I feel that they made Sims 3 too realistic - sure, they have vampires now, but it lacks the charm that TS2 had. Weird enough, the thing that completely turned me off the game was the lack of alien pregnancy. I don't use it too much in TS2, but at least it gave more basis for the "pregnancy for all genders" hacks out there...there are a few for TS3, I know, but from what I've heard, it's hard to work around.
Next, they completely screwed up on the outfit assignment system. As far as I remember, I've never downloaded any CC for TS3, but I still got the "spider children" that results from a teen+ shirt being put on a child or a toddler.
Then there's the story progressing and swapping houses - such a pain! You have to sacrifice your Sims' wants/wishes/whatever in order to swap houses, and while playing a different family, you could miss important things - I've heard of random divorces and random marriages, and endless babies going on while playing a different house...it's like EA expected us to play one house - who the heck does that!?
...Anyway, that's part of my extensive rant on what I feel EA screwed up on TS3. It was a complete disappointment to me.

Which is just how it would work in the real world. If you cloned yourself and had 100 babies with your clone, it would still be unlikely that any would be genetically identical to each other, let alone to the parents (unless identical twins of course).

Traits are heritable but sex is a remixture of haploid parts from each parent to make a diploid organism. Because most traits are multi-alleled (see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allele ) you're always rolling the dice. (See a short explanation: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/i...01152919AAkhvLn )

Sex is awesome. Even clones produce variety.

Here are a some shortcomings of TS3:

Minimum living costs are too high.
Wealth gaps are big in SimNation, just as in the real world.

Poor people in the real world can usually find low-cost solutions to their daily needs, such as squatting abandoned lots and buildings, moving into a mass-produced mobile home, or dive into dumpsters for used furniture and building materials.

However, Sims households must buy everything off the shelf. A single-person home with minimum equipment (cheapest bed, fridge, stove, sink, toilet and shower) costs most of the personal seed capital, and Sim families with few or no working members can barely make ends meet. The price difference between low-end and high-end goods is rather slim in TS3, though, so well-off families often get to the point where they own most objects in the game, still with money to spend.

Junkyard salvaging was introduced in Ambitions, long overdue. And many simple items are really overpriced. Why does the cheapest chessboard cost as much as a TV set?

Exclusion of everyday features
Spiral staircases, basements, newspaper crosswords (a nice TS2 feature that built Logic without a chessboard or a telescope), stove extractor hoods and lots of other stuff that could have been in the base game.

"Saving them up for an expansion pack" is no excuse. None of these features would be good enough as a sales pitch for an EP. And they would require no animations that weren't already in TS2.

Life stages, except adulthood, are pointless.
Toddlers cannot learn skills, and their traits hardly make any difference between them. Toddlers' personalities are different from birth; ask any real-world parent who had two or more children.

In TS2, school served a purpose for children and teens, as they could get skill and money rewards for hard work. The TS3 school report card does nearly nothing.

Ready-made elders are worthless. In the real world, elders have skills, memories, social relationships and money in the bank. If Create-A-Sim gave some of these benefits to elders, they would get much more interesting.

Glamourous jobs wasted away in rabbit holes.
This problem remains from The Sims 1. As TS1 and TS2 were limited to one lot, the off-screen job was necessary. And maybe the base game felt a little more exciting if the careers had fancy names such as Athletics, Politics or Crime, even though the career part of the game was more of a 1980s style text adventure, and all careers were essentially the same.

The Sims 3 base game changed nothing. We have gotten used to a workforce distribution inspired by ten-year-old kids' fantasies, where each small town holds several professional sportpeople, politicians and musicians, while blue- and white-collar jobs make up a minority. And all these careers were still hidden in rabbit holes.

Ambitions gave an opportunity to play out some glamorous jobs on-screen. An expansion pack could have had contained full-fledged Crime, Law Enforcement, Military, Sports and Political careers with exciting hands-on quests... but these opportunities were already wasted, as these were already in the base game. The Firefighting career is good, but the other ones feel rather lame. The Medical career was the only one that actually got more graphic.

