GTAIV which at the same time felt like it had a smaller scope than GTASA.
Yeah, the issue with IV was that R* made an in-house game engine that was very impressive, but not good enough yet to make something as big as GTA:SA.
It's worth reminding that with GTA 3 you had three small islands, and you could only drive cars. Bikes weren't implemented, and the plane code was immensely shoddy (if you tried flying the Dodo you'll know), plus the map wasn't adjusted for flying anyway (if you visited the Ghost Town you'll know). With Vice City you had two islands, but they both were bigger in size. You also how had bikes and helicopters, and also more weapons and a clothing system.
San Andreas pushed it all to the max with a gigantic map that was possible with real time streaming, whereas previously every island was loaded in whole, you had more vehicles like rotor planes, jets, military VTOL's, hovercrafts, dune buggies, and so on and so forth, your character had a full clothing system AND a physique system, you had way more side activities than before, it was massive, especially for something out of 2004.
The issue that IV faced was that it couldn't be as big as GTA:SA because it would make the game way too demanding than it already is, so R* stuck to this scope that's close to Vice City. You only have cars, bikes, and helicopters, you have a few islands, and even worse, you're in Liberty City and you cannot explore any countrysides, so obviously people were upset about it. But overall GTA IV was a massive technological improvement over the older games, and while GTA V might've had a bigger map, there was even less to do on it than in SA, and R* dumbed down a lot of things that made GTA IV's engine great. Hell, the driving model in V is even less realistic than the one in SA, the cars are firmly glued to the ground while in SA they still had a degree of realistic grip.
The Sims 3: feels like it should've been a separate game, you have this town you can walk around but you have little impact on it, would've been better to have a town you can build and have a bunch of sims instead and follow them around, choose who you want to control and leave the rest to the AI, pick up whenever you want, etc.
I feel like Sims 3 as it is could've been great, but the issue was that the code of the game was way way worse than even the one in Sims 2. Sims 2 already suffered from world corruption, but Sims 3 took it to another level, with mods that could completely break everything, and even worse, add that broken code to every other mod or anything custom made.
And if that wasn't enough, the "load and simulate the entire map at once" idea led to the performance crippling, especially with every new expansion pack, as EA was adding too much and the code was too shoddy to handle it all. Even today, if you install every single possible mod to get the game running better, it will still run worse than Sims 2 without any perfomance tweaks.
