Consumers should not be fooled by the new bones thrown at them. This game has the depth of a 2000's Disney sitcom.
The Sims gives you little people that you can design. It sets up a virtual, customizable life. Probably, your little person looks like you. You build your people homes, choose their furniture, buy them better TV's when the cash flows, watch them go to work, strategize their romances, educate their children, and lament their deaths. The Sims is a cut above other virtual life games for two simple reasons: control and complexity. Here is an example and a simple truth: It is more fun to spend money making your home ten feet wider; decorating every inch, than it is to level up into upper middle class and have a better house materialize before you (as with Sim City). Control. Complexity. Secondarily: realism and ease. Very lastly: ergonomics. We go wow when we can make a fifth floor and an elevator. We do not go wow when a family inventory button is added to the buy menu.
Why is "The Sims" series fun? Fun is a sense of progress related to applied skill. YOUR skill. If a big red button appeared with the text "Win Game" and all you had to do was push it, that wouldn't be too awesome, would it? Fifty thousand years ago we were spearing mammoth and splitting stone. Today, hustling to press a stack of papers into your boss's paws typifies the real-world dynamic of progress. There is no sense of it, because there is no end in sight. With the Sims, promotions are possible, romances can be with anyone, and your home can be whatever you want it to be. The horizon is visible, and its breadth depends observably on your efforts. Fun is work; it's just work that involves all of you, as a person, and it is work that has rewards in sight. With many options and reasonable rewards, the Sims lulls you to work your happy little butt off.
A sequel to such a franchise needs to challenge and subvert the original limitations. It needs to offer more options, better control, increased flexibility, improved realism, and if there's time: make it easier to use. But ease is really the least of all considerations. EA made that mistake with Spore.
We did expect a sequel. We expected advances, amelioration, aesthetics, and many other A-words often emergent on the SAT. But now we're eyeing the gunfire back from the community, members of which reported their disgust with this new incarnation. They were quick to note the evaporation of Maxis over the corporate burners of EA, a company for whom public appraisal often reserves just one very special A-word.
So IS The Sims 3 a fitting sequel (or was it a prequel) ? Did they fail? Is this a creative vision, or a "duct-tape it and pass it down the assembly line" product, fit for today's marketplace? Well, it's both. It has the range, but not the depth. It has surface variety on its structure, but you can't go inside the
building. Literally. Fun may involve doing a lot of different things. But once again: fun has to be work, to some degree. No one wants an "I win" button.
My Opinion of the Change from Sims 2 to 3 Categorically
The Good
* Improved stability. This game loads faster for me and has fewer overall loading screens than the base Sims 2. It is friendly with ALT-TAB, and hasn't crashed yet.
* Powerful recoloring and retexturing tools. Every object has had multiple sides and planes tagged as changeable, so that, for example, an interior door may be wooden at the hall side, and painted white on the bedroom side.
* Town visits are much easier and more alluring. It takes a few sim-minutes to get into town, there are reasons to go, it takes about as long as a trip to the bathroom, and the game time doesn't sear cracks in space-time as a result. Town time is synchronous with game time. Not to mention the beloved absence of loading screens.
* Dynamic town. Outward zooming shows neighbor homes with full detail. Following your character allows you to see their vehicle.
* Better featural design controls at character creation. A lot of people are expounding the woes of Sims looking too similar. I have to disagree with this. It is my personal belief that it's just difficult for many people to pull a slider in an "uglier" direction. I love creating imperfect people though, and believe the range looks sufficiently varied and beautiful.
* A minor graphical advancement. Not exactly setting the benchmarks for 2009, but at least my trees cast anti-aliased shadows.
* Many core and beloved features are left alone. A build mode exists, a buy mode exists. This is cited as a negative, too.
* The "move wall" tool actually works.
* Some necessities from the expansions have been included. From almost every expansion, in fact; as you have the young adult phase, cars, the cellphone, party provisions, gardening and fishing, and the ability to host a party.
* Furniture. Finally, the game allows you to pack your existing furniture into a new home. Also, the preloaded homes include a hefty amount of furnishings this time, but you are not obligated to buy them furnished.
* Increased skills count to 10. 11 with "Collecting".
* Nice skill journal with challenges.
* Trait system provides very different attitudes, obsessions, interactions, vulnerabities, resistances, vagaries of life. Certain trait combinations seem to have been prepared for, also.
* Encouragement of the limited lifespan (replay value). The trait system assists with varying the characters, the skill range assures that a "normal aging" setting will not allow masters-of-all-trades, the career meter seems timed for a normal lifespan for one full promotion tree, and your friends die. I'd guess one would feel a bit "abominationey" if they're notified that their grandson's best friend is about to die (of a geriatric cardiac disorder?) while stuffing themselves with ambrosia and pounding away at the treadmill.
* Slightly more to consider while at work. You can select to work hard, or actually build back fun and social meters by choosing lazier options. Workplace advancement is also more sophisticated; rather than chucking skill set requirements at you, you have projects, homework, a range of acceptable skill levels, and schmoozing potential. Despite this, promotions are not as randomized as in Sims 1 or 2. You get a progress bar, and when it is filled, you advance to the next job title.
