I do hope in a way it is open world, and fully modifiable. No fake buildings and unusable lots. Decorative buildings are objects in the game--just look after you've enabled buydebug mode and liveedit objects. I'd like to be able to simply delete those and build on their lots. It is one of my many major annoyances with TS4. Each world should have a small town area with a police station, fire station, hospital/medical clinic, and stores.
Game features in TS4 have a bad habit of being limited to the worlds and hidden lots with which a world ships. While in TS3, they were added to every world;
A powerful, and easy to use world builder should ship with the base game as well.
But on the other hand, given my experience with TS3, it depends on performance Hopefully, it will run a bit better than TS3, which tortures all but the highest end computers. My laptop has an i7, but when playing the game, my PC gets so hot, I could probably fry an egg on the palm rest (which isn't helped by the fact the Itronix GD8200 has poor cooling anyway). The one I'm typing this on is a proper gaming PC capable of running TS3 pretty well (and so far, is the first and only computer I have owned with dedicated graphics), unfortunately, out of the box the RAM was bad. My games (and anything involving a lot of processing power) would kill the PC; requiring a reboot. The beep when it started up was BIOS code for bad RAM. Hopefully once that's fixed (and doubled from 8GB to 16), it will work great.