Glad to hear that you recovered almost everything!

The weather is also one of my most favorite things about The Sims 3, along with the open world. They are also reasons I have stuck with TS3.

I agree to that, although never having played it. I think I know enough about Sims 4 to stick to my intention of not bothering about it.
I do not think that Sims 4 is capable of developing into anything that would interest me. Although it may possess elements that should be employed in sequels.

My cardinal wishes for a The Sims 5 are:

1. It must utilize state-of-the-art PC and programming tech at the time of its release (early 2020s)
2. The game should have a flexible configuration system such as to cater for a multitude of hardware platforms
3. Our game (because we the fans - not EA - are its emotional owners) must be highly moddable

I agree on all points, yeah. TS5 should be technologically competent, and flexible.

Thanks for your agreement. My ego lives off that.

I believe an evolutionary approach toward a sequel is better than the revolutionary one. Main things from TS3 are quite adequate and should be preserved. Graphics are good enough, both close-up and remote. It is more than sufficient for gameplay and scenography for the video artists in our community. I want better algorithms for switching (right-clicking) between active sims. Better routing is a must, also smarter movements related to actions and interactions. But the priority of improvement is more needed not with graphics but inside the sims' brains. A system for sims' actions that depend on not just traits, moods, experience but on wishes and what you as the player have directed this sim to do.

Let's bring together Will Wright and Peter Molyneux.

Thanks for agreeing with my agreement! I concur wholeheartedly with your approval of my approval.
It's perfectly possible, nowadays, for video games to employ mechanics that observe behavioural tendencies in the player and use them to tweak its own AI. Certain racing games measure the player's driving style and create an AI "avatar" that mimicks them online.
All it takes, really, is a series of stats, modifiers and flags.

Now I strongly agree that a Sims game need not reinvent the wheel. There's nothing wrong with TS2 and TS3, and there's nothing wrong with adapting those games for the 2020s. There's still plenty of in-depth simulation and strategy games, and there's still a market for them. TS4 is fine as a thing of its own but compared to the games before it it looks like some dumbed down mobile game. Or, hey, an MMORPG that got canned and had to be quickly adapted for single player!

Absolutely, true. Regarding the third point:

This is something that keeps being brought up. I think there's a whole ton of people who would love to see, or be involved in, some sort of improved or remade version of TS3. TS1 has been rewritten, remade and remastered by a group of no more than a couple people, and they managed to rebuild AND massively improve that game in what seemed like a very finite amount of time.
I absolutely think a fan-made TS3 remake is an inevitability, and I hope it's something that gets picked up on sooner rather than later, but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Not for a few years, at least. I've wanted to set up threads about it, talk about it all day long, see if it's possible to put a team of diehard fans with skills together, and brainstorm ideas and plans to no end.....and that definitely needs to happen and I'm dying to be a part of it, but I don't think it's something that can be done right now.

TS3 is a fairly recent game, EA is still somewhat interested in selling it, and a whole lot of people are still actively playing it. It's not an old-school game yet. Now I don't know whether that last point is an argument FOR or AGAINST any sort of community project, but I find it difficult to imagine a game being remade or remastered by fans while they're still playing it as if it's new and current.

EDIT: made a thread about it

I would so love a Sims 3 remake with better stability and performance then the one that EA cooked up. I mean the worlds take forever to load and the starts to lag terribly especially when you have a lot of custom content and apparently that's still an issue with high end gaming pcs as well which is a dog gone shame so yeah i'm all for a 64 bit Sims 3 remake. Only problem though is how would EA react if they ever find out, I mean if there ever is a remake for Sims 3. Nintendo had already shut down the Super Mario 64 remake project some years ago so I could imagine how hard EA would work to make sure that the project is shut down especially with how greedy they are.

Big difference, though: Nintendo is notoriously difficult about their property, but EA is notoriously greedy. Meaning, that EA only protects their sources of income. And sooner or later, TS3 is going to stop making them money.

