I'm convinced that it is actually those artists' management firms who pay EA for having them included and not the other way round.

Especially with EA being such a whore for celebrities. I bet the CEO was like, "Thanks for the money, Katy Perry. And the happy ending."

I could honestly do with TS4 never getting a pets expansion. I never used much of the expansion content of TS2 Pets or TS3 Pets and the only great thing about Unleashed was Old Town and the wonderful loading screen music*.

* I work at a department store now that sometimes plays music from the same genre of the Unleashed loading screen music and it's starting to make me nostalgia pretty hard.

No compromises Get with it EA.

Pets are something that I actually would like them to sell piecemeal in the store. I don't want horses, or critters or a million fur patterns...I just want a dog. It doesn't need to have a job or breed or find me a date...I just want it to run like mad (even from a deep sleep) to the curb to meet it's favourite Sim, the way it did in Sims 1.

Sometimes less is more. And Sims 1 music was fantastic!

It bugs you because it's EA trying desperately to be 'weird' and 'wacky' and bring some of that 'traditional sims humour' to the game, but they're trying far too hard.
Instead of a subtle 'haha, that's funny and kinda neat' like we had with, for example the cow plant in TS2 University, or the Grilled Cheese aspiration - the rocket is just 'WOW LOOK AT THIS GUYS SPACE SHIP IN THE SIMS LOL XDDDDDDD FUNNY CLASSIC SIMS XD'
They're so out of touch with the game and it's fans, it just reeks of desperation and the Sims team clinging to a by-gone era.

Instead of toddlers, cut YA. Make the adult lifestage longer instead. I never saw the point of YA in TS3, as they're basically adults. I can't name one thing YAs can do that adults can't do (or perhaps I've not played enough to figure it out). In TS2, at least they had a purpose.

I'm not that pissed off for pools, as I don't use them all that much. Seems like a stupid thing to cut, though. I'd rather be without the rocket.

The "weird stories."

Adults are just young adults with wrinkles on their faces. They wouldn't be necessary if the game had gradual aging. Life stages made sense when TS2 was being developed in 2003, when technology was limited, but now it's 2014. We can do so much more. Gradual aging is not too far fetched, unless you're greedy, lazy, E.A.

I guess it actually is...
I'm no programmer, but from what I've been told, it would be actually pretty hard.
Let's think of Spore, for example. Every animation it had had to work with EVERY possible creature created, with every height possible, and a lot of other variables (multiple arms, eyes, legs, etc...). However, those animations weren't as good as the former YibSims said TS4's are. Also, there were "fewer" animations, in the sense that there were fewer actions you could or needed to do. And, they didn't need to be so detailed and smooth and "realistic". At least, they weren't. Just regular animations, I guess.

Now, in The Sims, every Sim as to be able to do a lot of stuff, messing with objects, move around (which has been said that's very good this time around), etc. And they wanted to make them as smooth and realistic as possible.
Which meant, fixing the height (and not only the height, but the horizontal length of every sim's limbs, if you notice), would actually make it easier and "possible" to make "perfect" animations for those measures. But bear with me here, I don't know how animation works, or how did they make Spore's animations in 2008 work for every creature, but height (or actually make your sim's arms longer, for example) would difficult animation a lot.

Not to mention that so far there have been actions and interactions divided by life stages, I don't know how would that work if there were gradual aging...

I don't mind with life stages, it bugs me that they virtually removed 2 of them (teens with same heights as YAs makes them the same thing, only the appearance slightly changes and I guess there are some gameplay nuances).

Not that I'm defending EA, I actually have no idea how that could be possible. Hope someone else does and explains me

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's easy, but still, they should at least try to innovate the game and try new things, instead of doing more of the same (and then less). The leap from TS1 to TS2 was HUGE. The switch from TS2 to TS3 was incremental, whereas the switch from TS3 to TS4 is actually a step backwards, with no pools, no toddlers, no open world, no hot tubs, no Create-a-Style, only one world, etc.

As I said before, TS2 had a 3D world. TS3 had an open world. TS4 has what, animal hats and luchadores? For crying out loud, E.A. Innovate! Freaking innovate! They should have a new feature, never before had, and advertise that. Emotions? Really? TS1 had emotions. If a sim didn't socialize, they'd get depressed and cry randomly. And it's not even properly-done emotions. Just dudes crying from violins and shit.

I'd much rather have gradual aging or adjustable heights than this half-arsed "emotions" bullshite. Then again, E.A. doesn't want to put in the work to making this a good game, rather just pumping out some half-gestated fetus and hoping to cash in on it.

I agree with you there

Adjustable heights would be a much more welcome feature than emotions.
Sims have always been emotional

Katy Perry's whoring herself out to E.A.'s pimps?

No, they're whoring themselves out to her.

Katy Perry's a pimp? That explains a lot.

I don't think adjustable height is impossible - just a bit difficult. It could maybe be possible if they'd made a rig that allows for slight scaling, and a functional version of the 'stretchskeleton' cheat, only implemented in the game instead of being a cheat. There could be one skeleton for each lifestage, but with slight height differences from beginning of the lifestage to the end of it (think of it as somewhere around 0.85-1.15 on a TS2 stretchskeleton scale, just without the mesh weirdness with arms/legs they get). They would probably still need to grow up with a cake to change between skeletons, but it would be an improvement.

As for emotions, sims are more than enough emotional already. They cry, they jump with joy, they get overly excited when it starts to snow, they get jealous, and they get so angry they get into fights. Sure, in TS4 they've probably built more onto the emotions, so thta the sims can be in the emotional state longer and go into or out of it more gradual, but it's not exactly a new invention.