User blog comment:LostInRiverview/My Dream Sims Game/@comment-4568327-20180911153035

Part of the notion of time being progressive was introduced as early as SimCity 2000. A lot of buildings and structures are not available if you start the game in ye olde 1900, but they would gradually be invented and get unlocked as you progressed through the decades. For example, nuclear power plants weren't invented until the 1950s and 1960s, so you couldn't just plop them down in year 1900. Even if you started the game in 2050, it would still take a couple of years for fusion power plants to become available (assuming you didn't just use cheats).

This idea of "progression through time" was lost in SimCity 4 (I haven't actually played SC3K yet), and it doesn't exist in Cities: Skylines either. Those games exist in a "timeless universe" where technology never really changes. Sure, years may pass and your industries may become advanced high tech processing plants, but they would never actually invent or do anything that impacted the world around them, save for perhaps producing less pollution and providing well-paying jobs.

Careers have always been the most underwhelming aspect of The Sims. As a kid, the better part of my day was spent at school, and you do a lot of stuff in school. Classes didn't necessarily have to be tranquil and unengaging; if the teacher was a good teacher, you would often be granted the opportunity to do some fun and engaging hands-on activities. At recess, physical play built up young muscles and relationships with your peers as you learn how to resolve conflict... or not. Yet, starting from the very first game, and never really changing throughout the series, this potential was never explored; Sim kids would go to school and then disappear in there, out of sight from the player. TS3 was especially disappointing in this aspect because the developers went so far as to building a school building, yet never allowing you to go inside... the potential was there, why did they let go of it?

The same goes with careers for older Sims. The Sims: Superstar did begin to explore this by allowing you, for the first time, to follow Sims to their workplaces, and The Sims 2: Open for Business allowed your Sims to run their own businesses and could serve the community (it was possible to run a neighborhood where all community lots were owned by locals, and as such, meant that those landowning families could make other Sims dependent on them for things like groceries and clothes). The basic career structure, however, was basically School 2.0, where Sims would disappear into a building and be inaccessible to the player. Once again, the potential was completely ignored. Opportunities for the Sims to make changes to and make an impact on what we spend most of our waking moments in life doing were simply not pursued. There's so much potential that The Sims could have, and in later games they HAD all those opportunities to explore them, to expand the core of the game. They did not, however, and with the fourth iteration in the series, it seems they have no interest in doing so. They are no longer exploring new ground; instead they are marking time to recreate things we had already seen before.