We get our hands on The Sims 3 and have a no-holds-barred report on what the game has to offer.
The Sims 3. It's the next game in one of the most popular computer game series in the last 10 years--a series of games that's all about the joys, loves, careers, and embarrassing moments in the lives of little computer people. We've just played the game extensively and have much to report on its new features, improvements, and the way you don't always have to worry about having to send your little sims to the bathroom.
The Sims 3 expands on the extensive customization options of The Sims 2 in many ways. The Create-A-Sim character creation utility has grown and improved, offering five major categories of customization: basics, hair, looks, clothing, and personality. Basics offers six selectable stages of a sim's life span (as opposed to five in The Sims 2): toddler, child, teenager, young adult, adult, and elder. Younger sims will have more-limited choices than older ones when it comes to the game's new personality options, which we'll explain shortly. Basics also offers a full gradient slider with various hues for different skin colors (such as light, dark, and swarthy--or blue, red, and green if you prefer to make characters who look more like aliens or movie monsters) and gradient sliders for your characters' stature, which set both how much body fat they have and how much musculature they have.
Hair lets you select from a variety of preset hairstyles (or hair-plus-accessory styles, such as baseball caps, top hats, and bicycle helmets) with completely adjustable hair color layers for your character's base color, roots, tips, and highlights. The looks panel offers the ability to customize your character's basic head shape (or choose from a preset shape), along with eye shape and color, nose shape, lip shape and color, beauty marks such as moles and freckles, and colored cosmetics for eye shadow, lipstick, and face paint. Every single color choice has both a variety of presets as well as a free-form gradient option that lets you select whatever color, hue, and gamma levels you prefer.
The clothing menu is stocked with a predictably huge array of preset clothes for everyday wear, formal occasions, sleeping, athletic workouts, and swimming, and most of these offer mix-and-match top-and-bottom selections (or one-piece outfits if you prefer)--all customizable by color or using the game's new create-a-style system, which lets you customize a color or color pattern, save it, share it with your friends, and apply it to anything that can have a pattern applied to it, such as your character's clothes, living room sofa, wallpaper, carpet, and car paint job.
The personality menu has been completely revamped for The Sims 3, including not only provisions for your sim's favorite food, color, and music--as well as a customizable "simlish" (gibberish) voice with adjustable pitch--but also the much-talked-about traits system, which completely replaces The Sims 2's arcane and sometimes-confusing "personality sliders that give you a horoscope" system. The Sims 3 instead helps you define each sim's personality with more than 60 "traits," which we've revealed in a previous story. Toddlers start with only two traits, children get three, teenagers get four, and young adults get the game's maximum number of five.
Of the huge variety of traits, many can be extremely advantageous, while others can be extremely disadvantageous, especially when stacked together. There are clearly combinations of traits that were placed in the game for people who prefer to play toward a specific goal. For instance, one of our sims took the following traits: good sense of humor (which makes your sim's jokes funnier and more likely to strengthen a relationship); party animal (which guarantees that all invited guests will show up and also makes them more likely to bring gifts); schmoozer (which makes your sim a more-persuasive talker and grants extra dialogue options like "flatter" and "praise"); charismatic (which makes your sim gain charisma skill faster, have better conversations, and make friends faster); and friendly, which makes your social interactions more impactful overall. This set of traits is a natural for a popularity-based lifetime wish, such as making 15 friends. Of course, if you don't care to be as ambitious, or instead prefer to play the game as more of an observer, you can load up your characters with flaws such as absentminded, technophobe, no sense of humor, and so on, toss the characters together in the same house, and watch the sparks fly.
I have been an Sims fan ever since 1 Sims 3 is great but since it came out their is a few bugs in it still like all games do but so far hands down I like 3 way better than sim1 & 2 only major bug i have on it having the retail version bought it of course I have an annoying bug with the speakers not playing sound the items speakers other than that the games great. tech wise this game is am ram hog uses an 1,450,000 ram on my pc wow ... while most my new gen games uses 800,000 or less
Glad I didn't blow my cash on Sims 2 expansions. Otherwise EA would be having a ball screwing me.
Ive had this for a while now and its Great, but theres hardly ANY items in the game. There whole buiness model is to get you to buy crap from an online store with real money.. if you have ever played Home you know what I mean. Don't expect to get anything out of the box, and they reused a bunch of old items from past sims games so besides the graphics and personalities and exploreable town. Its the same game.
Surely this game will be a big hit. I really look forward for this game and I am so exited about its new gamelpay.
I agree that this game looks pretty cool. My only problem with the Sims 3 is that if you bought all the expansions from Sims 2, you're taking a step backward. It feels a bit like the painful stretch of moving from one edition of D&D to the next. I suppose I only wish that some of the premium features that were in expansions for Sims 2 had found their way into Sims 3. Pets for one!
I liked the sims when it first came out, but it's becoming the same thing in a new package. It starts getting kinda mundane over time. I might check it out to see how it is, but I dont think i'll lose sleep over it.
Really excited about everything in the game! Almost here! ....except worried about how everyone in the neighborhood ages even when you're not playing them. i always played with free will off, and it's annoying to know when i switch a different family my other families will be aging and doing things completely on their own. But i trust maxis. i'm hopefully it'll all be okay (: either way, nothing could stop me from playing.
wow.looks like they didnt mess around and just put everything from sims 2+expansion packs and added on top of that,while still managing to deliver huge overall improvements like seamless gameplay,higher intelliegence,more customization,and more personality driven gameplay.like I said,wow.
just one more week. plus sweet, and reedyproduction, I agree with you, alas I do not know why some people say it's the same thing, it is for a long extend a lot different, starting with seamless neighbor, and ending in +50 IQ points Artificial Intelligence (enough to understand that you are supposed to go to the bathroom without your conscience/God having to tell you to do it)
I can't wait for this game to come out. I'm going to have to install my Sims 2 games again in order to get my fix.