The base game should have stuck to mundane careers such as Education and service jobs, and saved up the glamour careers for future expansion packs.

I absolutely agree with everything in this thread and only have two more to add:

1. Lack of two-sided relationships. In TS2, your relationship with a sim was independent from their relationship with you. This added a lot of depth to the sims and inspired story-lines of unrequited love or making that one co-worker who's friends with everyone but they all secretly find him annoying. In TS3, if your sim feels another sim is their best friend, they feel the very same way.

2. The way the sims look in-game, especially outside. And I'm not just talking about their "puddingness". I have a fairly decent graphic card, and am able to crank all the visual settings up to the maximum, and they still look like smudgy garbage. All the other visuals look awesome, especially in interesting towns like Twinbrook and Bridgeport, so why do the sims themselves look so awful? Plus, those blocky shadows that they cast outside. I still rage every time I see them.

the only reason i continue to play the sims 3 is because of the open neighborhood. but I'm considering going back to ts2 now that you guys have shown me light!(EA's mess-ups)

For me, the Sims in the Sims 3 all look the same. No matter what I do, they all look chubby and silly. I probably suck at making them though =P

The other, more annoying part is the rabbitholes. I want to see the kids in school, make them play hooky or hide from the teachers, mess around in class. And when you're at the restaurant, you could avoid paying the check, like in the Sims 2.

It's overall an okay game, just some parts REALLY annoy me.

Agree with you all about the 'charm'. I too loved alien pregnancies and after the males had been delivered back home they used to clutch their bum I also used to love watching their motives go crazy; it was the little things.

I could play Sims 2 for hours on end but I can't do that with Sims 3, there's just not enough variety in the game to keep me hooked. But now I have been spoilt with the good graphics and open neighbourhood so much so that now Sims 2 bores me!

Sims 1 was the pinnacle of charm however. I used to love the old Hollywood feel to Studio Town (and the music in build mode there was AMAZING), the New Orleans feel to Old Town. All the furniture and stuff was quaint. But trying to play it now is so difficult; however did we manage to keep those needs up?!

I do enjoy Sims 3, and I am ultra psyched for Medieval because it looks like some of that humour is coming back in. If we could inject the humour back into Sims 3, it really would be the perfect game. (Aside from what we need mods for, but at least those mods exist!)

@Angstrom: Toddlers do skill. If you let them play with the peg box until it says they have learnt all they can, when they are children and they play chess they will start with 3 skill points. Same goes for the xylophone which gives 3 guitar skill points (not sure about other instruments), and the books result in 3 painting skill points.

Another thing I wanted to add. Sims always make those darn silly cartoon faces when idle. I know theres a mod for it but still. If it wasn't for the open neighborhood, CASt and traits, i'd probably go back to sims 2 100%

Yes, most townies have them, even if the Sims themselves are thin the faces looks like they weight over 150 kg.

If I were to limit myself to just one messed up thing, my vote would go to the ... Launcher!

Why do we have columns we can't sort?
Why doesn't ALL of the installed content show up under the Installed tab?
Why doesn't ALL of the viable (meaning user has the EP/SP) content install?
Why isn't there an easier way to uninstall?

And the most infuriating thing about it is that it would be SOOOOOO easy for EA to fix these problems and put out a patch, yet they completely ignore it!

The horrendous AI. This becomes extremely relevant with path-finding. Earlier today, my sim was planting in his garden. I had missed a spot, so I wanted him to go inside a square of already-planted seeds and plant another. He gave me the typical toddler whine-and-stomp before staring blank into space. Can TS3 sims seriously not step over a pile of dirt?! This and my sims seeming to ignore critical actions. They get tired, so they queue up going to bed...after they've decided they're done watching TV or playing an instrument. Inevitably, they dip over into the negative moodlet and I have to force them to drop whatever they're doing and tell them to sleep/bathe/use the bathroom/go to work/etc. I have free will on its highest, so I don't know what on Earth. It just feels like TS3 is more babysitting than anything, but with full-grown adults. I know there are mods for various AI issues, but it shouldn't be necessary, you know?

