I really do miss Sim's 3 open world and cars.
And also that mod that let me run over people.
I sometimes see people, mostly women, asking about what kind of laptop to buy to play Sims 3.
The funny thing is that there is no machine that can run that game well, because it's not the issue of lack of performance. It's the issue of spaghetti code. When you have a large neighborhood with many Sims, buildings and all of it running in real time, it will take a shitton of time to load even on an NVMe SSD and it will cause lags even on a top of the line CPU and GPU. EA did a shit job at optimizing TS3's open world and the code is what restricts performance, not the hardware.
There is a mod called SmoothPatch that manages to optimize some of that spaghetti code, so at the very least customizing items and Sims doesn't lag when the game tries to load all the available choices. This is the approach needed to fix TS3, to reverse engineer the game and then inject code into it that corrects it's shortcomings, much like SilentPatch does for GTA games. Unfortunately you don't have this much autism in Sims modding community to fully fix Sims 3 that way.
Same thing happened with GTA V's loading system, where someone diagnosed the issue, created a code injection patch to fix it, and ended up getting paid by R* for finding the issue and fixing it, where the fix ended up getting officially implemented in the game. Except GTA V is a 10 year old game that's still supported by the developer, and The Sims 3 is a 14 year old game that is abandoned by the developer and lives thanks to it's community.
I haven’t played 1 and 2, I’m really excited to.
Do play them. I have fond memories of both. Played a lot of TS1 because my friends lent me a copy of TS1 with the Vacation expansion, and I played it a lot, and also gathered a lot of custom content for it. A whole bunch of it wouldn't load because I didn't understood it required other expansion packs I didn't own. TS2 I remember because my sister got a hold of a pirated copy of it, that wasn't cracked properly, so you couldn't build shit. I also collected a lot of CC for it.
In some ways Sims 2 is better than Sims 3, and if you went from base Sims 1 to base Sims 2, it felt like a much much bigger evolution than just a sequel. To this day I believe that Sims 2 pizza slices are the best looking pizza slices ever implemented in video games. It was a fantastic game, and it's theme song legitimately makes me cry from nostalgia.
Reminder that the best spot for The Sims 1, 2 and 3 is
Games4TheWorld. They also have all Sims 2 and Sims 3 store items to have the full package. For Maxis items for Sims 1 your best bet is to look at Internet Archive, a lot of TS1 CC has been archived there. There used to be a site called CTO Sims many years ago, but it unfortunately disappeared.
I wish we had bigger worlds. Going back and realizing you could actually make whole neighborhoods/worlds in Sims 2-3 is jarring.
There’s barely any lot space to do anything with, even after demolishing default builds.
I’m also sick of not being able to control lot size like you could before. Tiny lots are miserable and makes you play the same areas repeatedly.
I pirated Sims 4 to try once and that was the most jarring thing that I experienced.
Sims 1 had a simple 2D isometric neighborhood view, because the entire game was very primitive like that. The only 3D objects were the Sims, the pets, the plumbobs and the few things that they hold when doing something. Everything else was 2D sprites. And the neighborhood was static, the lots were static, the decorations were static, it was very limited, and you were limited in the amount of empty lots you could use for building. It got a bit better with the expansions, such as expanding the neighborhood with Old Town and giving you six slots to switch between, even though it was the same static neighborhood.
The Sims 2 was a completely different world and if you went from 1 to 2 back in the day you really fucking felt it. The entire game was 3D, and so was the neighborhood. It was massive, and in the base game you had three of them. And the best part? You could fully customize it however the fuck you want. You could move lots however you want, you could add empty lots by any road to expand it, you could save what you built to place it somewhere else, and you could decorate it in any fucking way you'd want. It was one of the many things that were jaw dropping when you moved from TS1 to TS2.
The Sims 3 took that even further with it being open world, with the entire neighborhood playing out in real time. Before that, both Sims 1 and Sims 2 had to reload the game whenever you went between lots or families. But with Sims 3, it all became one live game, with the only loading happening when you switched neighborhoods, whether it was you going to University, going onto vacation or going to the future. Yes, those were long waits but it was still a single dynamic world with no loading screens whenever you went from lot A to lot B, or when you changed which family you were playing.
And then Sims 4 did something unimaginable. After all those amazing leaps in the game design they... made the neighborhood screen a static 2D screen. That somehow looks worse than what was done in Sims 1.
It honestly insulted me. Sims 2's neighborhood was simply amazing, a gigantic leap from Sims 1, with Sims 2 still being a lot loader much like 1 and 4. But for some reason they didn't even add a less customizable 3D neighborhood in 4. They just added a lazy soulless 2D neighborhood.
Now they could excuse this with TS4 being initially planned as a mobile game so it had to be restricted. But that does not excuse the complete lack of a 3D neighborhood that could've been simplified for phones but still remaining as a proper 3D render you could rotate with two fingers and tap to access lots. And that was only the tip of the iceberg that is the sheer amount of regression Sims 4 made after so many gigantic leaps with Sims 2 and Sims 3.
