The lack of backstory/lore for families in TS4 is something I've never been able to understand. Especially when they did such a an in depth job of the item lore... like Princess Cordelia's items, and the paintings of Lord Lycan and Lady Sanguina.
I've played one save file since I bought the game, and have played around 1200 hours. Recently though, the lack of generational history has really been getting to me, so I decided to start a new save file and add all the families/history from the previous games using the info from sims wiki.
So far I've added the full family history with all connected ancestors and relatives for Goth, Landgraab, Alto, Monty, Capp/Thebe, all ghosts have graves at a large cemetery so sims can visit their ancestors.
It's a lot of work but to be fair, if I was employed on the TS4 team, this is something I'd be advocating for and would expect to be working on. Lore is surely the most important thing when creating worlds. Just look at LOTR, GoT, Vampire Chronicles, and other successful "story worlds", the lore is thick and consistent.
