@Sk8rblaze I feel you. I don't want to spend a bunch of time hammering on the same points, but I do think there are some recurring themes of issues that have a cascading effect. Some of them named already in this thread, including the topic itself.
The one that's a bit of a mystery to me is the sameyness feeling of sims. I've thought at great length about that one countless times and I don't know what it is the other sims games do that make sims feel more distinct, in terms of personalities (probably in part because I haven't played them - if I had free access to them, I'd probably do it out of curiosity, but they ain't cheap when you add up all the content :tongue: ). As the system is now, it's hard to imagine how you would make each sim feel unique without a boatload of added content to individualize things.
I did that mod where you can lock/unlock skills and I think that helps for some user control over personality, but it seems like the greater issue may be that sim behavior is almost too well-refined. Like it's orderly and prioritized to the point of being boring in how predictable it is? Or maybe it's too reliant on particular objects being present?
From the way people talk about the other games, I wonder if their autonomy was actually less precise and so it created more of a feeling of random behavior, which helped keep it interesting? I know people talk about the likes/dislikes stuff in TS2, I think, but I don't know how defined that looks in practice compared to TS4. There are traits like Loner that are pretty heavy-handed as far as disliking being around strangers. But I don't know if that's the kind of thing people are talking about when they bring up likes/dislikes, or if it's more subtle than that.
