Kind of a loaded question I know, but I want to know what people think about this statement.

As many of you probably remember, TS3 had a fairly vocal margin of people at the beginning who were not fond of the direction it was taking. This had a lot to do with mechanics, performance wasn't a huge issue yet with the lack of packs but it was still there. But for all the things TS3 tried to do differently from previous Sims games, I feel as though a lot of criticisms directed at TS3 were unfair. I'll note that out of respect for others' opinions I don't want to tear anyone apart for what they enjoy. Just want to throw out what I've noticed over the years.

Take Story Progression, something we'd never seen before and likely never will in any official capacity again. The ability to simulate an entire town of Sims that live their own lives independent of your own Sims. I was so blown away by this. It wasn't the first game I'd seen with multitudes of NPCs, but it was the first where you could see them all being actively simulated at the same time. Many people that enjoyed rotational play felt left out, and several people skipped TS3 altogether because it simply didn't offer what they wanted. That itself is fine. What did EA do though? Instead of trying to improve on it, they dropped it altogether. Same with CASt, hugely innovative for The Sims and we're likely to not see it, or at least something as advanced as TS3's take, again. Were these features absolutely perfect? No, of course not. But there should be something said for those that did enjoy these features. And the one thing that I do get tired of seeing is people throwing both of these in the bin to excuse EA's laziness. I can understand not using a feature much, but saying "No one used it much anyway" or "SP and CASt were stupid features that always lagged anyway." isn't good criticism. It's just telling EA that they can get away with charging more for less.

Also, and this is a big one with me, I feel like TS3's technical problems are blown waaaaay out of proportion in the sense that people push the game as being literally, and I mean literally, unplayable. I've spoken with enough people here to know that isn't the case for everyone. I don't claim that TS3 doesn't have issues. It is probably the single worst optimized/spaghetti-coded game I've ever seen, but I love it in spite of those flaws. Many tout TS1/2 as the golden years of The Sims. TS1 definitely had the difficulty and quirkiness factor. TS2 was a great game as well, but this is where my point begins. I used to get so tired of seeing this, because everyone seems to conveniently forget that god-tier TS2 was prone to all sorts of problems that could permanently destroy your game, and as someone with anxiety issues, that's not a great thing to have lingering over your head. Corruption issues plagued TS2, yet TS3 is always seen as the point where everything started falling apart. Now, with TS4 there are hundreds of issues that still haven't been resolved, simulation lag is rampant, Sims drop actions from the queue, and TS3 is still thrown under the bus. By the actual developers on top of that!

I guess what I'm really getting at here is that is TS3 always doomed to be the odd one out in The Sims, or has it gained more appreciation over the years? Do you think some people have never tried it because they were scared away? Let me know what you think.

Really? I was not aware of this. All I know was when I first saw the TS3 trailer video... and the sim joggin' out of her home lot, my jaws dropped in amazement and I was never the same again.

The old TS2 fanbase who swore by TS2 in 2008, who still swear by TS2 in 2019, have every right to have their own opinions about TS3 but I don't think anyone can seriously claim it's responsible for the downfall of The Sims. Time has shown not even TS4 can be held responsible for such a thing.

Having said that I did personally have mixed opinions about it in 2009, and it took me some time to get over them. I don't think I even had any serious interest in it until after Ambitions was out. And yes, there's a certain lack of quality compared to TS2. The Store was pretty sleazy in many ways. I will tell you any day that TS2 is a better game than TS3 but then I'll play TS3 for several hours every week, while I haven't even touched TS2 at all since 2017.

omg, you just described me. lol

I have never felt 3 was the odd man out. It is my favorite of all the versions and where I am spending my time now. And IMO it was not the downfall of Sims in any way and I have never seen IMO serious posts to document that it was. People have 4 choices and can play whichever they choose and IMO there is no need to bash the other versions.

TS3 isn't really the downfall despite the shortcomings. The downfall was Will Wright moving on, and EA turning into soulless greedy fuckshits in the early-mid 2000s.

That said, I bet if you were to ask this question on the TS2 forums the corresponding replies would be drastically different. Me? I'm old fashioned, I'm not overly enthusiastic about any of them that isn't the first game. But speaking in terms of TS3, it grew on me over the years, and some things I do like about it, such as the darker tone and CASt. But I can't ever get over how badly optimized it is, the lack of v-sync, and how many of the gameplay concepts/features were ill-thought-out, how the game is graphically inconsistent, how bad the assets are, the annoying unrealistic heavy specular mapping on everything from wood to jeans [aka plastic effect] and lastly how poorly arranged the graphic user interface looks.

