I've played several hours now and my prevailing feeling is that indeed this is a similar, but different, game.
What I like:
- The way the sims interact and the multi-tasking. Yes, talking while cooking slows down the cooking, but then, I cook faster too when my husband isn't in the kitchen wanting to talk to me.
- The number of sims in the area - There are sims out in the neighborhood, and wherever you go. More do show up, but it seems to happen more naturally than in TS3 - not a big hoard all at once.
- The animations. So far, I've just done cooking, fishing, gardening, and mixology. The animations are entertaining, more varied and smoother.
- The gallery. I wanted someone to sacrifice to the cow plant, and it was really easy to just grab someone and have him go for the cake.
- The ability to position the camera up close, with centered sims, for screenshots. The camera controls have taken some getting used to, and I can't get everything just the way I want it all the time, but I find it easy to zoom in on my sims and get centered, up close shots. I think this was doable in Sims 3, as some story-tellers (like Pam for instance) consistently have great close-up shots. But I struggled with that much more in TS3 than I do in TS4.
- Socializing - I've found it easy to socialize and make friends, even though my sim has no specific social traits. And there's always someone running by the house to grab. My sim needed 5 friends for a work performance task. She started with 1 at 7 in the morning, and work started at 6, I believe. She had one acquaintance with a little green in the bar, so she invited her over and got her to friend, then stopped 3 sims passing by, and chatted with them all at once. She easily got to 5 friends that day, and still had time to come in, take a thoughtful shower, and watch some inspiring tv before work.
- Food - remaining servings and time to spoil. The time to spoil is much shorter while the dish is on the counter than when it's in the fridge, so the system knows that food spoils faster if left out. This should actually be under I love it, love it, love it. One love it because it's really helpful and two love its because it's just clever.
- Mixology drinks also show spoil times. And you can also put them in the fridge and your sim will come to the fridge and get a drink.
- Your sim leaves for work when it's time to be there - not an hour early.
- The phone doesn't ring all the time. And sims don't randomly walk onto your lot and interrupt what your sim is doing (like gardening, for instance). At least, that hasn't happened to me yet. Sims you know do come to your door. Constantly. But you can ignore them and they go away, and there doesn't seem to be a negative hit to the relationship for that.
- The complexity. Emotions impact everything and everything impacts emotions; skill levels impact what you can do in other skills (e.g. have to be at a high level in a musical instrument to craft a musical instrument); aspiration goals, job performance tasks, daily tasks; multi-tasking; the game is just more complex than TS3 and that means a lot to explore and new things popping up all the time.
- No Stop, Wave, and Whine. While it is a little weird how the sims just merge at the fridge or elsewhere, or temporarily merge with furniture, I'd rather they run into each other, literally, than stop, wave, and whine. And at least when they merge with furniture, they don't get stuck there.
What I don't like:
- Sims with severe attention-deficit problems. I had my gardening sim in the bedroom in the back of the house, in a comfy chair, with items all around him to help him focus, reading Gardening Volume 3. He was in a Very Focused state. He has no specifically social traits, but every time his wife in the other room changed her activity or cow-plant-sacrifice-guy walked in the front door, my "Very Focused" sim was out of his chair and heading off to socialize. There's no door locking, so I couldn't lock him in, or lock cow-plant-sacrifice-guy out. When I found myself yelling at him to "Sit your butt back down in that chair and read the dang book I bought you!" I realized it was time for a break.
- Can't control the sims back home when one sim goes to another lot. You have to either find a way to have both sims accomplish their tasks at the lot you want to go to, or sacrifice performance of the one back home. I'm not sure what's really going on at home when I'm gone (admittedly, that's a lot like real life with my two sons) but the sim at home clearly does not keep doing what you had them doing before you left with the other sim. You can switch back and forth, but every time you do, it's a reset - the sim at home will be standing outside, the sim at the other lot will be back in the center or front of the lot - not fishing or whatever you had them doing when you left. I don't mind the load screens, but I don't like that the sims don't keep doing their activity after you leave. I did see that you can choose a tone, much like when they go to work, and have them "work on skills" and then choose from the skills they have, but I keep forgetting to look at the percentage of the skill advancement before and after doing that, so I'm not sure how much progress is really made. And sometimes what you need them to do isn't skill work, it's job performance tasks.
- After completing one track in a career, you can't do the other. This really only bothers me at this point because I put my culinary sim in mixology with a plan to then do Chef, and then found out I couldn't do Chef after Mixology. I'm thinking this will get fixed at some point, so not too upset about it, but if it doesn't get fixed, it will become something I really dislike.
- The library only has Level 1 skill books. The only way I can see to get the others is to buy them. I don't know whether sims learn faster in the library or not. But my sim took her Level 2 Mixology book to the library and read there because I wanted her to make progress while her roommate was at the library. I don't know what happened to her book, but when she got distracted by some dust or something and stopped reading, the book was no longer in her inventory, wasn't laying around anywhere, and wasn't on any of the shelves.
- Needs Decay cheat doesn't hold from lot to lot. I don't usually play with cheats on, but at the beginning when I'm trying to figure things out, it's helpful. I don't like that the needs being static is lost every time they change lots. Granted, I can often reset it, using a mailbox in the neighborhood where my sim goes, but in the business lots and park lots there are no mailboxes that I can find, so I have to let needs decay in those lots.
- No Story Progression? I put ? on that because I'm not sure if that's what's causing plants in the wild to take so long to mature and produce. It seems like my sim has to spend time on the lot that has wild plants in order for those plants to actually grow. Makes harvesting plants in the wild much more difficult.
Overall, I'm enjoying playing the game, but for me, it's not really leaving TS3 and moving on to TS4, it's more that I have two people-type simulation games to choose from, and they are similar but different. If sims in Sims 4 get better at staying on task, or I get better at figuring out how to compensate for that, I'll probably gravitate more to Sims 4, because of all the new things and because figuring out the complexity is fun. And, of course, there will be Metro's challenges . . . they will most certainly suck me into TS4 better than anything else could.