The Bad (With Solutions Where Possible)
Worse-Than-Expected
* Gameplay overview: The bad. The Sims 3 loves progress bars. Nothing symbolizes the dry corporate software stamp better than a progress bar, and they are everywhere in this game. They are the phallic icon of EA. They are the water bottles, and upon them, EA is as reliant as a rabbit would be for its hydration. Many user reviews report back specific gripes and quandaries, but more still register an unaccountable feeling that the game is not as fun as it should be. But they don't pinpoint the issues. Why does fun need depth? Why can it not be a series of progress bars? A few quick examples from the game itself in the format of "Problem?" followed by EA solution: "What are we going to do about dining out?" Progress bar. "How about making fishing and gardening fun?" Progress bar. "Acquiring a whole business in the game?" Progress bar (gotta sign those contracts!). "How can the player enjoy fun sim activities, such as concerts, films, sporting events, and spa visits?" Progress bar. "How do we [continue to] represent the attainment of skills?" Progress bar. "How can we trick players into wishing for normal gameplay by altering the toddler phase of life in some way?" Remove the progress bar. "How can we reduce the torture of the fast-forward button being ineffective while the characters sleep?" Progress bar. "How do we solve the user's desire to go to work?" Progress bar -- with drop-down menu. Allow them to select "work hard." (nice, huh? feels like you're there!) "How can we represent their relationship level?" You get the point. THAT is why the game is not fun to many of us. Not to mention the animations being so few in number and uninteresting -- that you will actually start almost exclusively watching the progress bars. While it is possible to make an interesting game off of icon and text feedback like that, the EA-spawned Sims 3 is a complete funfail. Because many of the aforementioned activities are totally shallow and have few ties to the rest of the game. Once you do one of them once, there is no reason to return -- except when your Sim gets a wish (such as to see a film). You then sigh to yourself, click him to the theater, and hope its over before you get annoyed with the wait. Even activities that enable you to start a collection are poorly implemented. All becomes rinse and repeat, except without the ability to clear the stench: "EA was here." That, which is marked by the apathetic design decisions, lack of thought for cohesion, and flawed implementation. It is the sense that even though you have discovered something new to do, it's probably not going to be that great anyway. This is part of the "golden-turd" effect, where every single franchise they touch turns into highly grossing ... Yeah.
Side note - Their suckiness is self aware. They know that their game activities are boring as hell, and this is evident in the reward structure. Frequently, completing "challenges" (XBOX-like things which do nothing but light up a sentence of text saying 'You have collected 100 tomatoes,' for example) will give the player TIME REDUCTION for their many implementable activities. Fishing, for example, will not have to be done for as long with certain rewards. So ultimately, you plod through their supposedly fun activities to gain the privilege to not have to do them as much. The proof is in the pudding: the WIN is to not play the game.
* Online exchange. The big problem here is that it's no longer limited to new mesh/texture creations. Users are flooding the site with recolors that anyone can do with the existing swatches. It makes me wonder how buried fanmade, new-mesh objects will be when finally uploaded. Solution: Categorize.
* EA Store - It is seen as generally unethical to have a game slim on object content and then to sell off 60 or so objects in your store. People get less offended when these come in large expansions, which themselves alter gameplay. But that would be far too difficult, wouldn't it? Solution: Maxis did the clever thing. Even if they were withholding content, they slammed it into the expansion packs, and fewer complained. I'll buy an upgrade, but I won't buy a door. This isn't Neopets.
* Terrible game interface. I can't even count the number of people asking how the heck to switch families, save in more than one file, why there are "two" inventories, or how to even access the family one. It takes a lot of talent, though to screw up something so bad after hardly touching it.
* Story mode doesnt work. Reports are coming back of how story progression cannot be shut down, and how the generation of new children is quite random throughout the neighborhood. Also worth considering: the "dynamic" hood has very little power to build strong relationships between NPCs. So new families do not arise from extant marriages, everyone is an acquaintance to everyone else, and you are responsible for everything once again. It may a lack of attention in the programming, or laziness, or hope and prayer that no one would notice, but it is very clear that EA lied about the dynamics. Also, owing to the observation that very few "park-prepared" meals appear to be of decent quality, I do not believe NPC sims increase their skills much. Solutions: Maxis-style god controls. Have a gigantic control screen with sliders which governs the behavior of the neighborhood sims; how many children should they have, what percentages of families should prioritize intellectual vs athletic development, user control over whether moving away is permitted at all, etc. Also, have NPC skills develop over time.
* File->Edit->Go to work. There are no career interiors. Job progression is still boring. One of the few features they have added to make the job more interesting is only half-implemented: you can know your boss. Problem is, your boss stays the same rank, and you advance. Meanwhile they retain the boss title and are still empowered with your promotion status. There is no way for a roleplayer ro rationalize this, it is just further incompleteness and more design. Guess the extra 4 months wasn't enough. Solution: Design the interiors and lay out tasks and time limits per day. Performance can vary finely with player cleverness and activity. The tasks required would be very specific to the job. A "Journalism Track" employee might race to town square, chasing down a story about a protest rally. A "chef" could have a very zoomed up view of the kitchen's surfaces, with all the ingredients and utensils laid out for the player. Mouse strokes could cut veggies and meats and then careful attention to cooking temperature would be necessary. If this sounds like a lot of implementation, this is nothing more than a flash game with easy programming. Many of those have been addictive enough to sell advertising space, haven't they? Please note that attending a workday would be optional, with the alternative being the drop-down menu as before. To solve the problem of players needing to watch multiple characters (and not disappear for hours to monitor the working sim), they could run the workday on its own time, and have the house time freeze. Once the player finishes a Sim workday, they are returned to the hour they left, to take care of the rest of the family. The working Sim will remain at their job until the assigned hour of departure, under the heading "At work: Player-driven" with no other drop-down options selectable. The player will meanwhile replay those hours for the rest of the family. Also, have the boss rank up OR change. The boss title must disappear when the player has appropriately advanced in their workplace.
