The Sims 4 has had ten years to beat The Sims 3, and it still falls short
2025 marks the 25th anniversary of The Sims, and EA has celebrated with gifts no one was expecting: re-releases for The Sims 1 and 2, and an update to The Sims 3. Now that the 16-year-old game is meant to run more consistently on modern PCs, it’s the perfect time for newcomers and nostalgic veterans to boot up this classic. Do so, and one thing will quickly become clear – even after ten years of updates, The Sims 4 still can’t match The Sims 3.
When you ask older Simmers what they miss most about The Sims 3, many will mention the life game‘s open world. Rather than The Sims 4‘s limited selection of individual lots separated by loading screens, your sims lived in a completely connected setting.
You could walk to your neighbor’s house and go inside without cutting away from the action. You could switch between control of your sims seamlessly, whether they were in the same room or on separate lots miles apart. Hop on a car, bike, boat, or jetski, and you were free to explore uninterrupted.
It helped that The Sims 3’s environment felt worth exploring. This was partly down to how sims behaved – a wider range of more impactful traits meant their behavior was more nuanced and unpredictable. The Sims 4 is better at populating an area with realistic numbers of sims, but the few that appear in the background of the Sims 3 are far more interesting to watch.
NPCs could often be chaotic, but that helped to create funny, memorable, dramatic, and – above all – organic storytelling moments. Heck, even the animals in The Sims 3 had complex desires and personalities.
In contrast, NPCs in The Sims 4 stick to basic scripts and rely on human interference to make anything interesting happen. Even the sims you control have less depth, as their personalities aren’t as varied. Your traits give you the occasional moodlet and hobby preference rather than useful skills or strange social interactions.
Beyond the actors peopling your stage, The Sims 3 also felt much more interactive. Sims could have imaginary friends, fall victim to crime, visit tattoo shops, pet a deer in the streets, go to the movies (even if you couldn’t follow them inside), and swim in the ocean. Many of these options aren’t available in The Sims 4, and if they are, they were introduced much later in expansions.
Speaking of expansions, The Sims 3 simply did them better. The World Adventures expansion, for example, allowed you to take holidays to entirely new locales, each featuring literal dungeon crawls. You’d need to dodge traps and solve basic puzzles to gather rare artifacts – it was a blast. The Sims 4’s Jungle Adventure, an attempt to replicate these mechanics, felt minor and overly similar in comparison.
This is a definite trend: many Sims 4 expansions take their ideas from those of their predecessors, but they are chopped up and watered down. The Sims 3 Pets offered dogs, cats, horses, snakes, lizards, raccoons, and more; meanwhile, it took The Sims 4 two full expansions and a ‘Stuff’ DLC to add dogs, cats, horses, and a handful of small pets. The Sims 3 Late Night was like having the Vampires, Get Together, and Get Famous expansions merged into one.
With major mechanics spread across so many expansions, even the most updated versions of the Sims 4 feel uninspiring to play. Unless, that is, you enjoy attending repetitive festivals. With enough expansions installed, the game will badger you to take part in some menial task every day of the week, often on a lot you weren’t planning to attend.
Participating is rarely rewarding. You might come away with a new mood or recipe but little else. This feels like clutter rather than worldbuilding. The series has replaced open, organic storytelling moments with a busy schedule of stilted, scripted ones, which I now ignore more often than I explore.
The Sims 4 has only one major advantage over The Sims 3: its visuals. Yes, the graphics are noticeably better, as you’d expect from a newer game. Create-A-Sim is more modern and diverse, both in terms of its fashion options and the choices you can make about a sim’s gender and disabilities.
Meanwhile, Build Mode is certainly more approachable, with a well-organized catalog of items and the option to drop in entire rooms with ease. It’s simpler than ever to Macguiver a complex build together, letting you create beautiful architecture with minimal frustration.
Plus, where The Sims 4 has been stingy with mechanics, it’s filled the void with far more Build Mode items. All told, things are certainly clunkier, more dated, and less gorgeous in the older Sims games.
There’s a catch, though. Building and decorating homes may feel more polished in The Sims 4, but The Sims 3 lets you customize entire towns.
Rather than limiting you to a few dozen lots, you could choose from over 100 in some Sims 3 maps. Many of these you could place yourself – and if you can’t find a suitable patch of ground, you could mold the terrain to make space. You had the power to craft islands and mountain ranges at your fingertips.
There’s another huge hole in the design options of The Sims 4. In the transition from one installment to the next, EA stripped The Sims of its best, most creative feature.
Picture the scene: it’s 2010, and I am a 13-year-old who has just discovered the emo band My Chemical Romance. On the official Sims 3 website, I find a custom pattern someone designed featuring the band’s logo. I download it, and I use the Create-A-Style tool to paste this onto items in my game – posters, T-shirts, bed sheets, and even fridges if I so desire.
Create-A-Style allowed you to add and alter up to four custom patterns on any item of furniture. You could further tinker with designs by altering the color, either with a color wheel or by inputting RBG codes. Color-coordinating outfits and home interiors was a breeze. You were completely free to create, and you were encouraged to share ideas with the community.
These days, Sims fans are grateful when two items of furniture have matching swatches. It’s now so rare that any base game update offering more colors is seen as a godsend. But many of us remember the days of Create-A-Style, and we resent The Sims gods for what they took from us.
Until recently, The Sims 4’s biggest advantage was that it could actually run on a modern PC. Intel processors introduced to many computers in 2021 weren’t compatible with the older games, and you’d need to rely on fanmade fixes to play The Sims 3 without it crashing on launch.
However, The Sims 3 is now perfectly playable on the EA app thanks to its latest update. It convinced me to return to my favorite entry in The Sims series, and I encourage anyone who hasn’t tried the third game to leap on this opportunity. In terms of gameplay, The Sims 4 will quickly pale in comparison, so why wouldn’t you explore the classics while we wait for Project Rene to arrive?
If you’re sticking with EA’s latest, you can make it a bit more exciting by using some of the best Sims 4 mods from our regularly updated list.