I was thinking about this last night when I was supposed to be sleeping and I'm guessing I just hadn't asked anyone on a date so my only experience is going "out", so out of town. I assumed that my Sims would be able to date and create families without my interference but apparently that isn't so. I've been fighting this game (Ts4) since I first played it and it's one step forward, two steps back, every time. Not having free range, I hate. I don't understand why they didn't at least let the simmies mingle in the same set of 5 puny houses without having to travel. It means that if I want to keep an eye out on sims at home next door, I have to travel back and forth, which is really stupid. While I don't remember much about TS1, I know that my families in TS2& TS3 were able to get jobs, meet partners, have families, etc. With the "normal" aging so short in this game, rotating turned into its own nightmare. I did manually change those days, even though that doesn't take into account that pregnancy retards aging through the process - again, asinine.
But all of those old single sims serve no purpose. They don't move the game or story forward. And with the limited neighborhoods (5 lots & 3 "blocks in Willow Creek), there just aren't enough other sims to partner up. I've read/watched a couple of interviews where EA developers talk about how quickly they were able to program TS4 because of not having to deal with the CAS patterns and open world and it really feels like they sold out. It's pretty obvious that they tried to build a multi-platform game that doesn't work well on any platform. But oh, the lovely money.....
Anyway, pondering the whole date thing kinda p***ed me off because it is apparent that what I'd read about EA leaving so much out in order to make even more off this game appears to be true. The 2nd and 3rd EPs both address the issue of mingling Sims (I guess) so it's pretty apparent EA understood they'd left out what they could make even more money from. 32 packs and counting. (TS3 only had 20 and was a far superior game.)