I cant belive some people are admitting on here that they have a leaked version of this game, how retarded can one be! This game looks awesome, cant wait.
i am playing this game right now but only with sunset valley and without riverview and this game is simply AWESOME!!!
this game is awesome... even though it's just a leaked copy... i've still got mines on reserve... gameplay is still your ordinary sims but there's plenty to do in this version. i spend a lot of my days after work fishing in the game or just out walking meeting people...
I just can't WAIT for this game! The customization looks 5x better than Sims 2, of course there will still be stuff missing to make room for the expansion packs later on, but that's part of the Sims! I already have the collectors edition pre-ordered.
It's fun, but unfortunately even more so then The Sims 2, it's painstakingly obvious that they removed core gameplay that was even in The Sims 2, to make room for the exhaustively old market plan of releasing over a dozen expansion packs. It's a pity really. :/
The only thing I ever loved about the sims games was sdesigning homes, That's sooo freakin fun! Didn't care much for the gameplay though, but I cant wait to get back to building some houses!
I agree 100% Zhakelia!! People who bash others because of what they like to play or how they spend their money are RETARDED! The sims is an awesome game and I LOVE it. I have my hands UP!
I really think that this game has the potential to be really cool if the customization features work well.
I encourage everyone to look at the female faces. They all look the same even with different shapes/customization. I really want to try this game out but kinda weird playing females with same faces. I mean seriously look at it.
@nappan Yes, agreed. Especially Gamespot, owned by CNET Networks, someone would be p'd if they or anyone in it conspired to a leak. And if they did, it be stupid for them to basically tell the world that (i.e. On the Spot, previews and videos.) But for me, I'll just wait for the game to come out. It's more honest, and it becomes more special when I finally play it.
@wiiplay1: I'm not going to argue that I'm mixed up here, but yeah, we clearly agree that the likeliehood of Gamespot or ANY reputable business conspiring to leak a game is laughable. Even if it was just some random employee, I find it unlikely, but it that were the case, it would be one person, not GS as a whole. Most likely this was a leak internal to the devs or to EA.
@nappan No, I was commeting on someone elses comment. They said it was leaked to Gamespot. Was Gamespot a consipracy to piracy? Chances are they aren't. I was replying to when someone said it was leaked to Gamespot. No, it was not leaked to Gamespot, at least I hope not. EA probably sent them a copy. My point and your point are completly differnet. You're completley mixed up.
@wiiplay1: Let me clear this up... read: "leak" as a euphamism for "it was leaked to the release group Reloaded and made available to all in its complete form as an act of piracy". "Leak" sounds better. We're not talking about a copy EA sent to ign, or gamespot... probably a retailer with an early copy, or a disgruntled employee did it. All it takes is a little time with a disc, an internet connection, and the right people and it can be shrink-wrapped and back in its original packaging before the cracks are even made. When people are saying leaked, they don't mean EA leaked a copy. They mean that, as I mentioned regarding Quake 2, there has been a MASSIVE pirate "pre-release". Bank on it, most of the people on this forum have already PLAYED the game. As I said, unless there was a Canary Trap somewhere in the game or code, unique to each disc so-far produced... finding who leaked this to a release group will be nearly impossible, especially since money is rarely involved at that stage in software piracy. I don't know why you bring GS into it... this could have been leaked in-house, or from a reviewer, or retailer, or tester. The list is endless for a game this massive.
@nappan No, I'm saying do you think it was leaked to Gamespot? Or maybe EA just sent Gamespot a copy. It wasn't leaked TO GAMESPOT.
The game has been leaked already. It's probs a preview copy like the ones that the people at Gamespot use. EA should investigate places like Gamespot for sources of the leak. Could be something like a Gamespot employee has had his/her PC hacked. So much for the hype machine.
UGLY! Couldn't they make the Sim faces beautiful? Is it really that hard? These are some damn ugly Sims.
My Story: I am a 2 month newbie to Sims. I just happened to be bored with my other PC games and went to Best Buy to get something and said heck, I'll just try the Sims....became addicted automatically. Then, of course, after the return/exchange policy was over, I found out about Sims 3. So...on one hand I was mad cause I had just spent all that dang money, and then I thought, well, this will give me good practice for when Sims 3 comes out and I'll have a better understanding of what the gameplay and game is like. Furthermore: I'm so sick of reading blogs with people saying how we are getting dupped because they are going to come out with expansion packs and they feel like all that should be included in one game. First and foremost...you watch your pockets, and we'll watch ours. Some people will buy all the expansions and some will by one, and some will buy none...but its an Option fool !!!! Stop hatin' if you broke and can't or cheap and won't. Secondly, has it ever occured to you that expansions are good things. Alot of times us gamers purchase a game, play it, beat it, play it again, beat it...UGH!! and are only lingering around with it until the next release. I feel like you can get slightly bored even playing the Sims sometimes, but with having expansion packs, it keeps the flame for the game going and giving you other things to do UNTIL the next big realease. So you really never get Completely bored with it cause new pieces are continually coming out. It's like breadcrumbs that are tying you over and leading you to the ultimate prize in the end...the next BIG GAME. Ofcourse, EA is benefiting from it, but so are we. DUH..it's a d*** business and ofcourse they wanna make money. Cause if they don't we dont play!!!! Me, Myself, (and countless others im sure) I can't wait until it comes out...and even though I didn't get years worth of game play out of the Double Deluxe and things I bought I dont Care!!!!! So if this message refers to u, get that negative crap outta here....SIMS FANS...THROW YA HANDS UP !!!!!!!!
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