TS3 L&P

[Maygus]

I suspect that those rabbit-hole buildings are placeholders for expansion packs.

[talysman]

I suspect that those rabbit-hole buildings are placeholders for expansion packs.

Early interviews with Rod Humble suggested that some may indeed become real buildings instead of rabbit-holes in some future expansion pack. For example, stores. On the other hand, there's one rabbit-hole for each career; I doubt some of the careers, like the business track, will be turned into full expansion packs.

[Jelenedra]

I don't see Going To Work becoming an EP. Who wants to go from watching their sim pee at home to peeing at work instead?

[Simsbaby]

The same people who purchased Open for Business?

[Jelenedra]

That's a bit different. That's not like watching your sim go to work in an office.

[Faizah]

I was initially not that hot on OFB, but, since I've purchased it, I've realised it really is my favourite EP.

That said, I am so not interested in seeing what goes on at my Sims' day to day jobs. If I wanted to see my Sims being bossed around, I'd be bossing them around. All 'going to work' would do would be to interrupt the flow of bossing.

Besides, how would that even work? Different sims are in different careers, and all. I can just imagine trying to follow 8 sims through their individual but coincidentally 9-5 Mon-Fri jobs. No thanks!

[J. M. Pescado]

OFB is the best expansion to abuse because it offers more control over the formerly useless community lots. The actual BUSINESSING is repetitive, and the default EAxis code for running one is horrid beyond all usability. Without Awesomeware, OFB is simply crap, offering nothing but frustration and irritation, but WITH Awesomeware, it is shiny.

[Emma]

That's true, and with Notovny's factories, it is even easy to sell craftables for Profit!

The only things that are completely shit and beyond repair (even with FFS stuff installed) in my opinion, are multi-family apartments. I can never play them for long without problems occurring. I like my sims having rented single-unit houses though, I never have problems with those.

[nekonoai]

actually, i would like the choice to follow my sim to  work... if only for the opportunity to have an affair with the secretary/coworker.

[Lion]

Judging from Ben Bell's explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMDssQV2Q7k&feature=channel

Quote: "You have complete control of the family that you play in the game, and all the other characters are really part of the setting....We've got AI that drives all the other characters forward, so that....all the stories that you are trying to tell are possible." (This section starts at 1:09.)

Playing multiple families in a hood, as most of us enjoy doing, does not seem possible. Yes, you can save multiple copies of the game, but once you go off to play another family, your original played family will not stay the same. What's the point?

"so that....all the stories that you are trying to tell are possible." -  Sims 3 limits how players will play and tell the story, not expands upon Sims 2. What a shame!

[HomeschooledByTards]

 I typically play one or two families in a neighborhood and ignore the rest of them. I like the idea of being able to have elevently million spawn, raise them, out all but my favorite and have the other spawn grow and have families of their own and avoid time problems like the great-great-grandchild of my founder going to school with the founder's original children.

I hate rotating through the various families, I have to build and furnish their houses, get them established in a career, skill and breed them, and let them live their lives when I really don't give a shit about the Sim.

[Zazazu]

I rotate and play everyone. For the households I don't really care about, I make sure they are following their path to their ordained career, and then I just ignore them. If they break the Rule of Four or a Romance sim strays, the punishing commences. If they somehow end up killing themselves, it's no skin off my back. Rarely happens.  Building and furnishing over and over can get dull, even when you like building. I have to do all my homes new. With adding new resident families (one-four, usually just one but I had two this week) every sim Monday, plus move-outs from existing homes, it gets to be a lot.

[Alex]

I can't wait to see how hideous some of the previous default sims look in this game. I know we've seen one or two already, but the rest shall be eye opening closing.

[Jelenedra]

I'm all for better AI, especially since I am terrible about playing the families I make, but I do fervently hope that Pescado can make a hack that will prevent huge life altering decisions. I'm all for having spawns without being directed, I am NOT okay with random marriage and career decisions.

[Lorelei]

I just have visions of Maxis-fugly idiot Townies breeding like cockroaches and filling up the game with MBs of useless, hideous-looking, unplayable NPCs.

DO NOT WANT.

As I've said before, the first thing I did before even getting The Sims 2 was find and download default replacements and Peshacks. My game had fug and bork and lame for about five minutes, then I shut it down and installed my preciouses, and the fug and bork and lame was (mostly) gone.

I'm a visual person who likes to tweak every setting I can. Making it difficult for me to do so, given that I find the EA aesthetic and 12ish sense of humor obnoxious for the most part, is FAIL. One character pissing herself constantly is rather amusing, and yet in Sims 2, you can leave her "homebase" alone and go play another household when the joke wanes for you. An entire town full of constantly pissing, house-burning, kermit-flailing, poorly-dressed deformed cretins who think tickling and joy buzzering strangers is LULZ is a big DNW. A little juvenelia goes a long way. After you see it 4,000 times, screw it. DNW.

[Jelenedra]

Maybe the game will be smart, and unless there is a nursery in the home of said NPC, the AI won't let them procreate.

[Lorelei]

Maybe the game will be smart, and unless there is a nursery in the home of said NPC, the AI won't let them procreate.

I'm getting conflicting information about whether we would be able to mess with other, NPC, household arrangements, though.  If you are restricted to piloting one family and can't have more than one household to manage, how would we get inside these households to remove the sprog pens? And if they are autonomous, as has been implied, no doubt they will just buy babby cots if they reproduce.

So, again, I see the town outside your bubble of god power running amok with Townies being fertile and stupid; yards littered with trash and crawling with vermin, gardens dying from neglect, stinking puddles of unnaturally blue pee everywhere, tombstones in the middle of the road, flaming houses, and so on. You & I know it is unlikely they will improve the AI enough for Townies to make sensible life choices. These are hapless, helpless, incredibly dim pixel creatures that, up to this point, lacked the ability to pull themselves out of pools, or to do minor household repair / cook a slice of cheese toast without risking death.

