Well, one of the first things I look for in a world I want to play in is the playability of the world. Is all the routing good in the world that I want to stick my sims into. Are my sims going to get stuck. If there’s serious routing issues then it starts to make the world unplayable because sims get stuck and play gets bogged down.
I tend to go for smaller worlds since that tends to work out better on a computer with a combined processing/graphics chip(APU) - now that I’m thinking of getting a gaming computer with a dedicated graphics card, I might look at playing the larger worlds like Great Bear.
Just because townies come pre-installed in a certain particular world doesn’t mean they have to stay in that world. But I always tend to look for townies who are interesting: River McIrish and Bebe Hart in Sunset Valley, Samantha Grey in University, Constance Shelley in Riverview. Your mileage may vary.
I also pick worlds based on what kind of game I’m playing. If it’s a legacy, I might start out in Sunset Valley where I know most of my favorite Sims. Secondly my OC sim can beat the ever lovin’ tar out of Jared Frio. None of my sims like him. If I’m playing a Supernatural Legacy, I might play Moonlight Falls. I haven’t bought Midnight Hollow yet (I don’t like vampires; I’m partial to werewolves). For my Castaway story (I don’t play challenges - I’ve never liked rules), I made myself a nice little island in CAW, no roads, but a mice beach and steep mountains. For Apocalypse stories, I chose “Les Sims 3: Sunset Died”. But for me now it has entirely too much vegetation for a town that has been blown off the map by a nuclear warhead.
I tend to look for worlds that I can populate with my own “family members” in a legacy so that tends to mean multiple 64x64 lots, Enough community lots to place down all the amenities. My sims basically are homebodies so bars aren’t important to my sims. This is part of the reason why I’m starting to make my own worlds, is because that way I can make them specific to how I want them; put in what I need. If I want a specific post apocalyptic world complete with burnt glass terrain from a nuclear weapon being detonated, I can make it myself and not have to ask others.
My next goal is to start making worlds specific to my stories that I can populate with my own sims with CAW. The royal pain right now is getting the roads to link up without causing an annoying routing issue. And frankly, that will take some time to sort out when I start making my own worlds with roads in CAW.
