Review: The Sims 3

[4thofeleven]

I’ve been playing The Sims pretty much since it came out. I bought Sims 1 on a whim a few months after it came out, not expecting much out of it, and was pretty much instantly hooked. I bought every single expansion pack as soon as they came out.

I was pretty sceptical about The Sims 2, but when it came out, I bought it, started playing, and never looked back. So when the Sims 3 came out this week, although I was once again sceptical as to whether it would really be a step forward compared to Sims 2 with all its expansions, I decided to take the chance.

So, what’s changed? Well, Sims 2 was a big graphical upgrade over its predecessor. Sims 3, not so much. The sims themselves look basically the same, though there’s more variety when it comes to fat or skinny sims. A lot of the animations and objects seen to have been taken directly from Sims 2, which seems a little lazy. The new ‘create a style’ tool is wonderful though; instead of there being a dozen preset recolours of shirts or chairs, you can just click on any clothing or object and recolour it yourself, using any of the existing textures and colours. Want your sim’s car to have the brick wall texture in bright green? That’s an option. The downside is, as if to even things out, there aren’t that many different meshes. Sure, you can have a chair in a few thousand colours and patterns – but you do end up with a neighbourhood of houses all with the same few items with different paint jobs.

Personality wise, there’s two main changes. Number one, the preset aspirations are gone. Instead, you pick five personality traits, each with little bonuses or handicaps. “Bookworm” trait gives a bonus to fun for reading, and the sim will roll up wants to read books or visit libraries. “Workaholic” gives a slight happiness boost just for being at work, and get wants to work from home on weekends. “Mooch” trait gives the sim the ability to mooch money or food of their friends. It’s an interesting system, and it works well combined with the other big change – the new mood system.

Basically, the regular needs (hunger, bladder, etc.) are now largely subordinate to an overall ‘mood’ bar. Sims get various bonuses or penalties to their mood based on their situation and traits. So while being hungry or tired might give a -10 or -20 penalty to overall mood, that can be counterbalanced by bonuses for, say, recently getting married or falling in love, having fulfilled a want, or trait based bonuses – “Evil” sims get a temporary bonus for attacking people, “Loner” sims get a bonus for being the only sim in a room, “Overly Emotional” sims get bigger bonuses and penalties for everything. It’s a clever way of handling things, and it makes sims feel more distinct from each other and means you can keep them in a good mood through things other than just making sure they use the toilet and eat regularly. Granted, Sims 2 sort of hand this with the aspiration bar – but that only had an effect if, a, it was either platinum or red, and b, if the sim was actually rolling up wants related to what they’d just achieved. A Sims 2 sim isn’t going to get any bonus from falling in love or marrying unless they had those wants when it happened – a Sims 3 sim is guaranteed to get a temporary mood boost… or penalty, for “Fear of Commitment” sims.

The other very nice new change is the seamless neighbourhood. It works very well; the game runs very smoothly, and you can zoom out from your house to the neighbourhood at any time, send your sim to a community lot – or to another sim’s house! – follow them, or remain with a sim at home. The neighbourhood layout now actually matters – a house across the street from the local park, or just round the corner from the sim’s place of work, is actually beneficial, since travel time now actually occurs. On the other hand, it’s not perfect – while you can go anywhere, there aren’t actually many community lots. The park and the gym are like Sims 2 lots, but the restaurant, the diner, the various shops and the workplace buildings have little more existence than the Sims 2 neighbourhood decorations – Sim goes in the door, sim disappears for hours, sim comes out again. For workplaces, this isn’t that big a deal – watching your sim work would get very old fast – but for community lots it’s just plain irritating, especially because you know they’ll eventually make a Hot Date/Nightlife expansion that’ll make some of them playable.

One other nice thing – Sims now have more options at work. When they’re at work, you can pick from a list of options on how they’ll work – they can work hard (bonus to performance), take it easy (better mood), get to know their co-workers, make friends with the boss, or improve their skills. Promotions aren’t just based on having the required skills, either – there’s four or five factors which are averaged out. You can get away with not having very good skills if you’re friends with the boss or regularly show up in a good mood. Some jobs have special requirements – Sims on the political career can get a bonus by asking other sims for campaign donations, or holding fundraising parties, while reporters can rummage through neighbour’s trash and write up stories at home.

So, that’s the good. What’s the bad? Well, the big one is that you’re effectively limited to one family at a time. One of the big features of the Sims 3 is that the entire neighbourhood ages. Think about that a little – while you’re busy playing Family B, Family A is aging and dying. Not too bad – except there’s very little logic to how the families you’re not playing develop. They’ll spawn babies at random, often without actually having a relationship with anyone first. Sometimes they move out of the neighbourhood entirely – presumably because too many other unplayed families have spawned babies this generation. On the other hand, they don’t seem to get promoted or develop real relationships with other sims – it’s really the worst of all worlds, you lose control, but they don’t do anything interesting unprompted. Even just switching to another household for a day or so can have unpredictable effects on the household left behind.

