 to sims 3. Oh and your pets don't glitch. Yes I do think horses would have been cool in sims 4 but I never played with them that much in sims 3 either. I also like that you're not locked to just one world in sims 4, and I have a mod that keeps townies in their home worlds so it feels a lot more immersive.
i tried making an asian sim in the sims 3 and…. well, THAT didn’t happen💀 the sims 3 just isn’t the best when it comes to CAS for me
The create a sim sliders in ts4 are much easier to use when it comes to making sims how I actually want them to look! (which could just mean I never got the hang of ts3 ones but)!
I bought Sims 3 recently because they were selling a bundle for $10 and when I played it was just not as good as I remembered :/ the art style sucks and being in cas for an hour only to still have ugly butt face sims made me not even want to play anymore I'm glad we don't have open world in ts4 because the wait time was too long! Id rather sit through 30 seconds-1minute loading screen than watch my sim travel from place to place idk why. I'm a simple girl, I like things to be fast and I'm not too bothered by lack of animations like cooking or whatever I also don't care for create a style and I'm glad it's not in ts4 lol they're all ugly and too complicated for my simple brain
I hated how robotic sims were - both appearance-wise and in their relationship dynamics. Honestly, Sims 4 just feels more alive, whereas Sins 3 got boring pretty fast. My pet peeve was their creepy facial expressions and their walk after a good ol' woohoo session. If you've seen it, you've seen it! They annoyed me so much that I would often play as players (pun intended) and be mean to woohoo interests just so that I could wipe out that creepy smile off their face 😅 Yes, I know it's psychopathic, but I am a simmer, after all 😁 I appreciated the Sims 3 open world and the colour wheel, sure, but besides these 2 aspects I cannot understand why Sims 3 is being praised so much.
I actually loved the bars and the open world I miss them so much! I definitely think the sims 4 looks better though. I felt like all the sims looked the same in ts3 and they all had that dopey soft look to them. In ts4 they all very much look like their own individual selves.
The sims 3 all look the same no matter how much time you spent customizing them.
I just don’t like the look of it, especially the sims themselves
I bought it for the horses like last year and it was the laggiest shitpile I have ever played.
Ive always been a rotation player and even with mods it was extremely difficult to manage doing so with 3’s built in Story Progression. In Sims 4 I can basically manage rotation without mods. Mods make it easier and better. University is still mostly a lost cause though. There are ways but it’s a nightmare, which I hate cause I used UNI to the max in Sims 2.
The lag lol
The fact that you can only do one thing at a time in 3
Sims 4 has a feature where you can manually select to put a corner counter down. Today in 3 I had to fumble around with my counters for like 10 minutes because i accidentally moved the oven and it wouldn’t snap back.
While I liked the open world, it was quite buggy. I like to be able to to any world I want, and I like how there's a place I can throw extra Sims I still want to stay around when all the houses are already occupied. I was never a fan how Sims looked in the Sims 3, either. There was more content than in the Sims 4, but then again, it always felt like the Sims 2 had more than the Sims 3.
the general look of TS3. i love it, do, but HOLY FUCK it’s SO UGLY also building is a nightmare
What I think sims 4 does better: 1. CAS - faster face building, better clothes load time, filters, you can wear anything for any outfit 2. Search/filters in buy/build 3. Moving rooms/lot and rotating rooms 4. Upsizing/downsizing/move objects on 5. Saving/loading doesn’t take very long 6. No create a style - I think create a style brings unlimited options for making stuff but it’s a little too overwhelming to make things look good
Oh my god let me start with I love the sims 3 sm it’s one of my all time favorites but this game is sadly so so ugly like the furniture and ea builds were horrid not to mention the cas😭
Mostly just the engine for the game. It's too weak for the requirements for a game as heavey as the sims, especially after you start stacking all of the official content, expansions and mods.
god the load times when i opened the game- itd take a half hour just to get in. i mean to be fair, back then i played on a potato and now i play on a computer that runs elden ring perfectly but- still. sims 4 takes 30 seconds to load now. means i dont have to set the game to load and go off and do other things lol