* Other rabbit-holes. Stores, the spa, and other unique town buildings can't be entered or constructed. This is particularly bad because the promotional scenes showed uniqueness on these buildings which, to the builders, drove up the hype for the game; as if they would actually touch and expand build mode. If the Sim enters a store, you get a list box and choose items to buy. If the sim enters a to pursue an activity, you are shown a progress bar. Progress bars are for windows installations, not high-priced games. This setup arises partially because the construction variables are non-existent with the building statics, unlike the "creatable" buildings, and because Sims in previous games frequently hemorrhaged hours away in stores and restaurants. Not to mention, they didn't want to create different objects for different KINDS of supermarket displays or book racks. Laziness. There is an easy solution to this. Draw the interiors as statics with collision geometry, and freeze time while purchases are made. Or (should I even say it): the town buildings should be creatable piecemeal, with the pre-existence of different consumer objects, stands and services, so the town shops wouldn't need to be instanced or internally hidden. Also, one of the things people like about Grand Theft Auto IV, is the fact that if you go to see a musical act, you really watch it and maybe enjoy it. Why couldn't the Sims do this? EA has more fundage than Rockstar. They fail to meet expectations again.
* Build mode capabilities remain unimproved. You still can't attach a garage to foundation because of the roof calculations. You still can't adjust the height of anything on a wall. Stairs within one tile of a doorway are still unplaceable and/or unusable. Curved walls remain impossible. Foundation levels are limited to two. Home levels are limited to five. Basements are still a challenge. Solutions: Massively better programming. "Click-and-drag" design-it-yourself windows. (NPC's don't use them anyway.) A rounded wall-edge option. I have seen home and design applications that allow you to shift height. Being a homeowner in a lame MMORPG allows you to adjust height of displayed objects, in fact. See further suggestions below.
* House selection issues. The game is happy to give you the choice of "furnished" or "not" when you first create a character. But if you are moving your existing character into a different home, you are forced to select the "furnished" option on the new home--even if you have elected to "pack" your existing furniture with you. This costs extra money, provides furnishings you don't need, and forces the time consuming sale of items. The interface used when selecting your first house is a bit pushy too, not allowing you to check anything out up close before you buy, and making you click specific buttons after you make your purchase, rather than letting you intuitively scroll inward.
* Sub-par writing. Descriptiveness, color, style, and accuracy are all off. The in-game text sounds like a teen's attempt to sound bright without having a clue about the quality or correctness of the presentation. Here is an example. "The teleportation pad reduces your transportation cost by 100% ... within a reasonable margin of error." I guess we have to closely monitor our savings from now on, because we may only enjoy a price reduction of 99 percent on a bad day ... which of course is still zero because there's no gas in the game, and you'd still pay bills on a previously purchased car. They obviously mean that there is a chance event of something going wrong with the teleporter. The writing is just incorrect. It's similarly flawed, lazy, or boring elsewhere.
* Default lifespans are still too fast. I am aware of the ability to adjust lifespan length. But some people aren't. I wanted to play the normal setting so as to feel as if I wasn't cheating, and around 3 days after my boy reached child phase, I got warnings about another birthday. My kid's done homework 3 times. If he was born on a weekend, he would have hardly ever gone to school! Come on. It's like they're trying to hustle you through a line at the supermarket. Normal lifespans are also too short to enjoy career mastery and have a side hobby. Solution: Allow players to feel "normal" with doubled lifespans, and don't make "child" the same length as "toddler".
* Social interactions are idiocy. The options have expanded, and their animations/responses look entirely too similar. "Speech bubbles" contain graphics that are far fewer in number than other Sim Games, unless they reference a specific household object under the heading "brag about possessions." On the whole, it is also very hard to fail a social encounter. Creating opposite personalities does not provide a challenge to acquiring friendship. Unlike in previous games, unfavored topic choices do not turn out negative social growth. Mostly, because no sim has favorite topics anymore. The attraction system is gone, the interests are gone, and the sense of it all is gone. Solution: full re-implementation of the Sims 2 system, and modify its base for this sequel. Allow more specific questions, social bonuses for favored topics, announcement of the discovery of favored topics, a much larger expandable stat sheet for all NPC sims with these data, allow trading of advice (correct bait to use, etc.), and new gameplay options provided by certain tracks of questioning (maybe you'd meet a brilliant naturalist who takes you to a hidden garden after the correct cues).
* Trait issues. Mean characters can still access the "friendly" social submenu. Geniuses do not start with grade bonuses in school, and only acquire logic skill faster. Sense of humor gives nothing more than a few conversation options. "Evil" sims have a few cute aspects, but most are senseless and lame enough to actually anger the player. "Have evil meal." "Take devious nap." Needless to say, the animations are the same as they are for these actions on a good sim. The majority of other traits only seem exist to speed up a progress bar. Shallow. Solution: saturate the game with about 10x more usage for all traits, stick social and functional restrictions on some traits, and add more. Genius should be on an intellectual gradient (Retarded-Dumb-Bright-Genius).
