I think one reason our sims “all act the same” is because they gravitate towards the same autonomous actions. When I am wondering what my sims are up to, 90% of the time they are dancing to music. I can see that being common among Dance Machines, or any sim at a nightclub, but not for EVERY sim everytime I look away for 5 minutes.
I desperately want to see autonomy make sense! Lifestyles are supposed to help with this. I have only noticed it with Energetic lifestyles - they will use treadmills or the climbing wall on their own but that wasn’t unusual before, anyway. Maybe as I get more experience with lifestyles it will become more clear. But right now I am not seeing many autonomy changes with lifestyles, even though in game options it clearly says lifestyles are supposed to have an effect on it.
It has been hugely disappointing to not get more traits added in every expansion pack. We got ZERO new traits with Discover University. And some traits that have been added in packs feel like they should be bonus traits or lifestyles. Being a cat or a dog person isn’t deserving of one third of a sim’s personality, IMO. I would have preferred those to be reward traits.
Honestly this is probably an unpopular opinion but I don’t think TS2 was better in terms of personality. All my sims would autonomously talk through teddy bears. All romance sims felt the same to me, and so on. The personality points scattered across 5 measures really only gave you 10 extremes. And then the star signs forced certain attributes which I didn’t like.
I really liked traits in TS3 and I never ended up using them all, I wish they had just stuck with those. There were probably too many silly ones, but that never bothered me because we can change them and they had more trait slots. We should have more than 3.
ETA: I would love to see favorite color, music and food return (or similar favorites). An attraction system would be awesome as well! If we can change the turn ons/turn offs with a reward potion or something, of course.
