I don’t think they had even talked to each other in that time! As the Free Will was a major draw for me in the Sims, I’m afraid I shelved it for a bit because of this. So when I left it for an hour and came back, I found they had done…well, nothing. They did basic functions, like eat, drink, sleep, etc…but they didn’t seem to have any other pursuits of their own. Moving over to the Sims 3, I was dismayed to find that even on full Free Will, my Sims just kinda…stood there. It was gratifying when they DID end up with who they were ‘supposed to’, but it was always a laugh and shock when they ended up with someone completely different and you tried to figure out “why in the world would you like him?!”
This was particularly fun for the storywriter in me, as I could create my fiction characters and see if they interacted the same way with each other in a Sim-ulation (pun-intended D) as I had envisioned in the stories. I’d come back to find what hijinks they had gotten into on their own – what people they became friends/enemies with, what hobbies they had pursued on their own, etc. One of my favourite parts of the Sims 2 was to create a household, give them their basic things, such as degrees/careers and their living arrangements, and then leave them to their own devices for about an hour. This was a big issue for me when I first tried the Sims 3.