Is TS4 still very predictable?

I'd suggest reading into the Neighborhood Stories update, it might create the kind of unpredictability you want. It's possible to make the game more chaotic with deaths specifically, but the ideas off the top of my head all require packs or mods.

The game has never been pure chaos for me, excepting times when I've done something foolish like make Cast Spells a club activity, but my sims do plenty of things I don't expect, and often find very funny.

However, I allow my sims a great deal of autonomy in their little lives, and mainly operate as a sort of benevolent presence. I can't bring myself to harm or kill them, it would be like abusing a hamster or something, but they can sometimes temporarily find themselves in strange situations of my making. (They always end up better off for it though.)

Some of the spontaneity in past iterations is still missing from Sims4. But with the use of mods a player can tweak the game into one more to their liking. Up to the release of Island Living I had managed to play a lightly modded game and be happy with it. That EP totally decimated my game, and it required months of work on my part to put it all back together into something I actually liked to play. The one plus with Sims4 is it can easily be modded. I ended up with just under 100 mods by the time it was all said and done.

There have been many times when I played in offline mode for months simply because updating my mods every few weeks became a chore, especially when I wasn't interested in the content of the newest game update or the newest packs or kits. I have fewer mods these days but the ones I use have created a new game that is immersive and has the spontaneity I desire. Sims4 has a huge modding community that has kept the game from being a total loss and waste of my time, in my opinion. When EA decided to attract a younger fan base, that's when Sims4 became a bit pedestrian, and the unexpected, often amusing, surprises were toned down in order to keep the Teen Rating in place.

Sims4 will never be a Sims2 or 3, but with a bit of research and some grit, any player can add a few mods that might bring the game closer to what they want it to be. I thought it was worth the effort to at least try because I had already spent a lot of money on Sims4, and I wanted a return on my investment. I'm one player that will be very happy when Sims5 is released. Not because I am going to start from scratch for the 5th time, but because I will be able to play Sims4 without needing to update my mods every month. Just thinking about all the time that will save when I would rather be using that time to play, brings a smile to my face. :)

Here are some of the things that bring in The Unexpected to my game, in ways that definitely interfere with whatever I was planning, but I'm the player who likes that sort of thing:

- Werewolves. More controlling players can use the option that limits them to Moonwood Mill. I just leave that option off.
- Aliens. I learned on this forum that visiting a bar on Alien Night (Tuesday?) encourages more aliens to appear in your game. Many of the human-appearing guests on that night will be disguised aliens, as well. Playing some of these aliens briefly and then marking them unplayed again will encourage them to show up in the background undisguised more frequently.
- Alien abductions. The more you interact with aliens the more likely it is that you will be abducted.
- Celebrities. Celebrities are very disruptive.
- Weather and weather effects. Thought you were going to have a regular ol' boring wedding on the beach? Try having a wedding on the beach in a thunderstorm! Whee!
- Having ghosts on the lot. Whether added to the household, or just appearing periodically from their urns. They don't break stuff as much as they used to, but they scare people more often, and many everyday activities are just weirder with ghosts involved.

In TS2 and TS3, I would plan out story-lines as a general guide for game play, but usually something would happen that would take me in new directions. New sims would enter the picture and their interactions with my sims would inspire new directions, or some crazy random event would happen.

I don't get that as much with TS4.
There personalities don't have as much social alchemy as the other games.
Things have gotten better with Sentiments and such, but I hope the next EP adds even more.

I definitely understand about there being controversy with big events, like Sims moving out or dying, But I'll never forget discovering that freaking freezer bunny in front of my fridge in TS3 for the first time. Just when I thought I could expect the unexpected after finding a genie lamp that had never been mentioned, Maxis went and surprised me again by adding something genuinely freaky. Good times. :'(

For me personally, it's still pretty happy, sunshine, and rainbows with not much happening unless I deliberately force things to happen.

If you have neighborhood stories turned on, random sims die and you get a pop-up telling you who died and how, sometimes it doesn't make sense.

Also, again if you have NS turned on, the townies (and sometimes your own played sims if you forget to configure that household) will continuously spit out baby after baby or adopt pet after pet. Again, these don't always make sense, because households could literally pop out kids every other day.

I have mine turned off because it's way too much. I also use a mod to stop the phone calls.

Plus the phone calls from NS again .... doesn't always make sense. Like I've seen where people have had phone calls from one sim to another active sim, and these 2 sims are actually in a relationship already, say that they found a ring in the other sim's purse or something like that and they think they're going to pop the question and should they say yes. So basically sim A, who is already in a relationship with Sim B, is literally telling Sim B that they found a ring in their gf's purse, and Sim B is ACTUALLY THEIR GF!

No Sense At All!

I've also seen people say that they've gotten a call asking if they should try for a baby and when the player said yes was notified they had a baby, yet when they went to that household to check on them, there was actually no baby.

Now, a few weeks/months ago there was a bug where EVERYBODY was mean and angry constantly, regardless of their traits or relationships with the other people. They were just ridiculously rude and constantly fighting. But that's been fixed.

Not sure how recently you played, but they also introduced Sentiments, which can NOT be turned off, and sometimes your sim will get a festering grudge against someone for something stupid, like a toddler who gets one against her dad because he made her try and go potty and it carried over to when she was older.

Now, if you have the HSY pack, I guess you can get crushes and from what I've heard you get a million people barging in asking you to be their BFF, and if you say yes, then you lose that status with anybody you already were BFFs with. If you say no, then your relationship takes a negative hit.

But pretty much, it's about the same as it's always been since the beginning.

Oh yeah, if you use the telescope, you are almost guaranteed to die by a meteor crash...... every time (unless that's been toned down). It's not like how it was random in TS3 and would just happen every so often.

Same boring game it’s always been.