I feel like the only one who had their enthusiasm dropped by the trailer and presentation. It seems more like an open world platform to show off modding capabilities than an actual game. It feels more Second Life than The Sims. Given that the Early Access release is only six months away, the footage looked like it belonged to a game way earlier in the development process. Aside from the jankiness which will probably get buffed out (hopefully), the world is so dead, again, early in development, it could change.
The lack of "rabbit holes" gives me pause, while others here are like, "yay! I can finally watch my sim check emails for eight hours", and I like that retail services are not locked behind a rabbit hole, I'm concerned how this is going to play out. The Sims 3 worlds, while pretty, they were dead, especially worlds such as Bridgeport and Roaring Heights, which are supposed to be urban. What is the cap of people going to be? 200? 300? And all these people are going to spread out doing their own thing?
Then, the actual open workplace themselves. From what we saw, while again, early in development, a person's entire job for the day was do 5 "work tasks", not a work task in particular, said task included stocking a shelf. Is that the entire work day? Stock three shelves and you are good to go? How well will this be automated by unplayed "agents", and this is before we talk about schools and such. I have a feeling most of these careers will be office or shop work, and very few that require their own interactions and activities.
It seems like the dev is going down the Roblox(?) route of getting modders to build all the content, while I know a lot of people here love and can't live without their CC and mods, to me a lot of looks like it clearly wasn't made by a developer. Think of it like DeviantArt, there are some great pieces of artwork, but that buried by all the poorly made stuff by delusional artists and ai generated stuff that it easily gets lost. Not to mention, I've seen lots of players struggle with the Sims 4's roof tools, they are in for a fresh new world of pain with the tools shown off in this, Paralives and Project Rene/Sims 5.
I have a similar issue with both Paralives and Project Rene/Sims 5 since both seem to be more focussed on build and buy with only limited promises of what the game itself will be like. Note, this was a trap The Sims 1 almost fell into, which originally was going to be a game centred around building - the sims only existed to support and complement it, until they brought in some new devs who convinced the team to focus on the sims themselves (children weren't even going to be in the game until some new dev pointed it out).
All the focus seems to be on the distracting bells and whistles, and little on the actual gameplay itself.
Maybe I'm an overly negative and pessimistic person. Sorry for rambling, I hope I made my points across clear.
