Once EA took hold of Maxis and the original creative minds behind the first iteration of the Sims fell to the wayside, I've become more and more disheartened with the franchise as a whole. I remember buying Vacation and House Party, along with the base game, on a whim one day while snooping around a shopping mall and the game absolutely blew me away. The music - each composed to match the expansion pack - the humor - some of it lowbrow and some of it subtle and undercutting - and the general atmosphere of the original Sims is something that both the Sims 2 (later on in its life cycle) and the Sims 3 (right around the time of Ambitions of Generations) failed to recreate.
I originally enjoyed the Sims 3, but it keeps going down the exact same path the Sims 2 went down. It starts off building upon the core mechanics of the original while introducing something exicting - for the Sims 2, age and families and greater interactivity, for the Sims 3, that plus the open world - but they slowly and surely decline into some ridiculous hodge-podge of expansion packs introducing gimmick after gimmick, as the things people WANT fall to the wayside, all while nickel and diming us for furniture that doesn't look like absolute ass from the microtransaction store (as of writing this, no Sims 3 copy I own - and I own all the ones up to Showtime - has ONE fuckin' ceiling fan in it - and the one from the store doesn't even work spin).
My main problem with the newer iterations is that they're increasingly homogenized. The orchestral flares and tropical music, jazz rhythms and organ pieces of the original, Vacation, Hot Date, and Makin' Magic, have been replaced by identical sounding by-the-books techno/pop garbage that is one strike against the game.
Looking further into the mechanics, while I don't expect much to change, the games in and of themselves fail to ever add anything new. While the open environments are incredible in the Sims 3, there's so LITTLE to do that it's almost disheartening. How the Sims had more to do in 3 expansions than the Sims 3 has enabled us to do in like 6 is ridiculous. By this time in the original, I could go to a tropical, winter, or temeperate get away and do all sorts of weather specific activities, I could hit it up in a jazzy, '60s inspired city filled with restaurants, clubs, and hangouts, and I could even go into a parallel friggin' universe, fighting wizards and magi, brewing alchemical potions, and building amusement park rides.
The plain and simple of it is, it's not even the items or the scarcity of things the Sims 3 and all subsequent games are going to have that worries me. It's the fact that the soul of the game died a long, LONG time ago (right around the time Apartment Life was considered a legitimate expansion pack) and what we need, instead of a return to roots orchestrated by a bunch of conglomorate suits sitting on a board room lauding the introduction of someone like Deadmau5 in the Sims 4, is a new company to come along and build their own iteration of the Sims, without stumbling into the pitfalls of greed and big business.
And for any game franchise that has been summarily ruined for that matter.
Basically, (here comes the dramatic, maudlin tone) we need to keep dreaming.
And before I have hell rain down on me for saying I'm feedin' the machine by buying the games and givin into EA's sales-pitch maaaaan, I don't actually BUY them. My brother does and I play them when he's done.
And I'm not gonna get preachy on his ass.