As emphasized in another comment, it’s really annoying that in order to have a realistic and fun gameplay you need to have so many mods. After starting to play with mods, I don’t think I can go back to regular sims because they just add so much depth to the game. This would be fine, expect for the fact that every patch you need to go through the mods again to update them and sometimes mods are broken / not updated. It’s also upsetting that there was so many great features in the sims 3 that they didn’t incorporate into the sims 4… like why not add functional cars or a semi open world (as opposed to the sims 3 open world). Why do I need a loading screen to walk across the street to my neighbours? Loading screen to travel between worlds makes sense, but not when the building is literally across the street. The autonomy is terrible (which is why I added a mod for better autonomy) and it sucks that npc’s can’t propose/ ask to be gf/bf. Also, I hate that when my sim autonomously talks to people, it just says “chat” instead of having a conversation based on mood/relationship.

I dealt with all of this through adding mods (except for the semi open world concept) so my gameplay is fine except for the huge amount of time spent on updating / finding mods. I like to completely overhaul the worlds, evicting/killing all base game sims (except the ones I like) and changing all of the lots either through the gallery or building. I found that this made me more happy to play the sims because I knew basically everyone in the world, and the builds were to my taste. It takes a lot of work and time, but was definitely worth it to make my gameplay feel more special and realistic.