It’s kind of an odd direction for the series to take – Sims 2 introduced aging, but only for the house being played, and had a cheat in the manual to turn it off. I’d have expected Sims 3 to have a ‘Sims 2 style neighbourhood’ option, where other houses go into stasis when unplayed – but instead, they seem to assume everyone’s going to want to play the same household forever. The option to change to another house is hidden behind ‘options – edit town’ – Sims 2 it was as easy as clicking on the house you want to play from the neighbourhood screen. There’s no way in Sims 3 to have the total control over a neighbourhood we used to have, and I personally don’t like it – and I suspect a lot of other people won’t either. Sims 1 and 2 feels like you have control of the whole world, and can mess with any family at any time. Here, the world might be more open in one way – but your powers are greatly reduced. It feels almost more like a game than the toy that Sims 2 was – notably, this is the first Sims game where the opening menu has a ‘start a new game’ option – to load up the default neighbourhood and play a new family from a fresh start, because they don’t expect you to have multiple households interacting with each other. There’s also a ‘difficulty rating’ for various families, which again seems out of place in an open-ended game like this.

Other things I dislike – I realise Sims 3 on its own can’t really be fairly compared to Sims 2 with all the expansions, but even so, as I said before, there aren’t many clothes or items to choose from. And it’s not just the variety that’s missing – basic items like the hot tub, piano, or even the diving board are missing!

In general, the game seems to be missing a lot of the attention to detail that characterised Sims 2. Sims 2 had three interesting premade neighbourhoods, plus a dozen blank neighbourhoods. And all three were interesting neighbourhoods, even before you added more sims yourself – all the families in Pleasantview were in the middle of a crisis or major decision when you load them up, and the paranormal themed Strangetown and Shakespeare themed Veronaville were different enough to justify their existence. Sims 3 has only one, rather bland neighbourhood to start off with, with a second available for download, and no way to create new ones.

Some of the traits change the descriptions of Sim’s actions – but there’s no actual difference in the animation or the effects. I was very disappointed to see that my “evil” sim’s “Practice speech for world domination” was identical to a normal “Practice speech”. It’s silly, and again seems to imply they intended to have more differences but didn’t implement any more than the most token changes.

Pathfinding seems to have regressed to Sims 1 level, if not worse. The days of two sims being unable to navigate their way out of the same room are back – and fires are now a real risk, with sims being as likely to walk into the flames as away from them.

Cars seem worthless, and poorly implemented – There’s no animation of sims opening the door and driving off the lot – instead, the car just teleports from the driveway onto the road, and then the sim disappears inside. Sims seem to be able to summon taxis instantly out of nowhere when needed, and seem to be as likely to do that as to use their own car.

Here’s the thing: back when Sims 2 was in development, I read an interview with someone at Maxis who said they’d done research into how people played the Sims, and had found there were a number of basic types – the people who just play it as a game, and want to have their sims earn the best stuff, have the best skills, and play ‘honestly’ without cheating them money. There’s the storytellers and scenario makers. There’s the architects and designers. There’s the people who just torture their sims. Sims 2 was designed with the intention that there’d be something there for everyone. Sims 3… was not. The new features are almost entirely for the game-players, and the storytellers and scenario makers are specifically excluded.

I play the Sims as a game more than a doll-house, and I don’t like the changes. If you’re primarily a storyteller or a designer, then stay well away – there’s nothing new here for you. I really don’t know what EA Games were thinking – they seem to have decided to eviscerate the aspect that made the Sims such a success, the way that it did have something for everyone, and wasn’t aimed specifically at the existing gamer audience.

If The Sims 3 feels like anything, it’s like some sort of warped alternate universe of the Sims 2 – as if the designers intentionally went all the way back to Sims 1 and decided to take things in an entirely different direction, rather than building on the gameplay concepts of Sims 2. It’s an interesting decision, and the Sims 3 has some interesting concepts – but for everything it adds, it’s removed something that made the Sims 2 memorable.

Other notes:

- The Sims Store really rubs me the wrong way. As I said, there’s not much content in the game itself. But for a small additional fee, you can purchase more items directly from EA! And hey, it all went up the same day the game came out – how about that? Bloody hell – at least all those damned ‘Stuff’ packs had the good grace to come out a few months after the most recent expansion, so there was at least some subtlety about EA holding back items in order to try and charge you for them again…

- Fences can’t be recoloured or retextured. What’s up with that?

- Infants and toddlers stay in those stages for far too long compared to Sims 2. And there’s not much for them to do; toddlers can’t learn skills past level three, and only very few at that. After a day or so, the toddler’s learned to walk, talk, and use the toilet, which leaves you with days and days where they can’t do anything interesting at all.

- Keeping the Young Adult stage seems pointless; in Sims 2, it pretty much only served as an indicator that that Sim was attending university. Here, there’s no universities, so the difference between a Young Adult and Adult sim is roughly… nothing.

- The collectables don’t seem to add much to the game. Seeds are nice, since you can plant them and thus gain fresh ingredients for cooking. The gemstones, though… once you work out where they tend to be (the cemetery almost always has at least one), you can end up drowning in them. They’re not particularly interesting looking decorations, and have no other uses. And what am I supposed to do with all these iron bars I keep sending off for smelting? They cost more to smelt than they’re worth, so what’s the point?

- Sims can gain new recipes by watching the cooking channel… which seems to make buying them from the bookstore a little superfluous, especially since recipe books self-destruct after being read.

- Am I just stupid, or is there no private school option in Sims 3?

Final analysis: If you’re planning to get into the Sims, you’d be better off getting the Sims 2 cheap and a few of the expansions for the price of the Sims 3. If you really want the new features of Sims 3, hold off until it’s cheaper… and hopefully by them, some mods and expansions will have dealt with some of the issues.

Comments

The telescopes might be carefully drunk

[sirhenryjones.livejournal.com]

Your basketball enthusiastically had flipped supercilious programs, yet orange juice is not Mike.

Re: The telescopes might be carefully drunk

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Eggplant Mike?