@Caitie --- It does make sense that they wouldn't get rid of campfire songs for the reason you mentioned. Thanks 
.
I've only played TS4, but it does sound like a drag that you couldn't have a band and someone to sing in it. TS3 does look cool from what I've seen online and from what I've heard on this forum.
TS3 was really cool in some ways, but really not in others. For example, the Maxis-made clothes and (especially) hair was hideous. Especially the base game stuff. Especially the hair. It looked like a really bad render. TS2 hair was way better.
The open world was a game changer. It created a community feel -- you really felt like this was a real town or city somewhere. I used to get bored while my sims were sleeping, so I would zoom out and watch people driving and walking around, even on the other side of town. And the NPCs had rich lives -- they would get promoted, change careers, gain skills, fall in love, get married, have children, break up, age up, die, move away ... it actually felt like your sim was part of an active community, full of people living their own lives. A sim could literally live their entire life, from birth to adulthood to marriage to death, without ever meeting a played sim. It also meant that things like distance
mattered; yeah, your sim might like it out in the country, in the rural areas around the town, but that meant that it was going to take longer to get to work, and you had to factor that in when deciding when your sim left for their job.
Of all the things I miss, the open world is hands down the big one. It's almost hard to describe to someone who's only played TS4. (No offense intended.)
However, there are things that I really love in the TS4. The CAS items are SO NICE, for example, especially when compared to what EA was giving us in TS3. I miss CASt sometimes, but not nearly as much as I thought I would. The sims themselves look fantastic. I love how pants won't clip through boots, and hair won't clip through hats. And the different packs play together so much nicer than they did in TS3. In TS3, each pack was its own entity, separate from others; in TS4, they're much more integrated. Like adding certain City Living activities such as the singing skill to the club system from Get Together, or adding the new ethnic foods to the possible dishes served at a restaurant via the Dine Out GP. And I have to admit the team is a lot more generous with stuff this time around; we vary rarely got free downloads for TS3, and when we did they were usually a merchandise tie-in with another company (like a few cars and a tshirt from Ford, or a bunch of pet-related items from Iams). The TS4 team are just like, "You know what? Here's a new hairstyle, just because. Oh, and here's a few new traits, because it was a slow Tuesday. Also, now you can lock doors and claim beds. And remember how basements came in the first EP for TS3? Screw that; here they are, totally free." Even though previously expansion packs (and stuff packs) went up $10 each with each installment, in TS4 they stayed the same; except for stuff packs, which are actually $10
cheaper now, and include an item with unique gameplay (in TS3, it was just a bunch of outfits, a few chairs, and a new hairstyle if the team was feeling generous, for $20).
I could go on and on about differences between the two games, but no one asked, and I'm not going to spam your thread any more than I already have (lol). TS3 was cool and all, and it definitely had its charms (especially for the time), but I actually tried to play it the other day and ended up uninstalling it, because I just couldn't get into it.
