Generally agreed, although I feel that The Sims 3 is a little overhated sometimes, though some of the complaints are valid about it trying to do way too much and of course that's when the aggressive $1000 worth of expansions for features which were in the last basegame era really began. As of late people seem to be looking back on it more fondly than before, though you'll still get the people who claim The Sims 4 is "better" because muh pronouns and because the graphics got knocked down so many pegs it can run on a calculator. I'm convinced that most of the people who try to play TS3 on modern hardware are trying to run it on a fucking potato, which is why the people with potato computers prefer TS4. Yeah, it was a big fucking problem when the game first launched but modern hardware shouldn't have an issue. I don't have a supercomputer, my PC is pretty pedestrian and lacks a discrete GPU but TS3 runs mostly fine on it when the game isn't spawning 400 copies of the fucking ice cream truck.
I've seen sentiment that people hope that "The Sims 5" [whenever EA is done milking TS4 of $30 'packs' that are worth like $5 and buggy as fuck] will further downgrade the graphics or stick with the same design as TS4, simply because they want to be able to run the game on a Dell Inspiron from 2009 with an i3 and integrated graphics. Buy a new fucking computer. They would have been in real trouble in the late 90s and early to mid '00s when your PC was obsolete like two weeks after you built it because shit was moving so quickly. At this point they're holding the series back because the community demands it be compatible and run well on ten to fifteen year old hardware.
Not that the series is going anywhere good anyway, if TS5 ever does release it will likely be a complete shitshow and I would wager it'll be the last in the series. Then again the "Sims community" complains and bitches constantly about EA's money-grubbing and releasing broken shit but they'll still line up out the door to buy the next pack, so maybe it will be very successful.
Late but I generally agree with this. The Sims 3 got too overhated because so much of the 'target audiences' are people with potato computers.
In term of game play detail wise, The Sims 2 is the greatest, it has so much details, so much stories, mysteries, and little interactions that give its depth. The Sims 3 is missing that a little, but The Sims 3 was also an extremely ambitious game, the open world and texture customisation are huge technical leaps - you can recolor everything, you can go anywhere, the dramas play out in real life. It's got loads of content, if it wasn't because of its obvious bugs and performance flaws, and if it had more consideration in some details how expansion packs interact with each others, It's probably seen as much a better game. I also think its quality dropped off later in its lifespan because EA became greedy with the store content halfway, but the early releases were solid.
The problem with The Sims 3 problems vs The Sims 4 is that The Sims 3 flaws are
flaws in an otherwise a complete and well-thought out game. While The Sims 4 has always been bad in the direction level, there's no technical leap except a leap in marketing department. a lot of systems got removed for performance. (hint: maximising sales) The whole game was literally frakensteined from a failed multiplayer spinoff, launched with barely any content, the expansion packs are released as numerous tiny DLCs instead of huge packs like 1-3, and a lot of updates are to appeal the politics of today. If you think like a business man you can see that The Sims 4 make sense, It's like a hyper target audience market tested game, the blocky cartoony graphics without alpha so it can runs on any potato school laptops and casual moms' computers and looking more appealing to casual audiences, smaller DLCs because it incentivises people to buy more, the content generally following trends and modern twitter anxieties as opposed to the 'satirical soap operas' style of The Sims 1-3 because it's so 'realistic'. It also feel a lot more sanitised, everything is pretty, quirky and inspirational, and everyone can live in pinterest-worthy homes. It feels like if corporate alegria flat art was a game.
The Bethesda is very heavily carried by the "Bethesda formula", which is how the players explore the world and experience it. That wanderlust is what drives the games regardless of the decline in writing. Overall Oblivion has far better written quests than Skyrim but Skyrim is more beloved because it peaked the wanderlust experience from the combination of the world and Jeremy Soule's music. It's like 80% of the reason why people even played through Starfield for more than a dozen hours. One of the many faults of Starfield however is that it committed the cardinal sin against the Bethesda formula by forcing you to fast travel around instead of letting you wander. I honestly expect TES6 to be probably the worst written Bethesda game to date but it will still be well received as long as they don't fuck up that sandbox and gameplay loop.
On a related note to what I talked about The Sims above, the offputting things about Starfield is that how streamlined and design-by-checkboxes it feels, the amount of liberal lip services on an otherwise nonsensical world (and I'm actually left-leaning compared to most Kiwis), You have that laughable nightclub, the pirate bar literally being called 'bar', and they sing a song that feels too on the nose about piracy, it just has no worldbuilding and subtlety. Things are just made to be a setpiece, nothing more and less. And the problem is to day with its direction, and that goes beyond writing. Skyrim main story is boring, but if you ask many players, they'll ask 'There's the main quests?', because the little details, side quests and explorable places they put in the world are a lot more fun than the main quests. It definitely has its charm because lots players are not lore nerds, they just like a fantasy world they can adventure in, that the characters feel alive, and there are consequences to your actions.
Fallout 4 is where I feel like it's getting sanitised, bright and appealing to casual audience, and it's very clear that they're trying to ape the success of other games at the time. The popular opinion is to fully hate it. For me It's more of a 'good game but not a good Fallout game'. I hate Fallout 76 a lot more though, it doesn't need to exist, and it's full of corporate money-making decision in the same way I said about The Sims 4 and Starfield