That's true but I just don't see EA just that slide if it ever gets made especially because Sims 3 is still making them money although i'm not sure for how long but I would still love to see a Sims 3 remake happen regardless of whatever the outcome may be.

Mobile games will never replace playing a game on a powerful PC, with mods, on a 60” TV. The architecture is simply not there.
When rumble pad technology and online gaming first came out, there was a fear that “all games are gonna be like this in the future”. That never materialised. Don’t worry, ‘normal’ games will continue for a long time yet.

Ts3 remake is a great idea, officially or unofficially. Ts4 has been an all-round embarrassing flop and they’ll soon see that flogging a dead horse will simply not make it run. It just depends on how stubborn they are before they admit it.

I wouldn't be so quick to shoo it away as a complete failure. Was it such for a large portion of veteran Sims players? Yes, most definitely. Are there people who genuinely like TS4 despite its faults? Of course. Are they idiots and morons as some would say for continuing TS4's financial success? Absolutely not. Some like the simplicity. Some have never played a Sims game in their life before 4. But what it *has* done is show EA that they can get away with selling much less content for much more. It's the reason we're very likely to not see another Sims game with the depth of TS3 for the forseeable future. Remastering, officially, I can say with almost complete certainty will not come from EA.

Though I would call morons and idiots who are all talk and complain about it's success DESPITE afterwards still habding over their money to EA. That's just dump. If you don't like the DLC, have SOME restrain. Bitching about it while contributing to the problem is very counterproductive.

Steam : "Hold my beer".

PC games being on the out has been said for a decade almost. But Steam just keeps growing and other distribution platforms try to take a piece of that pie (Uplay, Origin, Windows Store). This is partly due to the total pie of gaming having grown last decade (over all devices). So from a total marketshare perspective, you see a decline in PC gaming, but not in total revenue.

Pretty sure they were already saying that when I first started gaming on PC, in 1999ish. Yet here we are.

Try the late 80's/early 90's, about the time the Game Boy really took off. PC games were supposed to be dead within a decade.
(Along with the world coming to an end because computers weren't programmed to understand the year 2000, so you had better take all your money and invest in gold before the computer wipes out your savings... )

I think the game was so broken they couldn't continue any longer. The more EPs that were added the more problems appeared and lag. That's why they ended it.

What I think should've happened is for them to have made a sims 4 game with an open world that improved on sims 3 and added more. Corrected all the issues of the sims 3 but o well.

Did you manage to get the game to run smoothly on your pc? I run the game with all the EPS and Stuff Packs with little to no lag but then I'm playing in a tiny world called Sunny Town and I limited my custom content so maybe that's why.

Though I'm curious to know wouldn't the game get overloaded If they continue to add more content? I would definetly would like If it got updates like the game minecraft.

It’s true, I remember early 90’s games magazines (remember them!?!) saying that PC won’t be around much longer as a games platform.
To be honest, PC was almost an endangered species for quite a few years. The strength of the SNES, then the PS1, then the PS2, meant that PC gaming was nudged increasingly out of the mainstream consciousness and was hiding in the dark for a while.
Then at some point, probably near the end of the PS2’s reign and when the internet became commonplace, it emerged like a Phoenix from the ashes. The modding scene exploded, and consoles tried their best to emulate things like patching, DLC, and modding, all of which were exclusively PC endeavours previously.
You could compare consoles to a ready made meal: quick, easy, and does the job. PC’s are more like cooking with your own ingredients: harder work, requires more knowledge to keep it all correct, but ultimately more rewarding.

Yeah the best thing about pc gaming are the mods. Imagine what games such as Skyrim,Fallout and Sims would be like without mods and custom content.

I never had a powerful computer until last year and I could play the sims 3.But all the rest I am agree with you. The Sims 3 is underrestimated and not loved because of the bugs and the lacks of interactions you have to use poses to have some stuffs and rabbits holes.
I wish more modders to come to create awesome mods for the sims 3 as we got in this site because I have no hopes from EA they came back. They are rather developping the sims 4 !

Yeah I hate how the children especially don't really have that many social interactions to choose compared to Sims 2.