User blog comment:LostInRiverview/The Sims Wiki Monthly Question - May 2014/@comment-1519608-20140501152521

Personally I feel like the newer games are very easy. In The Sims it was sometimes a struggle to get the Sims into a good mood so they could succeed. But, if you persevered and were able to reach success, it seemed like much more of an accomplishment. It seems in The Sims 3 like opportunities are just thrown at your Sims everywhere they go, and it's really easy to get a family very wealthy in just one or two in-game generations.

My idea would be to have optional features in the game that add some challenge or throw some curveballs at the player. These could all be enabled or disabled in the game options, so players that want to play purely as a fantasy or sandbox would still be able to.

1 - Relative health, illness, disease etc.: Diseases have appeared in the games before, but they're relatively isolated incidents and otherwise the Sims are in perfect health the whole time. I'd like to see Sims with variable levels of healthiness. Their overall health would be based on a lot of factors, including diet, exercise, how often their needs run into the red, the cleanliness of their surroundings, whether others nearby are sick, and age. There would also be new diseases and causes of death related to their health. Eventually as Sims get older, their level of health would decline naturally so they would become more susceptible to these conditions, thus serving as a natural "death by old age"

2 - Loans and mortgages, and eliminating starting funds: Right now every new Sim or family starts out with a pot of money that they can use for whatever reason, though typically it's used to buy a lot/house and possessions. But people venturing out into the world may not start out with thousands of simoleons ready to be spent, especially when it comes to buying property. So, I'd like to see the introduction of a loan system into the game, where the Sim borrows money to pay for things then pays it back over time. This would also allow families to move into larger, more expensive houses even if they don't have the money to pay for it at that time (but have the earning potential to pay for it later on).

3 - Non-linear careers: Right now, Sims in a particular career track proceed from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3 and so on, in a predictable pattern. Each job leads to a new job, each job has a particular base level of pay, each job has a particular required skill set. But real life employment really doesn't work this way. I would envision a system where Sims start out in a position based on skills they've acquired and based on certain traits they have. If the Sim is a hard worker and develops their skills, they will be offered a promotion to another position and a new salary, and the player can accept or decline the promotion. But if that Sim developed a completely different set of skills, they'd be offered a completely different job, or perhaps even a job in a completely different field of employment. To prevent this from getting overly complicated, imagine each career "track" as a tree instead. New employees start in some menial job at the bottom of the tree, with two or three different job options based on their personality and skills. Each of those two or three jobs would in turn have two or three more jobs that branch off of them, and so on. Some of these branches may combine with other branches, or may even reach onto other "trees". Ultimately a Sim could end up in a job that is radically different from the one they started.