, to get the game out on time. I don't want to talk about that too much, though—it'll just lead me down a rabbithole that doesn't need exploring.
First, why am I referring to The Sims 3 in the past tense? Oh, no reason, really.
Anyway, the most obvious bit that leaps to mind is the insane specular highlighting. Like, I know that EA/Maxis were trying to flex on The Sims 2, but someone must have seen the new Star Trek film too many times. "Why are my khakis so shiny?" No one thought to ask that, apparently.
Next, for whatever reason, ceiling position never saved properly. It didn't matter if you had a complex set of ceilings, like in a sprawling mansion, or just a boring old rectangle like most people build, there was always the chance on any given save that the ceiling would get transported somewhere stupid. It was really time consuming, clearing your ceilings and having to rebuild them every time you loaded a house because you went to take a screenshot and you found your hallway's ceiling was halfway through the exterior wall for some reason.
The window plopping sound, whenever you would move windows around in Build Mode, was just too damn loud. My roommate came in and asked me if I was making popcorn one time because the window I was dragging around the wall tiles was making so much noise. On the subject of sound effects, I don't think the sound supervisor actually knew what a static electric discharge sounded like. When sims got their clothes out of the drying machine, it reminded me of the GoldenEye 64 tazer.
This is a grievance I've wanted to air against The Sims for quite some time: statistically-improbable events occur to active households far too frequently. I can understand wanting people to experience a dryer fire in the game because the implementation team spent 5 hours of their own time making that happen, but every goddamn time I do the washing?! I can understand using death by meteorite strike as a selling point and making it so players can actually experience it, but every goddamn time I go camping?! I can understand wanting to make it clear that your expansion pack's new thunderstorm isn't just for show and that the lightning can hit the ground, but every goddamn time it rains a bit?! I can't tell you how annoying it was that, like clockwork, at 18:00 on the first night of a new household in The Sims 2 Seasons, the lightning would strike a tree I'd put on the lot and burn it down. Or, how many times I had to rebuild campsites because a meteorite would strike it in The Sims 3 Ambitions and demolish bits of it by changing the terrain heights. Or, how many times the game would slow up my computer converting my sim into a Tragic Clown just because they stepped into a LLAMA in The Sims 3 Supernatural. Fortunately, that last one could be dismissed by nuking the moodlet.
Since we're on the subject of grievances, let's air another one: MAKE UP NEW INSIDE JOKES. Llamas, gnomes, and pink flamingoes were fine for The Sims Classic, and they almost had a Sims 2-specific inside joke with the freezer-bunny. But they carried that shit over into The Sims 3 and The Sims 4. It just goes to show how apathetic the designers were, getting paid bare-ass minimum for a game they wouldn't even get a single residual on; obviously, Electronic Arts is not synonymous with creativity. But still, the only reason llamas, flamingos, and gnomes showed up in The Sims Classic at all was because they held special significance with Will and the design team. The freezer-bunny in The Sims 2 seemed more like an Easter egg than anything else; just something the 3D artist threw onto the texture as a joke. The Sims 3 almost had an inside joke with the book title, "Point Farmer: The Story of Grant Rodiek", but a "sequel" ended up in The Sims 4. Was there nothing that the design team considered funny enough to sneak into the game? They just stretched the old jokes out to unravelling.
Sheesh! Festivus isn't even for 3 days yet! Let's get back to the point.
I never could understand why the game's main musical score wasn't customisable, either. You couldn't do anything in the sound options except look at the titles, you couldn't turn anything off, and there was no option for adding your own music to the playlists. No offence to Mark Mothersbaugh, but that's what saved The Sims 2 for me; I could load Jerry Martin, Kirk Casey, and Marc Russo's music from The Sims Classic into the game. Let's face it: Steve Jablonsky couldn't keep his projects separate, and The Sims 3 ended up sounding like Desperate Housewives; plus that Buy Mode song with a chorus of people whistling? Uh, no thanks. It's better than a chorus of kazoos, but not by much. Plus, as a composer myself, I tended to use The Sims 1 & 2 to test out my production music, and I couldn't do that with 3 anymore. What I ended up doing was muting the music, then running an independent playlist on Windows Media Player that I would pause and unpause with the media keys depending on whether I was in Live Mode or not.
I don't think anyone at Sims Division knew how hail works. Hailstorms are supposed to happen in the summer, not the winter. This is because there's no surface convection during the winter that allows ice crystals to melt and refreeze, or enough wind to keep them aloft long enough even if there was.
