I don't want story progression. As someone whose least favorite game in the series is Sims 3, I think it would destroy the game for rotational players. That was Sims 3's biggest flaw - abandoning rotational players to put excessive control in the game's hands.
However, story progression did make more sense in Sims 3 because the game was initially designed to play one household per save.
But Sims 4 has a lot of rotational players now because it's better designed for it. Invasive story progression would screw up those games in a very huge way. The only reasonable option is to have it only affect NPCs and maybe households marked "unplayed", and have it be able to be switched completely off. Because, I get it, there are no new generations being created and the world's die out and it's no fun having to manually go into each household to create children.
But it's a slippery slope, because even Sims 3's progression doesn't completely turn off, and I don't want to see Sims 4 get tied into the same forced gameplay. As it is, even if it were programmed just for NPCs and townies, any of those Sims that a player was engaging with will be at risk of being whisked away into a nuclear family with Ganji Sakamoto, the senior pear. So there also would need to be some recognition of player Sims' relationships.
And my worst fear? Game bugs and how they would affect the game worlds and our Sims. I think I'd completely lose my mind if I had to wait for a fix for a story progression bug that takes control of my Sims when it shouldn't.
