Open Neighborhood Rather than Open World
In TS3 the entire world was open and i think this contributed to difficulty running the game. In TS4 the active lot and a portion of the neighborhood within the world is open. I'm not sure if this can...
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Open Neighbourhood worked beautifully for The Urbz, The Sims 2 Pets (Town Square on console), The Sims 2 Castaway, The Sims 3 for Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3.
Open World was poor to mixed on PC/Mac (base game was well received, but the results changed with DLC), and terrible on the Wii (despite EA & another team working on it from memory).
Every attempt at Open Hood has been done well, both attempts at Open World failed. The Sims 4 worlds as they stand also fail.
Tech hasn't changed that much from 2009 & 2010 to say that Open World with a Simulation can work, without it being way too complex and expensive for EA to manage over time.
You either have a closed world like The Sims 2 console (create different locations with proper backdrops) or you build an open hood. This whole closed world within an open space makes no sense, and Open World clearly is too much for EA to maintain with a post-release budget for the base game.
It's clear that EA get next to no budget to maintain the base game post-release, so it has to be as easy to maintain as possible (they don't yet to have the budget to fix the shadow jump bug etc).
Open World was poor to mixed on PC/Mac (base game was well received, but the results changed with DLC), and terrible on the Wii (despite EA & another team working on it from memory).
Every attempt at Open Hood has been done well, both attempts at Open World failed. The Sims 4 worlds as they stand also fail.
Tech hasn't changed that much from 2009 & 2010 to say that Open World with a Simulation can work, without it being way too complex and expensive for EA to manage over time.
You either have a closed world like The Sims 2 console (create different locations with proper backdrops) or you build an open hood. This whole closed world within an open space makes no sense, and Open World clearly is too much for EA to maintain with a post-release budget for the base game.
It's clear that EA get next to no budget to maintain the base game post-release, so it has to be as easy to maintain as possible (they don't yet to have the budget to fix the shadow jump bug etc).
