For me, there are some elements of the game that were a long time in coming. Story progression, in theory, was a great idea. The rest of the town ages along with your active family, and with lives of their own. In practice, not so much. There were many problems with the base game's SP such as families you were attached to packing up and moving to limbo, clone babies, and house hopping (try finding a favorite inactive sim with that one).
There were player-created mods that helped with these issues, but the way the game was built, there could only be one of these "core mods" used in the game at a time. The most robust of them all is maintained by its creator that insists on time-bombing each update.
Also, it seems that EA Games is trying to move toward an online model again adding quests, buying in-game items from their online store, and what not.
The look of the sims aren't that different from those in TS2, but with a lot of color options. Perhaps too many. And genetics, as I'd mentioned before, have been watered down from the simplified TS2 version. But since you barely played TS2, I don't think you'd miss it. My overall opinion is that it's a good game but it could have been great.
Yeah, I used to do something similar in Pharoah. Because sometimes I just didn't feel like paying tribute to the gods!