* "Developed" traits: (RICH??) This is a half (or one-hundredth) implemented idea to stick developmental features of a character on top of their ingrained traits. Except, the only one they bothered to include was rich and your sim always seems to thrill at this discovery. I'm not really sure what this says about society in general, or the EA staff in particular, but I'm pretty sure this would sit easier with me if there were other "aftertraits" to go along with "rich", or if it were removed entirely. Solution: Finish this feature. "I have discovered that Geoffrey Landgraab is RICH!" Fine, then I want to also have discovered that he is "Skilled at Fishing", "Married", "A Good Parent", and "Decent" (which will mean that he has rarely chosen 'mean' conversation options). More depth needed
here.
* Skill changes half thought out. Creativity expanded to "Writing" "Painting" and "Guitar". First, this demands that a new skill must be added with each musical instrument. But then, they probably will. Second, why was logic not expanded? Left-brain/right-brain contrast seems the theme there. Logic could have stretched to "Science" and "Strategy". Solution: Revamp skills to make depth consistent.
* Skill progression uneven. Your character will turn over a level every two repairs in mechanical -- for quite a while up the ladder. Your character will also have to play/write/paint for many long hours before seeing a millimeter's movement on the skill bar after level 8. Solution: Balanced progress.
* Boring activities: Fishing/Gardening. After you know the bait, or the fertilizer, you are essentially setting the command to fish or garden, and letting your sim get to it. The animations do not vary much, and the success occurs almost immediately. Also, during fishing, you may find random objects by accident. These are frequently generic products, like "age-old bubblebath." Solution: Optionally, mini game it. There are plenty of addicting fishing sims out there, just throw control to the player if they choose. Also, make the random chance finds unique items only.
* Broken activities: Fishing/Gardening. A clever player will catch 12 deathfish in 4 hours. That's thousands of extra dollars a night. Too much. Money trees don't seem to die, and you can plant hundreds. The "common" plants die after very few harvest cycles, and the "rare" plants RARELY die. Finally, mounting fish results in receiving a plaque with a very tiny version of your catch. Solutions: Reduce deathfish yields to one per day. Make rare plants die faster. Punish excessive money tree harvesting with IRS/Treasury visit-and-fine. Make mounted fish closer in size to the actual fish.
* Neighborhood behavior. Sims run everywhere for no reason. Cars, without collision frames, phase right through each other. Bicycles do not add to body skill. Schools are apocalyptically deserted at 3 p.m. Sims cannot seem to finish any of their burnt meals at the BBQ areas--and those may remain dirty. There is no polish anywhere in the neighborhood, it seems.
* Death system. This has a few issues. First, you receive a phone call that someone is about to die. That's understandable enough. But then, like clockwork, the person will die a day later. This is not a chance event, not based on a dice roll, they are just guaranteed to go. More programming laziness. EA programming sophistication has your sim failing to react to it altogether. The phone call is shrugged off, and the final death notification is obviously meant to bother YOU, the player. The sim moves right along without so much as a negative moodlet. Actually, my sim received a phone call notifying him of a death recently. He used the standard phone animations, which sounded like agreement and laughing. Do developers do any work anymore?
* Unbalanced and annoying tutorial system. It really bothers you all the time. It rarely gives you info you don't know, and when you need it, it doesn't have an entry. Here's an example: I saw a very clear and "baby-steps" article about the fact that four walls makes a room. I still have no clue what fertilizer to use for which plant, or where to find the books for that. Another half-finished feature. Solution: Redo entirely.
* The guitar music and animation. Is it just me, or do our sims only play easy listening? I realize there's no electric guitar (why not, again?), but I don't want to wait days for the skill meter to fill listening to hammy, douchey, college campusy, sandal-wearing selections. Also, the performing sim seems to Rock the Heck Out as if they're jamming Metallica. That doesn't work for this style of music at all. Solution: Change the music to rock or add more douchebaggery to the performer's attitude when playing.
* Paintings. First, there are too few in buy mode. Second, while you can paint scores of them with the easel, new problems have arisen. You cannot recolor/retex the paintings' frames if you wish to hang up your work. The brush-stroke effect when painting still-life distorts the painting terribly. Finally, your smart sims will have a tendency to overuse the "honeycombing" or "look-from-a-distance" effect, making 80% of all paintings seem essentially the same. The game will hail these as brilliant, too. Solutions:Add more variations of intelligent work than the honeycomb, do less striations on still life, make frames designable for the paintings we keep, and provide more purchasable paintings in-game.
* Food is too simple. I want to see 5 ingredients for something like a "Stu Surprise" rather than just one. Also, it kills it for me that missing ingredients magically appear in the fridge (while your cash for the food is magically whisked away). The point of the store should be to acquire groceries, not just show your face on 5% discount day for a net savings of $4.00. Also, child sims are set with favorite foods that THEY HAVE NEVER TRIED. Major lack of foresight. Solution: Increase recipe accuracy, make condiments purchaseable and add a condiment rack. Do not create fridge food out of thin air. Dare I say it would be FUN to have to shape your meals around what kind of food you actually have available.
*Thievery. Sims can only steal in live mode when they have the kleptomaniac trait. As such, they steal very random things, and often not what you'd want. As a quirk, I would expect the trait to occur without the player noticing--so new items would be an unexpected discovery. As an attempt at legitimate thievery, I would definitely expect the object desired to be chooseable. It is not. The choice of object is up to the sim, and he often chooses a lamp--not the car next to it. Also, all objects are equally easy to steal, and I have yet to see a victim react the following day. Horrible implementation. Solutions: Have klepto- work on a chance basis, with the sim VERY OCCASIONALLY stealing trinkets on their own, and allow the option to steal at random to remain. Have the odds for successful thievery work in correlation to the logic+charisma+tier of "criminal track" of the sim. Fails will be more likely with expensive objects. The police may come. Escape should be difficult, but possible. Masks should be equippable. Locks should be pickable.
