Here's my thought on the snow, for what it's worth:
As far as the information released so far goes, we have the exact same gameplay features relating to snow as we did before. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but we still have Snowmen, snowball fights, snow angels, etc. We might have more, we might have less, we won't know for sure until more info is released, so though we can speculate, we shouldn't be making definitive judgements on the gameplay one way or the other.
The depth of the snow, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It's an aesthetic feature. One that the devs thought they couldn't reproduce to look good on the Sims 4. So whole I see a lot of people saying that we don't have equal or fair trade off for the snow depth, I have two major thoughts:
1) how do you know? We haven't had the full features list, how do you know that the thing they focused on instead of deep snow isn't mind blowing and a total game changer?
2) as far as I can see, the trade off for deep snow is the texture of the snow itself. I love sims 3, but the texture of the snow on the roofs was jarring to me personally. It was a small pattern repeated and it was obviously so. The screenshots of the snow on sims 4 may look flatter than before, but it looks beautiful. It glistens in the light, it doesn't look like one pattern repeating itself. There are patches on the roofs that aren't as thick where the chimney or dormer roof has partially protected them, as there would be on real life. It fits in with the Sims 4 art style beautifully. Of course, this is a matter of opinion, and some people will prefer deep snow, even if it doesn't look as good texturally (is that even a word?), but I'm saying that I can see where the devs might have made that decision, and why it made more sense for themselves to do so.
I'll admit that I was disappointed in the lack of depth originally, but as more pictures have come through, I am more than happy with the trade off. To me, the depth has been replaced with detail, and I can't wait to experience it.
