While I'm playing the game, I find it interesting that I can wander a whole neighborhood or area freely but I can't actually visit other lots within that neighborhood/area without encountering a loading screen. I know they restricted access in the game to 1 lot at a time for performance purposes, but it feels weird that I can access all of the public space around my house but not the actual other houses within that space. I actually don't miss the completely open worlds from sims 3 but I would love to have open neighborhoods with access to all the lots within the beautiful public spaces. Would that be possible in the future or is that impossible within the game's new engine?

I think visiting the surrounding houses without a loading screen would be easily possible, given enough time. What they've done for now is load up a model of the house, and inside the windows you can see an illusion of the interior. I assume it's a 2d file such a skybox, generated based on what the inside of the house actually looks like. That's when when you look through the windows you can see furniture but if you zoon into the house, the walls drop and it's completely empty.

Once modders have had a good run familiarizing ourselves with the code, I think it's feasible to make these lots load entirely instead if loading this "prefab" of sorts.

What can we say about this now? 7 years later?

We can say the same things we say about Maxis making babies that just lie there instead of crawling, learning and moving about like they had in previous sims games.

I know it's old post, but well well well. Look how far we gone and behold:

Somebody here had tested it?

It's very clever but not the type of world that I like to play. It's a bit dark isn't it? I prefer sunlight and more green spaces rather than American cities.