"RobinGreenthumb;c-16981398" wrote: Look, I will consistently rank Sims 2 as the best (and sims 3 as the worst simply because of playability issues although I will sing the praises of the ideas in it. Even if those ideas crashed and burned on a regular basis, literally), but Sims 4 has it's place. It took me awhile to come around to it, but Sims 4 is more of a life sim instead of a sandbox sim, for better or for worse. Like. This was obvious from day 1 but just became more and more obvious as time went on.
I really dislike when people think their PERSONAL experiences with a game are FACTS.
The truth is that The Sims 3 runs fine on my PC (even without mods, though mods help keep performance more stable). I build gaming PCs for a living and I've tried The Sims 3 in 20 different systems I built and it runs fine in all of them. Why? Well, because The Sims 3 relies on drive speed more than the average game. It was a design decision to offset the 3.5 GB memory limit (initially 2GB). So The Sims 3 is constantly reading and writing information to your drive (cache files) and if your drive is slow, it will throttle your CPU and you'll experience lag and other performance issues. Since my standard is to use an SSD on EVERY gaming PC I build since 2013, performance isn't throttle by having a slow drive.
This is how it runs on my midrange gaming PC with every EP/SP and a lot of CC using Island Paradise content:
It's not rocket science. It only takes having a GOOD system. And with good I don't mean fast CPU and/or GPU, which is what other games mostly rely on for performance, but a BALANCED system with no weak links. Most people who claim to have powerful gaming PCs turn out to still be using a hard drive (or not having TS3+save game folders installed on their SSDs). A hard drive is five times slower than an SSD.
Could The Sims 3 be better optmized? FOR SURE. It's not a well optimized game, to be honest. There are memory leaks, especially when using the Create-A-Style tool. Most EA worlds are poorly optimized and Sims get stuck all the time (you can reset them with resetSim *, you don't really need mods). Custom worlds overall give a much better experience because CC world creators are more thorough with painting routable and unroutable terrain and testing, on average. The Sims 3 will always be hampered by being a 32-bit program. It was designed in the late 2000s, when 64-bit system were the exception, not the rule. If it were able to use more RAM, it wouldn't need to cache to your drive which is much slower than RAM. In reality it was too ambitious for its own good and developed in a transitional period (from 32 to 64 bits)
What's important is that you don't take your OWN experience as a general rule. It's definitely possible to have the game run fine without mods or super powerful components. It just takes to know a little bit what the game needs (a fast drive) and build a balanced system.
"RobinGreenthumb;c-16981398" wrote: Comparing Sims 3 and Sims 4 is bunk, Sims 3 was a terribly executed game anyway which honestly should've waited ten years from NOW to be made vs 5 years ago, and Sims 4 is a life sim not a sandbox sim. Yeet.
This is 100% your opinion and it's not a fact. The Sims 3 was too ambitious for its good like I mentioned, but I believe developers were clever in the way they managed to offset the 32-bit RAM limit. Create-A-Style wouldn't have been possible if they hadn't find a way to reliably cache to your hard drive and use it as VIRTUAL MEMORY. They probably didn't expect to add so much content (lack of foreplanning), but most of their decisions were sound for the time.
Remember, The Sims 3 was developed between 2005 and 2009. Do you know how many 64-bit games existed before 2009? A dozen or so. Out of million of games.
As someone who studied computer engineering for 2 years, I can't help but admire the way engineers managed to realize their ambitions and make a game that is 100% playable (without lag as you can see in my video), in spite of the the limitions of technology at that time. Less capable engineers would've scrapped the open world OR create a style.
