What The Sims 3 Does Better- Carl's Guide

"Simburian;c-17666131" wrote:
If Sims 3 was given a complete makeover in 64bit, with all modern uses of screen sizes, video cards catered for it could be a great hit again as it had very good ideas, too great to work with 4G memory.

If they ever did that, I know I would never load TS4 up again. And, I think that EA would fear that would happen with a lot of other players too. That the old TS3 players would go back to that game and never buy any more packs for TS4 nor move on to TS5. Keeping it a broken rage inducing laggy mess is a way to force players to abandon it.

If EA was smart tho (which we already know they are NOT) they would actually remaster it, include some things from TS4 that they're so proud of, update it to 64 bits, give it a little facelift with the sims themselves and rebrand it to something like "TS3 Re-Imagined - The Next Generation".

And, I'm pretty positive people are setting themselves up for severe disappointment regarding the 64 bit MAC version update because they think it will also include a 64 bit update to PC. The only reason why they are updating it is because people who have purchased the game and packs who updated their MAC can't play a game they purchased. People on PCs can still run the game, it runs like c-rap for some, but it still runs on windows operating systems.

I know there's been tweets and posts on Reddit showing conversations people have had with EA Customer Service Reps regarding the update and the person said it was coming to both PC and MAC but I'm not sure if that's really the case.

The post from MaxisJoe back in June was on the EA Help Site MAC Technical Forum and he did not state anything regarding the 64 bit update including a PC update.

MaxisJoe

Hey macOS The Sims 3 players!

Just popping in to give my monthly update to you. First is the tl;dr version:

Yes, we're still working on it
Yes, we're adapting to work-from-home. I can't say that this is a core factor in things not going as fast as we'd like, but it sure isn't helping.
Yep, that switch to ARM processors is exciting. Like all macOS developers, we're frantically assessing what this means to us and our games.

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/the-sims-3-64-bit-amp-metal-release/m-p/9257271#M7664

"Placebo7;c-17666347" wrote:
Thank you for posting this. My laptop had a hard time running TS3 back in the day, but watching this video really makes me wish I had this game now. Watching the movement throughout the city, the random interactions between sims who meet on the street, the meaningful activities...man, what a better game. And this didn't even touch on relationships and personalities in TS3, which I also think were much better!

@Placebo7 little tip: buy the game second hand. It's a lot cheaper and you won't be paying 40$ on 10 year old expansion packs.

When I see videos like this I wonder what the sims4 would have been like if they would have tried to make it like the sims3. I don't feel that their decisions that they have taken with the direction of the sims4 have really worked.

I will admit that I like the sims4 more than I liked the sims3, but Carl is not wrong.

This is the reason I still play ts3 even after ts4 has been out for six years. I play it almost daily and I still find new things I didn't know about even after eleven years of playing.

"fruitsbasket101;c-17667254" wrote:
This is the reason I still play ts3 even after ts4 has been out for six years. I play it almost daily and I still find new things I didn't know about even after eleven years of playing.

I still play it too. Especially in 2020 since I didn't buy a single pack for the Sims 4.
Fact is, sims 4 without new packs gets boring quickly, unlike previous games.

I'm going to guess (by what I saw way back at the release of TS4) people who played and loved TS3 never even moved over to TS4. I would guess 99% of people who loved TS3 (more than TS2) didn't buy TS4. But I would also guess about 50% of TS2 players did buy TS4 because we believed a somewhat 'open' district was going to be better than a closed lot. And we had said a lot about the AI in TS3 where it seemed they took maybe too many seconds or minutes to interact after a command. However, we also see TS4 as expressive as those Sims are, doesn't have the depth of TS2 Sims, so, I think still to this day TS2 is the better game. It's just that TS3 added so much more in packs, and the store (clutter) as objects to use and surround the Sim with junk. But I know I am still waiting on an actual restaurant in TS3. I have to say I love restaurants in TS2, but TS4's DO is better than the restuarants in TS2 by how they are served, what foods and drinks they can order, ordering more foods, etc. But TS2 had table interactions for romantic interactions so for every thing gained there is always something lost. TS3 is a huge game, it makes me wonder why they ever thought anyone who loved TS3 would ever switch to TS4. Maybe TS2 players would for awhile but not diehard TS3 fans. I have to wonder how much revenue they lost by about 99% loss of players from that group of Simmers. Too bad, because even TS4's fanbase is starting to get fed up with Maxis chasing new players and not listening to even them on what content and improvements even they want to see.

ETA: He made good points, and to answer his last question, yes, I never really fully appreciated TS3 until TS4. I wasn't keen on big list in that game (as he pointed out) about skills and with fishing and all that other stuff, but it offered rewards and things that added to a personality. My only real problems with TS3 was it was extremely overwhelming to me, the AI sometimes seemed slow to interact, and some things never were added from TS2. But it is a huge game, really huge, so, yeah, I remain shocked they call TS4, The Sims' fourth iteration. Maybe it is actually a side game, spin off.

I'm the same I LOVE what I experienced in sims 3. It's an amazing game. But I'm having so much fun with 4 right now i probably won't commit to it until later. I tried but can't play two at once.

I agree with a lot that he's saying, however a counter point - he mentions right away at the beginning of the video that a common complaint of TS3 was that it was slow. This wasn't just a complaint for me (and I'm sure others had the same problem), it was a deal breaker. During the era of sims 3, I was playing on a Lenovo laptop. It was an incredibly fast starting laptop and it couldn't open TS3 CAS without crashing. This meant that after many painstaking and frustrating days I finally managed to pop one family out of CAS only to be doomed to play only that save forever without ever being able to edit the family again because I couldn't deal with the game crashing and not saving every time I tried.

Beyond the performance issues, I fell in love with a rotational play style in TS2 and not being able to do that in TS3 took a lot of fun out of the actual gameplay for me.

I don't have much time to play a lot of games, but back in the days I upgraded my desktop just to run the Sims 3 properly. Why? Because I had a desire to build my own worlds and have my sims live in them. I converted part of my mac into a windows operating system, only so I could use CAW.

Watching this video makes me feel a little 'homesick'.
I really love Sims 4 for what it currently is and in my opinion it does some stuff much better than 3. However...

When Sims 3 runs the way it's intended, it really is a fantastic game.
Can't beat the open world, cars and those...unicorns. The Horses are done incredibly well! I'd never ask for a horse, but this is an exception.

With the Nraas mod you can get rid of all the cars and just travel by horse (or unicorn) if you want to live in a historical or fantastical world. A world which you can just build yourself in CAW or at least download from the gallery.

The customization in TS3 and the feeling of openness has always been something else though.
I must say that when I played the game for the very first time, the open world was quite overwhelming, but it didn't take long for me to absolutely love it. And I actually miss those insect and small animal spawners. Turtles...I remember them well... :D

One day I'll get back to it. It deserves my attention again.

For me, TS3 will always be the game that felt the most like a living world. There were no kids running around in the parks when they were supposed to be in school. If you were speaking to someone on the phone, they were somewhere in the world, actually speaking to you on the phone! It wasn't all make-believe.

That level of simulation takes a lot of computational power. I can't help but wonder what a modern-day equivalent would be like now that technology has advanced so much. That's what I hoped for TS4. In the end, the devs decided to chuck the simulation almost entirely in exchange for nice visuals. Yet, the strangest thing: TS4 still has "simulation lag", so go figure.

So much sacrificed for negative gain.