I absolutely miss creating my own original towns and being able to set the map type, terrain type, lot sizes, and neighborhood set pieces myself! I always make original towns when playing TS2 and have NEVER played any of the pre-made 'hoods. I like playing my own stories with my own cast, thanks.
It was really disheartening for me going into TS4 and having to play pre-built, pre-populated neighborhoods where most of the good-sized lots were either claimed by pre-made households or at least pre-made homes that starting sims couldn't even afford unfurnished (and, heck, even some of the puny lots have starter-unfriendly homes on them). And, of course, it's a pain in the butt evicting everyone and then having to go into build-mode and bulldoze each lot to create a blank template...which you must then devote a whole un-touched save to so you can spin off other blank starters using "Save As". Then, of course, there's the fact that playing the same dang towns in every single save starts to get slightly stale after a while, and building community lots gets kind of repetitive thanks to those checklists. I mean, does every club really need a garbage can? A can that our sims never even use?
So, yeah, as far as world building goes, this game is very lacking. TS2 is a better game in terms of that aspect because there's just so much more freedom and versatility. TS4 is kind of the Madlibs of world building...