The game's financial system was wildly unbalanced, too. There were so many ways of making quick money that you could (and I did) make §50.000 without needing to ever type "motherlode". There were too many ways to make money, and not enough ways to spend it. Now, I'm sure that was helpful for households with huge families, but that just underscores how family-centric the game was. I tended to play only with one or 2 sims, because that was uncomplicated and offered more unique play opportunities than just constant breeding. I had to quit moving sims onto a particular lot in Sunset Valley because there was a Sweet William spawner right across the road and I couldn't stand the temptation. All that really needed changing here was a few minor tuning mods; cap the resale value of flowers at §20, charge more for smelting and gem-cutting relative to the value of the object, increase the price of food to more realistic levels, increase the cost of wall tiles from §70 to §120, and charge for roof textures and terrain paints. Also, sims' secret admirers tended to send them very generous gifts in the post, which could be resold at cost; secret admirers should have only sent items within their own price range. For instance, when I would play in Moonlight Falls, Pappy Wolff tended to send me hugely-expensive wall decorations, like that tapestry that cost something like §10.000, just because I chatted with him on sims MSN and he thought I was cute. He sent me five of those in a week one time. Just sayin'.
Going along with that, it bothered me how easily sims could sell things that they had made. Just click "Sell to Collector" to throw the painting into the air and have money shower down on you. Just finish a novel to have it become a best-seller. Just grab your pile of gold ingots in Buy Mode and hit "Delete" to get a whole bunch of money. One of the offices in the Doo Peas plaza could have had an art appraiser in it who would have determined a painting's value and bought it off you. There could have been a dedicated printer object for sims to print their novels out to either put on their own bookshelf or take to the publisher on the second floor of the bookshop to have it edited and sold. Gemstones could have been sold to the science lab, ingots could have been sold to the city hall. These could all have been implemented in the core game without much bother.
There also should have been more epic questing. I read a post on Cohost some time ago that talked about the lifelong quest for learning how to make Ambrosia, and I realised they had so many opportunities to make similar quests, but they just... didn't. I guess corporate feudalism got in the way or something, but they never even finished the Temple of Karnak in Al-Simhara! And, they managed not to leave any functional way of finishing it on the player's side. All of the important tomb-building objects seemed broken, as I gave it a damned good go on a few occasions to build new tombs and each one failed because I couldn't get the bloody triggers to work. I figure there's no way the World Adventures developers could possibly have used the in-game tools to build their tombs and must have just used standard Python or something. And, if I'm wrong about that, a tech document outlining how all that shit worked would have been helpful.
Of course, that has nothing to do with what I set out to talk about. The aforementioned Ambrosia quest requires no special objects or even any expansion packs, it's just there in the core game. It's not even a "quest", per se, it's more of a personal challenge; a confluence of time-consuming prerequisites for a single, whizz-bang payoff at the end of it. It doesn't bestow any special power, unlock any special objects, or even pay back any of the money required to achieve it; it's just something you set out to do, that under normal circumstances, most likely will take a sim's entire life to achieve. A similar thing could have been done for all of the other core skillsets. For instance, the ability to summon aliens to take a sim away to their planet rather than having to die at the end of their life by mastering the logic and handiness skills; this could have been done by locating a rare item such as a Luminorious Gem (which would have required those to have their own spawner, I know), and reaching a certain point in the Military career before ducking out of it and changing to Science. Given more time, I'm sure I could come up with other ideas, but that gets the point across.
I mentioned specular highlighting earlier. I don't know whose brilliant idea that was, putting highlights, surface normals, and particle effects on a game with 2009 technology. That was top-of-the-line gaming computer stuff for fluff and nonsense that wasn't even particularly well-executed. Possibly this ran afoul of shortened deadlines inasmuch as the people responsible for it were probably sleeping under their desks, Kid Icarus-style, to get the game out on time. I don't want to talk about that too much, though—it'll just lead me down a rabbithole that doesn't need exploring.
Talking of rabbitholes; having had a taste of the Animal Crossing games lately, I think the open-world aspect to the game should have made Buy Mode obsolete. The convoluted bit at the beginning where you're supposed to move a household in somewhere (confusingly requiring a house to be built there already), could have been reformulated just a bit. Build the house after you've moved onto a lot, then furnish it with some basics that you moved to town with in your Family Inventory. Anything else could have required a visit to the home centre. Of course, the option of moving your household into a fully built and furnished house would have always been there in the same way as what was released: ignore households and click "Edit Town". This had already been explored by the handheld versions of Bustin' Out and The Urbz, in that there was no "Buy Mode"—you had to actually go to a shop and buy things in order to furnish your house.
Suffice to say, I can do pages and pages on this subject, but I'm getting hungry and I'm gonna go make some rice now.