* Book reading process. Honestly, this just sucks. An intelligent character won't leave their bookcase alone. Sims going for a quick read will exhibit no preference for new stuff versus books already finished. Also, all bookcases purchased now include books. Solutions: Have characters exhibit preference for new books. Let the bookshelves be empty, and make us buy the books we wish to read!
* Cars. Endless issues here. The carpool doesn't go away after you purchase a car. With multiple cars in the household, your sim often does not travel in the one you clicked on. No animations exist for pulling the car out of the driveway, or into a parking space. Career reward cars do not announce their existence, and you cannot store them. Owned cars enjoy spending time in people's pockets. Not to mention, in this sophisticated AI world, no one is impressed by the type of car you have. Solutions: Just ... just the opposite of everything I wrote here.
* Buying businesses. After your bankroll passes certain milestones, you see this option upon clicking on the several businesses throughout town. Generally, all you can do after buying a business is: rename it, collect weekly money (unanimated), maybe fire an employee, and buy the business a second time (yes--really) for a larger stake. The primary issue is that none of this is particularly interesting. Not even on your first pass through the feature. Secondary: there are notable flaws with its implementation. If you buy the company that employs YOU and your career track, you will enjoy no effects or recognition of ownership from anyone. Buying for the larger stake is a way to cheat, as the sell-back price is always greater (the prices don't vary on random dice rolls or anything--forbid!). Finally, with an average default lifespan of only 90 days, and considering the business' stake vs. payouts, only child purchaser would ever see a profit - and that he would see, in old age. But of course, the business is supposed to pass to offspring. Yeah. extra money. That's what this game needs: more ways to not challenge the player. Solutions: Expand the existing options; let reasons come up for you to fire employees. Let the player review incoming hire packets, to kill unemployment a bit in the town. Provide small manageable (automatically or not) budgetary systems, and for that matter: the ability to hire a manager. Introduce disaster events wherein the business can tank. Make the business expandable (for restaurants: star-ratings; for buildings: capacity; etc), observable through VISIBLE UPGRADES on the neighborhood map. Perhaps one of the towers could get taller, or a few more bistro tables could be added. Remember when buildings grew in Sim City? Would it not be cool to see the same happen when YOU are the sim-owner?
* Toddlers that play with intellectual toys (xylophone/shape-blocks). They receive a progress bar, which when completed, may or may not add a skill. Users report varying results. In my own experience, I used the shape blocks quite a bit, the xylophone a little bit, and read three books. I only got credit for the last/most frequent thing done: the books, and it netted me one skill point to writing, and notified me two days later. Final note: Skills seem to be added when skill-building activity is attempted for the first time in a later life-stage. This could have been clearer by the game.
* Gem and stone finding. While conceptually a nice idea, when seen hinged with the rest of this game, it seems rightly at home with the "no depth/can't use it" effect. You can collect a few different kinds of stones/gems, and send them away to be cut to different shapes. Oh, and the Sim's access to different shapes isn't explained at all. Solution: First, a display rack, fitting all minerals and cuts. Next, make it clear that acquiring the different cuts is a SKILL, for which knowledge is required (otherwise it seems half-implemented, like everything else). The fun part: what can we do with these gems and stones? How about reinforce the house with mineral fireproofing? Find the age-reversing mineral (unlike ambrosia, it will bump you to the previous life stage)! Create love dust. Fashion jewelry -- and bring back gift-giving to other Sims.
Downgrades: New Gameplay Limitations
* Diagonal and curved design tools have been removed from pool creation. The absence of the curved option I can marginally understand, but diagonal had been in the series for quite a while. This is a downgrade and should be easy to re-implement.
* Parent-toddler interactions weakened. Range of space required has increased to what appears to be 2x3, so toddlers or parents will often walk three rooms away to pursue any kind of contact. Worse yet, if the toddler has gone, the parent waits for the toddler to return to start the interaction, rather than going himself. [/B]Solution:[/B] Fix the interaction space to 2x1 and disallow long trips to "no-collision space".
* * Ultra speed. This fourth setting feels like mortal plodding as the player can still eye every bedtime movement of his sim, hear their every snore. The reason: "Ultra" doesn't mean fastest. It's more of an alternate function setting, although that is not clearly explained. Ultra is as fast as ONE of the faster settings, but sets back to normal when a sim embarks on an activity or their activity ends. There used to only be three grades of speed. The fastest, "ultra", should absolutely mean that you're moving at around fifteen minutes a second or so. Solution: Skip whatever frames are necessary to attain proper time compression.
* Motive bar functionality. Another important device of gameplay confounded by the interface. You need to click through this mess to see your needs. I think the game bills itself as clever enough to not have sims suffer if left to their own AI. 1. It's not. 2. What if you had them on low free-will. Solution: Fix the motive bar on the interface, abbreviating needs if necessary.
* The ceilings suck. No longer do ceilings appear everywhere without a staircase. Ceilings only appear when a floor above you exists. If roof is above your present floor, you will not get a ceiling. Also, you can't design them.
