Giving extremely high-detailed models to the Sims (or anything in the game) would be quite pointless, since you spend so much of your time looking from very far away. The game doesn't look too good from up-close, but it looks fine when you're actually playing. The only problem I would have with it would be how flat the ground looks. I'm sure it would greatly decrease performance to do it any other way, but it's still disappointing how the ground is *painted* on.
Other than that tho, the game looks fine.
As far as "no gameplay change", can't really agree. They've added a few things that changes the way how you'll play your sims (Mood effects, Traits) and make them a little bit more unique than with the previous games. That's not the only thing changed, but it definitely has an impact on what you'll do, and also smoothen out the gameplay compared to previous games. (Where you would start with quite a few problems in making your Sims happy, to suddenly having no problems at all.)
And the whole "Can visit the town!" thing... Not that interesting. It'll probably feel more "alive" once they release more stuff for it, but right now it doesn't seem to do much except remove the loading time you'd have in past games.
Either way, most Sims games would just bore me after 2-3 days of playing, since it felt like there was nothing left to do, at all. But this one seems to pack more longevity, it'll probably still be a little bit of a letdown until they start releasing expansion packs (and for the love of all that is holy, don't buy anything on their stores, just uses mods) but it's a good "base" to build upon.