What even happened to Maxis? In general I like TS3, but at this point I'm seriously not sure if I'm going to bother with any more over-priced expansions or TS4.

My biggest problem is that the baby, toddler, and children stages are so POINTLESS! There's nothing to do with them! When people actually have kids, their babies become the center of their world. When my Sims have kids, I keep them in the crib the whole time until they need attention, and then back in the crib they go.

All the posts in this topic have actually really made me think..! Every new expansion pack was so exciting in TS2, whenever a new one was released I would just be itching to play it. But in TS3?.. Not so much anymore. I've kind of given up hope a little bit. Some of the best things from TS2 haven't been included in TS3.

They weren't in TS2, either. Basements NEVER made it into TS2. Elevators in TS3 are much less problematic than the ones in TS2...even if they ARE still always on the wrong floor for some reason.

Well, TS3 isn't in "America", and there are no disabled people. There weren't in TS2, either.

Well, then, you haven't seen much.

Because making such a thing would involve an entirely new pool of animations for EVERYTHING, and wheelchair people are practically an entirely new animal-type, gamewise: Their locomotion requirements are different, their animations for EVERYTHING are different, and EVERY SINGLE ITEM would need to account for this.

This is because, strictly speaking, there are not actually restaurants. The "restaurant" is really just the career location for the culinary career, and any ability to use it in a non-career fashion is just included because it's easy, obvious, and people would complain if it wasn't possible to do anything ELSE with it.

Maybe, but this sounds like yet another NPC disaster area. TS3 does NOT like systems with NPCs much, because of the entire "open world" issue: It will start stealing your sims and dressing them funny.

Yeah, it didn't in TS2, either. Apparently this would result in the need for extensive computation.

Well, the need for diving boards has sort of declined since sims no longer need a board to dive.

They're not exactly likely to die anytime soon without a mod, either. I think this was done so they don't stick around FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER, especially since the game likes to try to turn everyone in the game into one zombie-apocalypse style without a mod.

Well, no time elapses while you're gone. You're there and back in about 5 minutes. And if you brought those little turds along, they'd be utterly useless anyway.

You're gone for 5 minutes! It's not a big deal. I had to do something just to get rid of that annoying 12 that would keep spawning.

This is really more of a coding deficiency, and COULD be fixed in a mod, if you wanted to completely break compatibility. However, it wouldn't work very well: Many jobs will end up with conflicting hours as they promote.

Most of the "professions" are simply placeholders to keep your sim from being randomly dragooned. They don't actually grant any particular abilities.

Do you WANT a hotel? Someone needs to get off their ass and mesh me a rabbithole for it, then. I call it "Le Trou de Lapin".

Then you will have to track them down at their NOT HOME, apparently. This is what you get when you have an "open world" where sims actually have lives, instead of a "one lot" world where everyone else exists in the nebulous offworld waiting to be conjured to serve your whims.

Like TS2, the game is broken without mods. Whether you choose Overwatch to try to clean up the damage after it occurs, AwesomeMod to prevent the damage from occurring in the first place, or both for extra protection, you still need mods unless you want your game to hit an inevitable downward doom spiral.

-Genetics: TS2 genetics was perfectly fine (maybe except the rolling the pacifier, although I never use it) dont know why they chucked it out.
-Music: horrid. I can listen to TS2 simlish music everyday.
-auto patching & the launcher: excuses for them to get lazy with the patches ,
-the feel of a materialistic life style. Everyone has cellphones, cars/transportation, so much objects you can buy! *flashes sims store* Even the over complications of little things like upgrading toilets, sinks, where cheap items suck compared to high end products. That makes us get our sims to buy, buy, buy, to stop having all our furniture break every few days. Tired of seeing the same stuff break? Get a prettier version in the sim store.