* Animations. They used to be thought out; clever, different, more numerous, and provoke uproarious laughter from the user. In the Sims 1, a character would carefully sniff one arm--then the other--and then an offended "eww!" would emerge from him. There is no such love this time around, as nothing is as funny, smart, or cute. Genius sims DO ponder. But it's the same animation each time, yields nothing except an easily implementable moodlet, (your sims never invent anything), and gets old fast. There are plenty of opportunities for different complaint animations too; but it's typically the same animation each time. The same whining-and-stamping process occurs whenever a mood gets too low, or when someone's in a wanted chair. Mods already exist to remove this. That's how annoying it is. This is an important section because it marks the end of the joy there once was in watching them go about their little lives. Who even wants to set their sims on fire anymore--considering the scream and freak out process cycles into a repeat after five seconds?
* AI annoyances. Sims are now capable of passing each other in a one tile space, but they typically don't. They appear confused for a moment, and proceed -- maybe. Sims with needs in the red do not attend them. The complain process still takes longer than the solutions. See parent-toddler interactions above.
* The cakes cannot be eaten.
* Babies, if satisfied, just lay listlessly in the crib. They do not touch the bars, crawl, explore, or turn over. Their life animations change only slightly when they cry.
* Changing careers. Repetitive play is usually a glaring flaw with games reaching for eye-popping fun. But there are no invited career switches after you reach the top of the heap -- as with earlier Sims games -- in fact, the player is rewarded for staying forever in their current position, by earning continual time-based raises. So, not only is yawnable repetition encouraged, but if the player DOES switch tracks, the wish meter whines about the sim wanting to go back to the previous. That wish also comes with exhorbitant lifetime rewards that are difficult for even disclipined players to ignore. This design decision doesn't make sense for sim players whom ARE their sims; whom wish their wishes. If a player wants to switch careers, so should be it, and that's how the Sims 2 had it. But again this is part of my ongoing theory: the developers are so keen on rocketing the player through speedy lifespans, with individual job tracks, and the passing of reigns to offspring, because they are trying to create the semblance of replayability in a game that's not actually fun. Any production staff that doesn't design a sim game for the "oh so unlikely" event that the player doesn't want his main character to die, should not control the licensing for The Sims.
* Regular plants. They couldn't figure out how to remove the collision problems when watering plants so they took out watering entirely. I just think this is totally weak.
* Chimneys now take up 6 tiles. Why? No .. no really.. why?
* No lot creation or deletion. This is a major problem. What did I say in the beginning? Control. This is a perfect example of a cut feature to reduce programming variables. Solution: Developers who care.
* Television shows, movies, video games, are too few in number. You will now run into repeat video on each channel in under a minute. No matter what the gender or intelligence of your Sim, EA Sports is more likely to load when "playing computer games" than anything else, and it is a retarded football title of theirs that no one buys. There is another forgettable video game animation, and that's it.
* Investigate earlier Sim Games for creative play and innovative solutions. Example: using a certain lifetime reward object in The Sims 2 (yes, they were OBJECTS back then, not sentences of text) had a chance for failure. If this happened, your sim switched to the "Grilled Cheese" aspiration (sets of wishes) which had lots of amusing features. I do not see that kind of bright, witty, and overwhelmingly fun result for any gameplay choices in The Sims 3.
* Staircases. The code for staircases has always been the bane of a Sims programmer. We all know how hard it is to get characters to walk in a straight line, after all. But why can't we recolor these? There are only 8, and they are horrible bases. The woods don't match anything, four of them are intended for the outdoors or ultramodern house, and one of them is a carpeted variety. Its color is gray-green. They also suffer from earlier construction limitations: You can't taper them, you can't curve the banister. The width tool is effectively useless. Solution: Make them recolorable and curvable. Not that I know how to do this at all. But why don't they?
* Animations. These seem at the core far more robotic than in previous Sims installments. More troubling though, is the fact that no one seems to have bothered to include the same variety of social or activity-related animations that we are all used to from the series. They are far less in number, and far less interesting on an individual basis. Also, comedy has completely disappeared from many character actions, even when in situations that are hotbeds for humor; when the Sim is in need of a shower or a bit lonely. Basically the difference betwen The Sims 3 and each title previous, is the fact that you wouldn't call a friend over to watch what your crazy sim is up to anymore. You will never have a favorite animation. You will never say "omg look how he reacts when he has to get around another sim!" They're just not that great.
* Memories removed. Any awesome or tragic event in your Sim life should be attended with photographic vigilance, because you will never see or hear about it again. Not to mention, you have no ongoing record of divorces, aging up well, etc. Solution: More depth; memories should be brought back, and creep into the fears and desires from time to time. The loss of a baby boy might make a parent wish to have a girl, when they are finally ready. A series of fast promotions should create a negative moodlet if the next promotion isn't reached expeditiously. That is depth. 7-day moodlets are not.
Curtains. They cannot be set to close, open, or auto. Garage doors CAN be triggered, though -- for those of us that wanted that. So if you have the fuller sort of curtains in a room, expect to not be able to see the outside. Solution: Next time EA designers have a major project to work on, give them a checklist of things to think about. Does the object look nice? How could it function? Does it match objects that it is commonly used with?
Serious Object Omissions
* Functional doors. The extant doors are grand, weird, or modern. But missing are the two most common doors I've seen in real life: 1. Interior doors without paneling; 2. Front doors with a medium-sized (not door-length) window. Also the french doors, an unbelievably useful staple for the wealthy since the Sims 1 are now gone. They were also easily and convincingly placeable as double doors.