When the trailor video first came out I didn't like the look of the sims and that still stands.



Performacne sucked for me after adding a couple of EPs/packs. Few patterns and bit of cc and it started looking muddy.



For rotational play it wasn't good. One sim I moved out had a baby in a shack. All the wants and things would vanish.
What frustrated me more was I could not connect to the sims, the idles annoyed me and so did the relationship. I despise popups. The final straw for me was when the daughter moved out into a nice place, I had the mother visit just a few days later and she wouldn't accept the gift because 'she didn't know her well enough' The mum had played a huge roll in her life, had done all toddler skills, helped her with driving, had spent normal family time together. Kind of stuff that has families all being BFF's in Sims 2. I was done.



I thought the open world and casT were good ideas, just poorly executed. Personally I would prefer if they did a semi-open world like Skyrim. There is plenty to explore but you load dungeons and towns and houses. CasT had so many horrible patterns I never used, in that way EA never changes. Like all the wasted areas in Sims 2 cas. Sandles with socks and other atrocities. Mismatched woods in build and buy, horrible curtain prints, etc. CC to the rescue. Now it's more getting the game to run without pink soup.



I loved Sims 1 but haven't played it again. Kind of scared to, I remember how hard it was! The baby crying was *fingers in ears* I downloaded the music the other day to listen to as I played Sims 2.




Actually breaking your game is difficult, it's breaking your hood that is easy. Unless you go around making Universal sims playable, that is about the only way to break your game files apart from messing with them directly. Hood borkage though is still just as easy as ever as they never removed the buttons that caused it and of course, there are other ways to break it with certain npc cc.

I think Sims 3 still has a good following. It has a lot going for it, just didn't suit me. I wish we had horses and diving in sims 2 like sims 3 does.

I enjoy Sims 4 now and then, in small doses. I don't mind how the sims look, but the size of the town and the play just don't hold my interest.

Yes 3 has a good following. 97 people here on 4 and 145 here in 3. Let me check 2. People are still playing 3 and interested in it. 2 has 132 on now. Pretty much every time I have noticed 3 is the most active section of the forums.

I am personally related to someone who was a pre-order customer and an avid simmer at the time TS3 was released. She used up a lot of energy launching a personal campaign to prevent everyone from being misled into buying or having fond thoughts about the game because it wouldn't run on her laptop and as I recall there was no way on earth that it could have. She is a highly educated marketing and digital media professional and was clearly very successful in her campaign efforts back then. It was a bit challenging for me to suss out the problems with her hardware and a game that I hadn't even really thought of playing myself yet in between all of the crying, temper tantrums, and shoving her fingers in her ears chanting, "Blah blah blah, I can't hear you!"

Okay, to unpack the above a bit she was my beloved but spoiled rotten 12 year old niece and the highly educated marketing skills stuff came much later. I'd like to think that during that time and since then she has learned some lessons about what is really important in one's life and what "minimum system requirements" means. But without all of the trimmings above, this was a pretty common theme it seemed more so with TS3 than its siblings as they were released. Not that a sample set of one really means anything, just reminiscing.

You never eaten cold beet soup. To know how delicious pink soup can be.

I dislike summer borscht. Hot winter borscht is where it's at! They both pale in comparison to homemade pickled beets, imho.

I was extremely vocal in my displeasure over some aspects of TS3, when it was released, and toward the middle of its life. I loved the improvements to the world and the neighbourhood, CAST, separate shoe categories in CAS, etc but I felt that EA had taken some of the more "mature" aspects of TS2, and really dumbed them down in TS3 to kindergarten level.

I still feel like that. Makeout is kind of lukewarm, you can't goose your partner any more, there was less slapping, fighting and other stuff ( bar brawls in LN helped rectify that ) you can bathe your dog and your cat but not your baby or toddler, and that still really pisses me off.
I felt it got a little better toward the end in regards to being a little more adult, but I really felt like it had become a game for children rather than teenage rated. So many interactions were left out in favour of the open world, and though I loved it, It felt like EA were pushing your sims to have more "stuff" in a materialistic fashion, rather than concentrating on family units. Sims didn't talk during meals any more, there was no setting out of dinner plates for the family any longer.. all that kind of thing really bugged me. So much in depth interaction seemed to be excluded.
They've only made it ten times worse with TS4, so I'm quite grateful that TS3 still has some grittier ( for lack of a better word ) aspects to it. I play TS2 now when I want to concentrate on my families, and TS3 when I want to play a single sim who relishes the world they live in.