So the options are:

1. We have SOME control of households besides The One Household To Rule Them All, and will have to spend a lot of time mopping pee and making sure Townies don't breed like rats or kill themselves being stupid.

2. We will have NO control of households other than The One Household To Rule Them All, and the Townies who are supposedly going to carry on with their own lives simultaneously with the denizens in The One Household To Rule Them All are going to render the town a stinking slagpit of corpses, burnination, disease, floods of urine and squalling, feral, orphan babbies on the brink of death.

3. Modification of #1: "living lives simultaneously" with the denizens of The One Household To Rule Them All means that Townies don't do much at all but occasionally get older and drop dead, and exist only to become "activated" in some way by contact with your playables, much like some default EA Sims can be wooed and added to households, or befriended, or fought with, or whatever. Surely nothing can go wrong with this plan, as more and more Townies become "activated" and wander off to wreak havok outside of your sphere of control.

4. Option I haven't considered yet, which is, one hopes, better than the prior 3.

I confess that I have been DNW about S3 to the point where I may have missed some details that would clarify this for me and soothe my concerns. I have read reviews here and there, and this thread, but perhaps I missed some information that would clear this up.

[Jelenedra]

Option 4: You can adjust in an options panel how much life altering AI run sims are allowed to make. Check boxes for authority to get married, get knocked up, change jobs, buy furniture, or spawn. All I know is that I will be VERY irritated if I leave TOHTRTA to make a new CAS to function as a spouse for the next generation, only to have said CASpouse get married before the heir can meet them.

[Lorelei]

Option 4...

Interesting. I haven't even heard even a hint that this is something being considered, however.

And we are talking about EA, here. That would take mostly-unfukt coding skills.

And yes, I would be annoyed, too, if a CAS spouse wandered off and got autonomously hitched before being used in the storytelling manner intended.

[caterpillar]

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can go and play other households, but while you are doing so, the family you just left behind will continue with their lives without you.
So if you move CAS intended spouse into a new house and played him for awhile, the heir of your primary house could grow up and get married to someone else, or die, without your direction.

[FourCats]

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can go and play other households, but while you are doing so, the family you just left behind will continue with their lives without you.
So if you move CAS intended spouse into a new house and played him for awhile, the heir of your primary house could grow up and get married to someone else, or die, without your direction.

Do not Want!

[MaryH]

Hasn't EA learned a damned thing in 8 years? They don't understand that we want and need to control our little creatures, because they're the only things in life we can control-life is for the most part a very chaotic mess for most of us, and this game does fulfill our need to be the masters of our own little universe.
I don't want to play a game that tells me how to play it. I will play the game my way, under my direction. It's about the only thing I can actively change at my will-the rest of my life is being directed and controlled by forces outside my own powers.
I'll be damned if I let some corporation of bad taste geeks tell me how to have fun!
It's gonna flop bad-let the 12's have it. They deserve it.

[caterpillar]

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can go and play other households, but while you are doing so, the family you just left behind will continue with their lives without you.
So if you move CAS intended spouse into a new house and played him for awhile, the heir of your primary house could grow up and get married to someone else, or die, without your direction.

Do not Want!

Sims 3 is a whole lot of Do Not Want, lol.

[kaitco]

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can go and play other households, but while you are doing so, the family you just left behind will continue with their lives without you.
So if you move CAS intended spouse into a new house and played him for awhile, the heir of your primary house could grow up and get married to someone else, or die, without your direction.

This was my interpretation from all the articles as well. Either way, it is complete FAIL, DNW, etc. Part of the way I challenge myself in the game is to keep all the families straight and make sure that the generational lines do not cross too often. I, however, see no problem in leaving a family alone for months at a time while I create a new "line" to filter into the old ones. The day I got the game in 2004, I made a family with two toddlers and I only recently have got those toddlers out of university and married off to other sims. It takes ages to make the whole generation grow uniformly, but still enhances the fun I get from the game. TS3 just takes all the fun out of maintaining the minor details of every single sim I have...and takes the fun out of playing the game in general.

[theresatv]

I didn't mind simultaneous time when I thought the "seamless neighborhood" meant , for instance, that you could tell Emma to take a bubble bath, instantly switch to controlling Goopy across town for a while, and then resume control of Emma as she stepped out of the bath. However, it looks like the Seamless Neighborhood is a Gigantic Load of Hooey. The sim family you're playing at any given time can go anywhere in town without a loading screen, but it appears that you need to re-load the entire town to play another family.

I'm guessing that The Sims 3 will be very similar to Apartment Life, with each controllable family living in an "apartment lot" the size of the entire town. Non-playable sims will probably only behave on free will when they're actually out in the "common area" and their time "at home" will be spent standing still while their motives magically recharge. It shouldn't be too hard to keep a non-controllable from doing anything life-changing if you keep your eye on them.

Reviews have stated that time passing for the neighborhood can be halted temporarily. I've seen interviews saying that saved games can be "merged" to combine developments from multiple family threads into the same neigborhood, but I haven't seen any description of how this works in practice.

It's certainly a "small neighborhood" concept, with play largely appealing to Simmers who only play a small number of families actively. I play a huge neighborhood currently but I might be able to adjust because my favorite part of the game is creating Sims and getting them started, meaning that I could make a lot of Sims but have most of them function as customized townies.

I'll probably get The Sims 3 in time but I'm going to wait months after the release before buying it to avoid paying a premium for a hot-mess-o-bugs. I learned that lesson about buying computer games LONG ago.