It really makes the sims more sociable and interact with other sims. These packs adds a lot of depth to the Sims 4. Before Get to Work and Get Together came out, I always make my sims holed up in their house and stuffed everything that they need making them anti-social. When they feel sad about not having to socialize for days, I would just invite someone over and hangout with them or talk to some neighbors, passer bys and their family members. The only times that they leave the house was either they went to work, school or I'm not playing their household. Everything became slowly dull and quite repetitive but its all gone after these expansion packs came out. Ever since I played the previous franchise of the Sims I always wanted interactive jobs, and more or so the club systems. In the sims 3 it was like a ghost town everywhere you go thus I felt sad for my sims. With Get Together, every sim I mean anyone would really get together and my sims and the worlds feel so much alive.
I liked Get to Work, because I'm one of those simmers who loves aliens and all things supernatural in her game. I rather enjoyed the active careers, as well, so I felt like the EP was really nice. Get Together, though, improved the game play and atmosphere for the game dramatically in a lot of different ways. In the other towns, building an apocalypse, medieval, or any theme outside of the surrounding FX background of a sub neighborhood caused some major issues for immersion and believably. When I'd jog to the end of my apocalypse neighborhood in Oasis Springs, there were elaborate houses in the distance all pristine and wonderful. With Windenburg, this all changes. On the island you can do some really incredible themed environments without FX interfering for the most part. The same is true for the countryside. The town portion is a little more limiting, but still very doable for most themes. I appreciate this so much, as I like to shake up my neighborhoods often with themes that don't really fit into the pristine world of Willow Creek and Oasis Springs. Even Newcrest had this issue along the sub neighborhood areas. With Windenburg I can create criminal slum sub neighborhoods that actually look believable along the edges where your neighborhood meets the FX one, and I can do the same with medieval and Sci-Fi themes as well. (The primary shopping district along the bay looks amazing when remodeled with Sci-Fi lots. I often bulldoze most of the commercial lots and replace them with residential lots and only keep 1, maybe 2, commercial ones. I can go to Willow Creek if I need to hit up an official gym for aspiration credit). For those reasons alone, Get Together was huge for me, but then you add the club system into the mix and all of the buy/build modes items that accompanied it and you really do get an amazing/immersive EP that definitely blows GTW out of the water in regard to sandbox elements. Don't get me wrong, I liked GTW and I have no regrets, but it was a very traditional EP in that it added an assortment of new guided game play (active careers), and my beloved and most epic and awesome aliens (I really like how they did aliens in TS4!). It didn't change how my entire game could be played in the same way that Get Together did, though. Get Together felt very sandbox oriented to me, which is how I like to play. I don't mind guided things like the active careers and the like, they can be fun too, but I find they offer little replay-ability for me since it does get monotonous if I utilize them too much. Give me the ability to craft a believable environment of my choice, though, and then give me awesome club features to craft social structures in said neighborhood of my choice... and I can play for hours on end without getting bored. Both expansions are great, though, and have instilled a lot of excitement in me for future EPs. I have my minor irritations with each one (as naturally you can't please everyone 100%), but on the whole, I am very pleased with the direction the devs are taking TS4. I was hoping the series would go in a good direction, and so far they haven't let me down. It has been a really fun and exciting adventure in siming thus far. If they ever give me terrain tools (or even better a CAW) along with a color wheel for CAS and build mode... I will be so spastic and excited you'll have to use chloroform on me just for a moment of peace.