I too feel that the games tech problems get blown out of proportion, and it really annoys me when people screech about how the game is just flat out broken and unplayable. And they state it as a fact. It isn't. If it were unplayable to that extent because it was simply just broken, it would be broken for everyone. My game runs fine. I have the occasional glitch or problem, but it's easily resolved 99% of the time. I've said many times that in my experience, those people who cry unplayable, are usually trying to run the game on a windows 3.1 laptop with all EP's and a bucketload of problematic CC, with all settings on high, and wondering why the game plays like utter crap. TS3 has numerous problems, and at its core it is bandaided to hell, but it IS often blamed unfairly for user error.

There have been many complaints around, that I've read, about how TS3 is crap because it really needs to be modded to perform well. Should we need to use mods to fix up EA's crap mistakes? Of course not, but if it's the choice between modding the game and having a pleasant play experience, or raging and tossing everything in the bin because I shouldn't have to mod it to be able to play it, I'll choose modding every time.
I still feel that EA tried very hard to move The Sims in a forward direction with TS3, even though it was probably a little too ambitious for its time, and as such is poorly optimised and suffers numerous problems, but with TS4 they just took so many mighty leaps back that it isn't even worth calling that a Sims game. Even Sims Medieval is more a sims game than that one, in my experience. But, that's just me.

Sims 2 is often held up as the epitome of The Sims, and I feel that it is quite rightly deserved. I love TS3, but I believe that TS2 has had more love and care put into it that any of the subsequent Sims games; I don't think that we'll ever get another like it. And that's really sad.

Maybe "downfall" was a bit too strong of a word, but I do think the reception towards TS3 does tend to not be very favorable. But you have a good point. Contrary to what my post seems to state, I didn't buy TS3 right away either. Not release day at least. As much as I loved the look of open world and everything else I still continued to play TS2 for a while to see where TS3 ended up going.


You make good points as well, especially at the end. Though I love TS3, I'm not blind to the flaws either. I'd chalk up some of the strange graphical choices to just being a product of the time, but TS2 didn't even have those problems really. Like the exaggerated bloom, who thought that was a good idea? And it wasn't even there in the beginning, they added it shortly after or right after Ambitions' release. And don't get me started on the interface, as a designer that's been one of my pet peeves for years.


Guess I misremembered a bit, but I remember how much corruption used to worry me, hood or complete game corruption. I honestly wish EA took more time to fix it before they abandoned TS2, because I feel like that's part of the reason people have a hard time going back. I can because I played it for years, but when people see entire guides and threads on how to keep your game safe it seem a little daunting.

By the way for others reading, I don't want any TS2 regulars to be scared away from my post as well. Like I said in my initial post, my point isn't to tear any other Sims games apart. Just have a nice discussion.


Your post really hits a lot of points of what I do find underwhelming in TS3 as well. I never really got the sense that TS3 was really for children per se, but I do think they toned the interactions down quite a bit. I still think today that TS2 is the gold standard for interactions between Sims. So many different variations of a particular choice, and even today the animations hold up pretty well.

At the end of the day, I pretty much agree with your sentiment. I really think that we'll never see another Sims game like TS2 or TS3 because EA has learned that people will buy packs regardless. There's no reason to improve in their eyes when you've got an easy stream of cash flowing in. If they were smart they'd go forward with a new game that combines all the best features of the past games and really knock it out of the park. But I don't see that happening. I really don't.

When the Sims 4 came around, people become appreciated of TS3, since nobody really expected for a game to be dumb down and flawed to that level. Prior that, TS3 was seen worst, or at least inferior to just TS2, when comparing most things it offered that been compesation for little neat additions (open world, CAW, refined inventory system, a bit more involvement in Careers, etc). So the question would be yes, but... seem likęs the trend continues with (certain number of) TS4 players giving the 'courtesy' to bash TS3 aš if it's the devil's incarnation, either it coming from the fact it gives bad rep to their beloved game and plausible likelyhood their machine can't run the open world game and thus are jealous for missing out all the content it offered that the emushion/multitaskn lacks off

Sims do talk during meals in TS3. Was that not always a thing? Anyway glitches are there in Sims 2 too(Washing your dog can get you stuck and turning Mrs Crumplebottom into a vamp will destroy the game), these games have always been glitchy I think. When you have so many features in a game bugs will happen, no game is exempt. Sims 3's system requirements were a bit higher especially with all(or many of) the DLCs then what a lot of people in that time period could afford which is probably where a lot of the hate comes from.

