This game is so underrated!!

You are right it was very much underated and unappreciated as a stand alone game. Once you get the hang of things you can take a lot more time between quests and live as much a normal Sim life as possible like in any of the other games, other than controlling other household members. But my Sims got married, had affairs, ruined lives, got in fights, got diseases, made a lot of friends and all sorts of thing inbetween any quests as I rotated among the heroes. It has a lot of TS3 interactions and TS2 interactions so it was a pretty good game in my book. My favorite theme world I created and played was LOTRs, some of the main characters of those books were my hereos...interesting to play it that way. lol Gandalf probably wound up being my best character. Some ambitions I enjoyed more than others, and I just wish they had patched a few of the quests that got flawed and never worked right after it ended.