But I disagree. Sims 3 wasn’t just badly optimized. It experimented with things that are impossible to get done in a simulation game like the Sims. The open world was incapable of handling the simulation of all those Sims and bloated itself up to ridiculously unstable sizes. CASt then broke what little stability the game still had with the idea of making every single texture interchangable. Both great ideas in theory but they should have never gone past that idea-stage. The bad optimization and the ridiculously lousy coding of the simplest tasks, such as cleaning up Sims that got stuck were only the icing on the cake.

The build mode of Sims 4, by all accounts, is incomparable to Sims 3. And I mean that in a positive way. True, you don’t have terraforming and popular cheats of the past are gone. But if you know what to do with the Sims 4 build tools, they become more versatile and more powerfull than any cheat Sims 3 had to offer. Something that is proven by what great builds you can find in the Sims 4 gallery.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I liked Sims 3 for what it was and enjoyed those 5 years despite all to trouble the game made you go through to be able to enjoy it. They had some nice ideas, no matter how badly executed they were. But I am a Sims 2 player at heart. I grew up with the unforgettable charm of that game. A charm Sims 3 completely failed to deliver. I would have given up all those great ideas of Sims 3 in a split-second if it had given the game the charm and stability of Sims 2. And that is exactly what I love about Sims 4. It works. It won’t destroy its own performance with bloated save games, useless textures and a ridiculous amount of background simulation. I doesn’t feel the need to show off with big arguments like an open world. It’s biggest argument is the age-old formula of the Sims that had been missing throughout the entirety of Sims 3. It has its own charm that is so similar to what Sims players loved about the first two games. It brought back the heart and the roots of the franchise and especially with the first Expansion Maxis showed off that they are really back to were Sims games came from, by delivering an amount of new content and attention to detail no expansion could deliver eversince halfway through the Sims 2 life-cycle. Personally, I haven’t played Sims 2 once since Sims 4 was released. Something I was never able to claim throughout all 5 years of Sims 3.

You can feel free to like Sims 3, as I am free to like Sims 4. And you can feel free to dislike Sims 4. But a comment like “sims 4 sucks sims 3 on the other hand = pure bliss!” won’t earn you much respect!

An actual civilized conversation like your last post, however, will…

(Also good job on upvoting yourself, darling!)