So the last week I have been playing The Sims 3. I started it a bit overnight after re-downloading all the patches and Playing my Sims 2 Legacy in the meantime. I got this game a few months ago after purchasing my HP dv7t quad-core. Finally having a graphics card that can play The Sims 2 at with maximum settings as well as being able to play most current games with any decent graphics detail has been a awesome.
Here's what I like about TS3 so far from actually being able to take the time to play it:
It's a Seamless Neighborhood - My Sim can run or taxi all over the neighborhood to communitylots, to work at a "rabbit-hole" or visiting a neighbor (finally!). It's like Sims 1 you were stuck in big square and couldn't leave. Then they had community lots in TS1 and TS2 that your sim could visit, but when they left for work, they simply exited stage left and came back a few hours later. Now, in TS3, your view NEVER leaves your sims, you can track them all over.
However, that leads to one of the things that was great about community lots. Sure, having time essentially stop for sims at community lots was not realistic, it does give your sim much less time in the day in order to do skilling and meeting potential breeding stock (as I call townies in my Legacy games). You kinda have to be lucky.
Traits - Traits can be good or bad and describe a sim, simillar to the point-buy system of the previous 2 games. You can actually have evil Sims. Or can be lucky, neat, sloppy, Geniuses, and the like. They also help descirbe how well the Sim can learn diffrent skills and how quickly. A sim with the Bookworm trait and the Genius trait will be able to learn logic books at an astounding rate, almost as fast as playing a game of chess.
Vehicles - Included in the base game and you can follow them all around the town, but its almost not worth buying your sim his own vehicle as the taxi is free and comes along almost instantaneously for your Sim.
Graphics Scalability - EAxis seems to try to make The Sims game of all sorts play on most modern computers. As such It seems the amount of options that is selectable in the graphics panel is exciting to me. I was able to get most of the settings to a very good level and be able to play TS3 at the resolution of 1600x900 with mostly a framerate in the 50-60 range. I am not playing on a high end card either. It's just a 320M that HP scrapped off of the floor of Nvidia and threw into my laptop. As such, I could imagine The Sims 3 being able to run on even some older video cards like a 7600 GT
What I am kinda meh about or annoys me:
Time Management - MUCH harder for multiple sims in TS3. If i got a little flustered with controlling multiple sims at a time I would grab one sim and send him downtown to do some tasks or meet up with neighbors. The rest of the house was put in stasis and aging didn't need to exist. When the sim got home, though he would nearly have drained his energy bar and needed to pound down the espresso to get his energy bar back up to where everyone in the house was. Overall though, it made things quite simpler.
Raising skills also seems to be much harder and the Sim has to rely on his traits in order to level them up at a decent rate. That could be a good thing, means that sims will not really be able to be a jack of all trades during his life.
Careers Vs. Pay - Very hard to get promoted from first level usually. Science for instance takes level 4 in the gardening skill and sucking up with the boss. At the final level it requires good relationship with the boss as well as high skills in Gardening, Mechanics and also Fishing. Which is a lot of skills to keep up with, without the right traits. The pay... not great. Business seems to require very few skills and can be exploited for money with the use of meetings many times a day.
Overall it is a nice game with some good improvements over The Sims 2. I will still play a lot of The Sims 2 because just the sheer amount of content that is in the game with all the expansions yarred.
In TS2: Currently My 3rd and 4th generation Drakemore legacy is going strong and already I seem to have broken most of the handicaps that I set forth with, but thats OK because by the time I have a 10th generation, I'll have so many Sims that I'll probably be able to easily populate my whole "still quite empty" base neighborhood. I just haven't added many lots for it and have only house a few of the non-legacy offspring in apartment buildings and age them up with hacks so they will be roughly about the same age (or dead) as the legacy lot. Lots of 2nd gen elder.
Currently Listening To: Bebel Gilberto - Secret
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