Simplicity was key to the success of the first two games. This is our dollhouse. Just provide the needed materials for us to build our world, and step back EA; not limit our creativity and set your own goals for our game.

The babies look like larva or something. And they don't even have eye color. Just black eyes.
Also, the car animations are lame. Or lack of, I should say.
And the only EP I've really liked so far is Late Night. In TS2 the only EP I disliked was University. And even then, I use it still.

I've been callin TS3 babies as "larva babies" for years now

Don't know if trolling or not.....

I just want snow and spiral staircases back...then I'll be content...

SIMS SUCK. To put it in short.

Their faces are just way over-the-top, mainly simply because every feature is scaled so big. And on top of that they make stupid, weird idle faces, like flare their nostrils ALL THE TIME. Even their smile sucks, because they have to flare the nostrils while smiling too!
And the poor children and teenagers... There's no way to make them look like something that reminds even remotely of realistic human beings, without them turning out weird later in life. And this goes to the other way too, you either have pretty kids = ugly adults, or pretty adults = awful lookin' kids.
I just wish I could block all the weirdo-sims of EA from my neighborhoods completely, and pretend it was all just a bad dream while playing happily with my nicely sculpted sims.

And to top it all, sims are such a bore. They lack the quirky fun (which EA did try, but failed miserably this time) from previous games, and in general... they are just very boring, since there's not that much real variation in interactions. There seems to be a lot of variation at first, but it's all just the same with only different labels.

I never had The Sims or The Sims 2... I was planning to get TS2 when TS3 came out, so I got that instead. It seemed logical. But reading about everything that TS2 had better makes me a bit jealous.

Tell me about it! Once an NPC was so busy playing with the foosball table in the lobby of my apartment that he literally FORGOT TO EAT and just DIED in the lobby.

My biggest quip is how the expansion packs are executed. It seems with each new EP and chance of adding something from the TS2 era, we get half-assed attempts that just make the game worse. Ambitions is a good example. The best parts of OFB were stripped away and all that was left was the ability to buy buildings and to become "self employed". For an EP about jobs and ambitions, your sims sure are limited on occupations to strive for.
Instead of having the freedom of owning/running what the user wanted like in the TS2 era, EA practically said "Here are some nifty occupations you should like: Tattoo Artist? Interior Designer? Firefighter? Dont those sound badass? That will be $40 please."
What happened to running your own business? As far as I know, that's an ambition you can find all over the world. It's like EA takes the time to add something new while taking away useful features

1. The point about not being able to customise everything. I'd love to be able to change rooves without the need of third party recolours. When the base game came out we couldn't recolour fences and stairs but EA rectified that in a patch which was good but I wish they'd do the same with rooves (and plants!).

2. Genetics. IME children are always a clone of one of their parents which is a bit boring because I want my towns to have some genetic diversity but it's virtually impossible to do this. I find that I re-edit a lot of sims' faces (and bodies) because they all look the same. I miss genetic hair colours too.

3. It lacks the charm from the previous versions which I think is because this is the first The Sims to have been developed by someone other than Maxis.

This is actually a peculiar artifact of simulation detail level and computer processing. In TS2, the game would process everything at absolute fidelity and never "skip a frame", even if the result would lag the game like crap. TS3, however, has real time interlocks to prevent processing from going into overtime, with the result that if your computer isn't keeping up, frames get skipped. If too many frames get skipped, motives update in very large jumps rather than smoothly enough for the AI to react to it, so one moment the sim is alive and well, the next minute an accumulated hour or three's motive decay catches up to it and it drops dead before it ever gets to take its turn, as the game prioritizes the turns of more "important" sims over those of lesser importance. This can be prevented by removing the real-time turn clock, forcing the game to always give everyone their turn, but if your computer can't keep up for some reason, the game performance will go straight down the terlet or freeze up entirely.