* The piano. In some parts of the world, a piano is likely to be found in the majority of middle class homes. A guitar is less frequently seen. I would much prefer tried and true methods to return and for the base game to have started with a nice, room-swallowing piano.
* Two story columns. These were in the base Sims 2.
* The diving board.
* The usual range of functional furniture. I'm now convinced that none of the designers have ever seen a wealthy person's dining table (they are typically not glass).
* There are curved flowerbeds and no curved fences or dividers.
Other Gameplay Improvement Suggestions
* Increase the lifetime reward list to 50x its present size. The catch: only allow a small fraction of the new list to be accessed by any one character over their life. This grants replayability, because you'll never know which lifetime rewards you can potentially have access to. Those exposed to you will be determined by your personality at start-up, and your play style throughout.
* As indicated above, turn the Sims' activities into games for the player; bustling with strategy, reasoning, and action. Let the musician's workplace summon a guitar hero interface for the player. The dishwasher job should have a timed get-em-clean mode. Writers should go through grammar/style correction challenges and appear on Oprah. But most importantly: let it all be optional in case the player wants the Sim to do the work. Neopets is soon going to total a billion dollars off of minigames like this, games which also support the virtual affluence of an avatar. And their simulated character life -- well -- sucks compared to the Sims. So why should the sim activities be the ones which are observation without participation?
* Individualize free-will settings per family member.
* Trainable and lockable activity sequences. EAT->TOILET->BATH->WORK. Who doesn't follow that pattern 99% of the time? I'd rather not click through that crap anymore .. and for that matter...
* Assignable beds, sides, doors (these previously existed), chairs, dining surfaces, etc., etc.
* Population Settings. New aging setting: Age everything except not past adulthood/young adulthood and add a "no deaths" checkbox. Require player
approval for townies to move away--or at least call attention to it and allow the player to convince them not to leave.
* Build mode. I want to see sloped ceilings, window height adjustment, curveature possible everywhere, height-expandable levels, designable build mode objects, sculptable roofing with sectional slope differentiation, and the ability to vault over fences.
* Drawable area for guests during a party. I hate having them out of reach and all over the house.
* Add a neighborhood builder. Lot sizing should be "click and drag."
* Recipe creation: Select your own animations and food products.
* Full integration with Sim City 4 (or 5 ... lol)
* Most of all, stop porting 95% of what had already existed in previous games and instead, putting on a new coat of gloss (more specifically, a nice graphical outline of a house), and feeling these are justifiably big enough changes to make a sequel (with which our old expansions will not work). Work with the code, or write new code, but try not to merely change the ergonomics and claim you made technological leaps in the process.
"Objects That Shouldn't Have Made the Cut"
(developing section)
I will personally save a kitten if they stop including versions of that asinine poor person's bookshelf. The one supported by concrete blocks. What's that about? Who's brilliant idea was it? Why are there 50 of them in every Sims variant? This should be a total side option for those of us that want to put our rarely-played sims into cardboard boxes. This object should not be wasting precious -- AND PAID FOR -- space in the catalog, particularly when they barely give us anything anyway.
How does the sense of fun relate to the here, frequently-stated ideas of depth and complexity? Through fun's requirement of a variable and changing experience. If a game is shallow, you learn its routines quickly and it becomes a clickfest. It's only when it provides a challenge that it becomes a real game. Never running out of food, rarely failing social interactions, and having a steady climb to promotion -almost- no matter what, kills the game. Also the reason the Sims, as a series, is fun at all is not because it is a life simulation. That just sets up a known framework. The Sims is fun because of the aforementioned challenges, yes, but largely because of the unknowns. With Maxis, I didn't know if a fridge monster was going to evolve from old food, I didn't know if a guinea pig would get me sick, and I didn't know that I could find such rare and unique items in certain places. With EA, everything is as it seems (example: chance finds while fishing. All of these items can be found in a store and are not special and unique). If you do make way to explore something REALLY unusual (Catacombs) you get a range of text boxes updating you on your progress. The funniest thing that could (and nearly always does) happen is having your character come out of the catacombs mauled (looking electrocuted, if you ask me). The point is, EA just gave surface touches with no depth. You are doing the same catacomb runs all the time, finding generally the same gems and seeds. If Maxis had created it, there would probably have been a hundred things to find, real dangers to behold, choices that mattered, and it might not have been all text. That, is fun. Fun involves you and fun is not static; it changes and varies your experience, generally through the depth of your activity. It forces to to learn anew and requires effort, for which your rewards feel validated. The Sims 3, on the other hand, rewards repeat actions and automatic activity completion (Your top-level career provides raises until the end of time, as long as you DON'T change your job. Your character is set to auto-harvest, when you unleash him on an orchard of money trees.)That is why it is shallow. That is why it is not fun. It is proof that there is no communication at EA, that they don't know what they are doing, that they focus-grouped very shallowly, and that there is complete and total apathy for filling out a game experience properly. The most credit you could give them, would be that they're experimenting to see how long they can possibly make money off of crap, just like Fox did.
