In all honesty I do not think open world was bad at all from my perspective and you will get various opinions from different players. I rather enjoyed it and felt it was the next level of evolution for the Sim series but all in in all how it is received for me is how well it is maintained and looking at the track record on how well EA/Maxis takes care of its bugs it was very poor as for me as I feel it still the same for Sims 4. I am not going to lie but I did experience some problems with the program and it is not due to my systems which was if anything was above requirements. if anything it was due to EA/Maxis programming which was beyond the end user control.
EA/Maxis decides to cut everything as if starting from scratch for various reasons such as use of properties from an project that was cancelled. The program was the last program that could scale up or down to what the end user was using and Imho it was EA/Maxis handling and also some users trying to use an program beyond what it was not built to do. The way I come to this conclusion and I was fortuate to have over 4 systems with variuos configurations that I played Sims 3 off and I would get various levels of gameplay but not the problems most players was complaining about with the expection again from problems on the developer side such as the lag in China, the release of an erronous patch released prior to Ambition release, and IP which was all EA/Maxis problem and could be solved by modders and was not properly resolved by EA/Maxis but all in all even with these problems I was able to play. Sims 4 is what it is due to poor handling of it's own program.
