Open world was an amazing concept for Sims 3 but it was not executed well. In my opinion, the game was coded poorly. The worlds has so many routing issues it was ridiculous. When you had modders having to fix tons of routing issues just trying to make a world playable, we have problems. I also believe the devs limited the Sims 3's potential by trying to keep the code simple enough to run on dinosaur PCs. I also believe this is part of the issue hindering sims 4.
I know many people say they run Sims 3 fine but I guarantee they are all running it fine with twallan's mod and most likely the routing fixes for each world. The only way I would want them to do open world again is if they upped the required spec to gaming PC level because anything less we will be limited once again.
