It doesn't lag on my computer . I have never timed it, but my impression is that it takes 2 minutes or less to load everything, from the time I hit the icon for start to the rendering of the town. I have a fair amount of CC and mods. Having said that, I admit that I play on a high end gaming laptop. I understand that it doesn't perform that well on lower end spec computers. I did read somewhere that Sims4 was designed to be functional friendly on those computers with lower specs.

TS4 is more goal driven than sandbox for my playing style. I have it and my mindset is different playing 4 than when I play 3. To that end, I wish that EA would consider them 2 separate games and support both as they would support any two other different games in their stable, and continue development for 3 . .

I've not experienced a lot of the problems that many players have discussed in these forums and other forums in general. I've just installed Island Paradise a few weeks ago and someone said that it's the laggiest EP ever. I've experienced it and to be honest, it's not the kind of lag that frustrates me as Its happened about twice now. You want lag? Go play an MMO with a server that's full or at high capacity and see what stuttering, rubberbanding and LAG is REALLY all about.

Anyway, ran into this little piece of info about DRM in Sims 4. Here's the link: http://www.reclaimyourgame.com/cont.../389-The-Sims-4

Yep, stuttering, rubberbanding (I like that term!) and LAG describes my experience with Island Paradise. I play it anyway because it's so beautiful, but even with Twallen Mods and a fixed Ellacharmed world, the game just stops regularly for several seconds or more while it figures out some routing issue that is no where near my Sim. Just freezes. And I just sit and wait to do whatever action I was in the middle of. Sit. Sit. Sit. This happens many times within even a brief 30 minute play session and I only keep playing because, as I said, it's so beautiful and I love the special things that were added with the island (mermaids, deep sea diving, hidden islands, houseboats, resorts, etc...) Before Twallen and Ellacharmed, the stoppage was minutes worth. Couldn't do anything there for more than a few minutes at a time. Yep, that's unplayable. I feel bad for all those people who buy the game and do now know about the fixes that Twallen or Ellacharmed made available. I think of all the kiddos who would never think of adding modded material. It's just sad.

I believe, based on what I read here, that my experience with Island Paradise is more typical than yours. I'm very happy for you that you can play IP without great interruption.

I had a lot of expansions for TS3 but it was worth it. Eventually my game did die and I lost my 13ish generation legacy family (but I could go back to an old save file like a generation or two behind I have on a USB). Still worth because I got SO many hours of play from it. With TS4, I feel like I've played something like 30 hours or less (origin says 52 hours but I've left it open a lot) and I'm already bored of it. Hence why I'm on this website; already trying to find challenges or new things to put in there. I would be doing an old TS3 challenge of having a guy make as many children as he possibly can in his lifetime, but there's not enough families. In my legacy now, I'm just mindlessly going through their lives.

Game Grumps was complaining about the lack of seamless travel from place to place, but (for me at least) TS3 loading times where awful, it took almost ten minutes to open the game and another to actually start playing. Plus it was slow and would often give you an error message if you played for too long without saving, forcing you to quit and start playing from where you last saved. I'll take a few quick loading screens over that any day.

One complaint i do have about TS4 is the lack of CAST. I hope they add it in a future expansion, or a modder creates it.

Bad news: At this point, it's impossible for CASt to be added to the game.

If you have problems with the saving error in TS3, you should go to your save folder and delete all files with the .bad ending. I thought it didn't function at first, but i recently discovered that i missed one and can now play TS3 again. But it is a shame, that people even have to do stuff like this on their own. Thx for that, EA.

Not necessarily so. Though the code for a modder to do so would be rather difficult. It can however be accomplished via standalone tools like Caster.

Well, anything is possible if you put your mind to it, but I seriously doubt any modder is going to make CASt. Caster's probably the best we're gonna get.

A standalone which allows you to recolor an objects, or groups of objects, outside of the game is useful, but not as seamless as using CAST in game during buy/build or CAS, when you can see the effects in "real time" and work through an outfit or, for decorating, an entire room AFTER you decided what objects you wanted where and then used your color palette to make everything complimentary. That was the beauty of CAST, recoloring as you moved through the environment, rather than planning everything out in advance, exiting the game, locating all the items you decided you wanted to use, recolor them, and then replace them after restarting the game. Way cumbersome to be a viable solution.

And at this point, with all the objects in game already created without recolorable channels, it's not something that can ever be added in. Unless every item was replaced by a patch with newly recolorable channels enabled, and I don't see EA doing that, ever.

How entertainment and ‘life’ give life to The Sims

Sims 3 is one weird game because the way it plays on different machines seems to be all over the place. I played the base game and WA on WinXP with a dual core CPU and a not very great graphics card, etc. without lag - my biggest problem if I remember correctly was saving - would get error 12s back in those day especially as the save got bigger and bigger. And didn't have Error Trap so had trouble with bad saves sometimes I think.