And I do stand by what I said: fun IS work. Some people have fun fixing their car, working out the best recipes, winning the most attention at a nightclub, doing hair a certain way, or playing a football game. But no one would have fun if the exact same thing always broke on their car, or if they had to redo the same meal ovr and over, or if their reactions at a nightclub were perfect and identical each time, or if their opponents in football never varied their strategy. That is work, complexity, depth, and that is LIFE. That is why the EA version of the sims, while finally opening up the 'burb and giving us decent design tools, is a total fail in gameplay. Because everything is what it is, nothing more, no easter eggs, and repeat. You fish over and over, and catch a certain expected number, and that's it. You go to work, and win your top level raise in a certain number of days, and thats it. You satisfy the needs of your baby, and he won't move until a motive bar goes down, and that's it. To put it simply, it's got no heart. To put it synchronously with my theme here, their gameplay doesnt offer little tidbits to vary the experience, alternate the reward, provide challenges via the unexpected, or do almost anything the way Maxis did. More importantly, EA games do not seem to understand the need to balance the game with difficulties and challenges anymore. In a manner consistent with rinse and repeat, the best strategy to raise your child in TS3 is to push the books at him and ramp his skills up in a race to get him competent before his life ends. Skill-grind, repeat. There is no penalty for this, such as giving him a 15% chance to go insane, or a 90% chance to workaholic. There are no bad memories or long negative moodlets. As long as you keep his needs up, you never even need to take the kid to the park. Shame. Because now we're talking about a game that Other aspects of the game are seriously lacking in penalty, such as social interactions (they rarely fail), job stagnancy, over-earning from money trees, etc. etc. But they were sure to make at least two things in your house break EVERY DAY. Good job on the balance. You gave us the problem we didn't want, and no challenge with anything serious. So the not fun hard stuff is there, but the fun hard stuff is nonexistent. (Wouldn't it be kinda neat if you offended a sim so badly that you had to strategize an apology by going to friends and figuring out her favorite food or something? This would imply of course that the status sheet for sims would be MUCH larger.)
Game developers should definitely fix the too-often whined about issues, but more importantly they should expand the game beyond the imagination of the community. They should consider the range of options within gameplay, but also (for the 100th time) the depth of each feature; what it does, how the game is significantly changed by your interplay with it, and what sort of reward it carries. This game feels like it skirted about a hundred fronts, coughed up 80% of what was needed for some, 10% for others, and completed very little. The community, I believe, will start to feel that sour sort of "gamer's guilt" from the Sims 3, that occurs when you realize you wasted valuable time on a title that didn't give you much reason to do so, and they will know that they wrongly thought it was awesome. At least with a game like X-com, you can look back 20 years later and have an excuse for your wasted childhood.
And Finally...
With all said (and beaten to death), the summary is as follows: The Sims 3 is not a bad stand-alone game, but it is not a good upgrade at all, for all of the aforementioned reasons. People seem to be dribbling theories that EA has bought off reviewers for their high marks. Whether that is true is a pointless, libelous debate. However, The Sims 3 does appear to address nearly all of the core issues that have distressed veteran players for some nine years. All players will therefore stroll down the path of fixes and upgrades that the advertisements guided you to check for. All players, in the first few days, will think this game deserves top marks. This is typically what critics get: a few days. That's possibly why the scores are so high. But accurate reviews for this particular title absolutely require extended play-time. The new features are big and wanted; but few and without depth. Notably, people will love the ability to choose patterns for ALMOST anything (there are still egregious omissions) and the seamless neighborhood. But the truth is, we're talking about pattern selection, which could have existed in a sophisticated 2001 game, and we're talking about a neighborhood in which you can do almost nothing really without dealing with a progress bar. Unless, of course, you wish to knock on a neighbor's door and scratch a dent into your skull wondering why the game's designers gave all the preexisting mansions two bedrooms and made them ten feet thick.
No, The Sims 3 is not a good game, but because of the way it has been presented, and what it DOES offer, it is a dangerous installment: it proves that companies can push laziness onto the shelves and still increase the price. Its few upgrades make you feel as if you're getting what you always wanted, and indeed, make earlier Sims games hard to go back to (especially for designers). But its flaws are located primarily in areas of the game that worked previously, which have been thinned out tremendously (with OR without expansions). They are also secondarily found in the shallowness of newly implemented features. Unfortunately, it is taken as read that trusted elements of Sims play still work as well as they ever did, while players across the country have an unaccountable feeling of "same old, same old" for this game. Players are wondering why this game has no soul. Well, it's not a mystery. It DOESN'T have a soul. The animations lost humor, and have been cut in number. Social responses are included in this. So the mundane activities have REALLY become mundane, and it's not because of The Sims formula. It's because the formula changed to include less ingredients, or to make them all gray. Strategy has been removed, as "challenges" are uncreative, easy to complete, and too forgiving for failures. Self-made challenges too are now non-existent, because romances can be raced through. Bonuses and rewards feel cheap and just exist to reduce gameplay effort. Finally, actual play activities (harvesting, etc) have about one level of depth; one repeating thing to click and do, and that's it. It's like they sat, didn't think very hard about what counts as fun, implemented all ideas without standard, but didn't flesh them out properly, barely communicated with each other, left half of the game broken, and tried to figure out what else to make the public pay for. Why do you think all of the high rating user reviews are ALSO swamped with criticism? This game is dangerous because it convinces people for a day or so that it's awesome, it convinces a time-restricted reviewer of the same, but the world it exists in, frankly, sucks -- for reasons which can usually be expressed (and applied ubiquitously in game) as thus: "I guess they really didn't think about how to make this cool" which often looks more like "they just really didn't put the work in." It's like someone gave you a Ferrari that someone else made, issued you the power to recolor it, stuck you in a gray backdrop, and removed the ability for you to open the door (you instead materialize inside), and everyone around you is telling you how awesome that is.