When The Sims 2 came out, bringing with it aging, goals/wants, ‘DNA’ (looks and personality passed on to the children), as well as a whole bunch of new interactions and refinements. The Sims 3 however, lacks these nice bullet points, except for one; instead of playing on a family lot, sealed off from the rest of the town, family members are now free to roam the community.
When starting a new game, your first realisation is this change’s downside. Rather than putting a whole lot of families in a town that you can choose to play whenever you please, you can now only play one family in a town at once. As a compromise, you can switch between families in the same town, but your previous family will go on free-will, and could die off, give birth, split up, or quit their jobs before you play them again. But, is that really so bad? The Sims has always been a storytelling game, and this new version, more than ever, helps these stories evolve to something more than just short events. This, together with less brain dead sims, means that you can now focus entirely on creating a story, without all the fuss of babysitting other family members or long loading times between locations.
There’s a whole bunch of little improvements, a ‘perks’ system helps in some ways to remove the abstract ‘needs’ bars, with a little icon popping up when they are needing to pee or eat, or just feeling good after a bath. In the construction side of the game, everything is far more customisable, with most objects’ (including clothing) textures able to be swapped/recoloured at will. And, finally, the grid on which objects are placed in-game is now smaller, and even can be ignored(although this can cause path finding issues with sims at times)
It’s a nice step forward, definitely some good progress made on the gameplay side, and a shift in focus from giving your sims a good life, to giving them a good story. Unfortunately, on it’s own it can’t compete against the full battalion of expansion packs for the Sims 2, which may dissuade the biggest fans who don’t want to give up the extensive objects and features gained from the set. Most will enjoy the changes, it may not win over those who ‘never got into it’, but I don’t think EA needs to worry when they have such a huge fanbase already.