They do, but it's pretty tricky to get them talking in a vanilla game. They tend to eat quickly, and by the time every Sim routes to the table with their plate of food everyone's already finished and cleaning up one by one.

Though I will say that at the very least they do it autonomously in TS3. In TS4 they never will, you have to actively click on another sim and direct them to speak to each other while eating.

TS3 was flawed and the Store was atrocious, but I don’t think people knew how good they had it in terms of series innovation and customizability!

Lol and yes I also commit the same sin of believing that TS2 is the superior game but then never putting in the time to set it up and play it.

Yeah, the store was probably the worst part of TS3, most of its content could've been moved to other packs and likely have been better for it. The worst part though was that they could never use any coding from later packs, everything added had to be compatible with the base game. That's what really set store content back more than anything.

Whether someone views TS3 as innovative or not is up to them, but I don't think anyone can deny that there is a huge difference in the targeted audience. Especially when you consider that the TS3 team released something like CAW for the general player base to download and use. And what do we have nowadays on that same level? Nothing! Not even TS2 style custom hoods.

I feel like Sims 4 is the downfall.

Counterpoint: Store was bad, but most of its content was okay to good. I've gotten my 2 or 3 thousand free SimPoints in my time and bought 2000 more myself, and all of them have been put to good use. But it was sleazy of them to take content out of the game so they could sell it through the Store.

And frankly, simple tasks are extremely hard in this game. Let's say I'm simulating a library full of people. What can I have them do? Okay, so I have a keyframed camera move of a Sim walking past, while hopefully another Sim walks past the other way at the right time. In the foreground are sitting two people having a conversation. In the far background, two more idly reading a book. Is there anything else I can have someone do? Nope. Nothing whatsoever. There are no interactions applicable to this situation, because Sims can't multitask in any way and all read books in the same, neck-straining way while sitting up annoyingly straight in their chairs......AT AN ANGLE.

What kind of a society is this where everyone has collectively decided to read books all wrong while sitting in a chair at an angle? Pull up your fucking chairs, people.
And because this isn't TS4 where you can just use BuyDebug to place hot cups of coffee or a pack of crackers or another unread book, everyone's sitting in front of a completely empty table.

The Store was bullshit. Most of it great content and all, but how convenient that they release premium surfing content and beach clothes right after the release of Island Paradise. Felt like there were several times they took something from an expansion pack pre-release and sold it separately.

I think we can all agree, "Error 12" is the downfall of sims.

I personally hated how it essentially created barriers for sharing content.

Listing out all the content used, premium vs non-premium, Decrappified vs non-Decrappified, etc.

Most of the legitimately purchased Store content in my game is somehow classified as base game. Shows up with no icons or anything in the catalog. What happens when I try to port stuff made using those items to another install of the game, I can only speculate on. But I think it's safe to say I'm going to have a fucking headache.

Also a pet peeve of mine: you can get great Art Deco content on the Store. Loads of it. You can get loads of mid-century content in a variety of styles from Grease to Mad Men. You can get the future, the present, the past, other planets.....you know what they conveniently skipped? The 70s and 80s, that huge retro phenomenon people can't get enough of. Does that have anything to do with the stuff pack? I doubt it. But why does the selection of themes and styles available on the Store feel so comprehensive with the glaring exception of, you know, the late 20th century period during which the average human being alive as of 2010-2013 was growing up?

The average person in any given developed country is between 38 and 45 years old, meaning birth years roughly between 1965 and 1975 as of 2010-2012. EA could've made a whole bunch of money by releasing some sort of orgy of 70s/80s nostalgia on the Store, instead of enchanted fairy tale bullshit and Soviet Russia or whatever that was they did. And I would've been having a very, very easy time here making my game look fun and interesting and worthwhile. And no, I'm not mad. Just disappointed.

While we're on the subject of the store, wasn't there a rumor floating around that the store team planned to continue releasing content for at least a little while after TS4's release, before EA suddenly let them go to make way for its release? I seem to remember something like that being passed around. Wonder if there's any truth to it, though we'll likely never know for sure.