One of the best selling PC game franchises of all time, The Sims, has been a longtime favorite of mine since the very first in the series. Countless hours were spent staring at my monitor, possibly open-mouthed, ordering the virtual people around and helping them achieve much more than I was at that point in my life. Now, over nine years after the first game’s release, 15 expansion packs and numerous random Stuff packs later, EA brings us The Sims 3. Even though this life-simulator is essentially more Sims, I was once again constantly finding myself awake at three o’clock in the morning making sure my sim was ready for work, a place I would need to be in a few hours myself. The lack of sleep in real life was definitely worth it though.
Between the first two Sims games, the biggest change was the graphical leap made. While The Sims 3′s graphics have been enhanced a bit, the main improvement over The Sims 2 is the ever changing city that your sim now inhabit. Rather than controlling the only dynamic household in town, every other family will complete the circle of life along side yours. Your sims can now seamlessly go anywhere in town just by clicking on your destination, without the need to sit through a five minute loading screen. Previously, neighboring sims would walk by your house and disappear after leaving your property line, now you have the option to stalk them and see where they are going and who they interact with in their day to day lives. The hours spent at your sim’s place of employment have seen a slight improvement as well, allowing you to choose what your sim will do during their shift, from working harder than normal to conversing with your co-workers. Though this does add a little extra layer to the time spent there, if you have a one sim household and you have the camera focused on them, you are just basically spending that time staring at a close-up of the building they’re in. With everything they’ve done this time around, there is the possibility of EA adding to the work experience in a later expansion, which is definitely something to look forward to. That aside, with how the town is handled now, gliding the camera around you can find people having fights, burglars breaking into neighbors houses and sims protesting outside of city hall, all things that really contribute to making it feel as if you are really in a living, breathing city.
Along with the city, the sims themselves have also been improved. Their needs are a bit easier to manage, with their bladders seemingly being able to withstand a full days worth of inventory before requiring purging. Each sim has up to five personality traits (out of over 60), like being charming, neurotic, a kleptomaniac, or having a fear of being nude, that determine how they act on their own and what type of Lifetime and daily wishes they would like fulfilled. One of the sims I created had the insane personality trait, making it so that he would constantly start arguing with himself and wanted to do things like ask random questions to other sims or call their mothers llamas.
Moving these more life-like sims into their homes felt a bit better as well. One of the most time-consuming parts for me in the previous games was furnishing their living space and getting everything to look semi-decent. Now the player has the option to buy a house fully furnished, which brought a huge wave of relief over me after clicking on my first house. Obviously, I am not someone who delves that much into the building aspect of The Sims games, but from some options that I messed around with while buying new items or moving currently owned ones around, I noticed a few upgrades in this department as well. An annoyance that I’ve both experienced and heard complaints about before was the way that items stuck strictly to the grids laid out around the house, leaving coffee tables unevenly placed in front of three seater couches. That restriction has been lifted a bit, with things being able to sit halfway in a grid now and even turned diagonally. The ability to customize every piece of furniture and clothing has also been added to the game, giving you many more options than just what EA put into the game.
While these are some great improvements, it is a shame to see all the new content from Sims 2′s expansions pretty much gone, bringing this game back to the basics. No longer are you able to add pets, go on vacation, watch the seasons change, or open a business. I guess one cannot really blame EA for doing this, as these expansions are what kept this series in the top 10 PC games sales charts every month for years, but it’s still a bit disappointing nonetheless. Perhaps one of their expansions could help touch on an issue that my sim, Jon, came across quite frequently: children born out of wedlock. I gave Jon the Lifetime Wish of being a heartbreaker, someone who has been the boyfriend/girlfriend of ten different sims. During the quest to achieve this goal, I discovered you could now easily have children out of wedlock and, for experimental reasons, ended up having eight children with six different women. When he was actually allowed to see his children at the various mother’s houses (some were so angry with him they wouldn’t even let him in the house), his offspring had no place to sleep, no toys to play with, or any of the other necessities that would help keep them happy. When the mother would get tired or needed to do something else, she would just leave the infant on the ground and go about her business. Attempts to be a good deadbeat dad and buy things the kid would need brought my screen back to his house. To my knowledge, I don’t think any of the bills that were paid in-game went towards child support either. I am hoping these kinds of things get addressed somehow in a future update or expansion, giving it some manner of realism and a bit of consequence.
Speaking of the possibilities for expansions, it seems as if the new online store found on their website could be used to fill the role played by the Stuff packs before. Where the Stuff expansion packs combined a bunch of similar styled items and threw them on a disc for $20, The Store gives players the option to buy clothing, furniture, and hairstyles via micro-transations. The Exchange makes a return, giving players a place to trade user-made content for free. The Sims site also gives users the ability to create blogs and edit videos captured in-game, stuff that I am not really into, but fairly certain there’s a large audience for.
All in all, The Sims 3 is a great game. The familiarity of the basic gameplay made me comfortable playing it, while the new additions to the series helped keep my interest enough to become addicted again. While I doubt this title would make Sims nay-sayers change their mind about the series, it will definitely appease the crowd that brought the franchise’s sales figures to over 100 million units.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
