THE HORROR: The REAL TS3 Scoop As It Unfolds

[VeilSethekk]

I have noticed books disappearing after learning a new recipe. I figured that it should go in the bookcase for others to learn. What is up with costing 1000 simoleons for a book learning that cake, I forgot the name. Too high.

I guess they decided to make those things one-time use to function as money sinks, given how much more difficult money is to comeby. But realistically, the idea of recipes disappearing like that is just plain stupid.

And did anyone figure out how the fuck the Food Replicator works, let alone if it does anything? From my observations of it so far, it's not like the ones at Paladin's Place for TS1 and TS2 in terms of making food appear by itself, and it doesn't serve as a stove/fridge replacement either.

[LFox]

I have noticed books disappearing after learning a new recipe. I figured that it should go in the bookcase for others to learn. What is up with costing 1000 simoleons for a book learning that cake, I forgot the name. Too high.

I guess they decided to make those things one-time use to function as money sinks, given how much more difficult money is to comeby. But realistically, the idea of recipes disappearing like that is just plain stupid.

And did anyone figured out how the fuck the Food Replicator works, let alone if it does anything. From my observations of it so far, it's not like the ones at Paladin's Place for TS1 and TS2 in terms of making the food by itself, and it doesn't serve as a stove replacement either.

Yeah i got a food replicator and it works great.  You make a meal then you store it on the food replicator and depending on the quality you get an amount of charges.  For nice quality its 10 for very nice its 20.  The best idea is to store group meals.   You can overwrite any one whenever you want providing you got a food dish to do so.

Once you got meals stored simply activate the food replicator and get it to replicate a meal.  I've had my sims going on just the food replicator for ages and never needing to cook.  You can also upgrade it to hold more slots.  When it's upgraded it can hold 3 foods.

[Inge]

Ok I now understand what is going on.

EA leaked a "pirated" copy of the game, knowing that the type of people who would be attracted to gaining the game in this dastardly way are precisely the type of people most likely to track down bugs and tell Pescado about them.   This way, Pescado can come up with solutions in time for EA to use his fixes in a patch very soon after the game comes out officially.   It's all good, folks.

[Kyna]

Inge, I think you've got the wrong brand of tinfoil under that tea cosy of yours - you went for the cheap no-name supermarket brand, didn't you?  The major flaw in your idea is that you think EA care about releasing an early bug-fixing patch.

Here's the real reason.

EA leaked the game to the pirates so that when sales go pear-shaped, they can blame it on the early release of the pirated copy.  With much wailing and wringing of hands, they can tell their shareholders that the game would have been far more successful if only those nasty pirates hadn't had a 2 week head start.  Then nobody at EA will have to take the blame for deciding to remove the aspects of the game that made TS1 and TS2 so successful, or for deciding to include secuROM.

[maxon]

I haven't seen anybody report this yet:

> Also, I deleted all the premade families, and after playing 30
> minutes, they're all moving back in... DESPITE BEING DELETED! The
> Goths, Landgraabs, Alto family, all of them!

That's from someone on the newsnet sims group who is trying out the game.

[Giggy]

Inge, that logic is full of flaws.

[21:00] <Lorelei> If they really wanted him to mod it and de-crapify it, they would have sent him a copy before now via a download link
[21:00] <Lorelei> the "it's not the real game" and other theories are lulzy

Edit: (Forgotten this bit, thanks Lorelei)

Pescado: "It's not the real game" is an irrelevant argument.
Pescado: The problems that exist in the game are deeply rooted design decisions that would not be overturned even within several months.
Lorelei: these [conspiracy] theorists are probably just bitter [that other] people got it before they did AND said it is 90% crappy

[Kyna]

[21:00] <Lorelei> If they really wanted him to mod it and de-crapify it, they would have sent him a copy before now via a download link
[21:00] <Lorelei> the "it's not the real game" and other theories are lulzy

This sums up what I thought of Inges theory.

Oh how cute.  Giggy's attempting to give a serious response to Inge's joke theory.  And it's not even Giggy's own opinion.

[Lorelei]

[21:00] <Lorelei> If they really wanted him to mod it and de-crapify it, they would have sent him a copy before now via a download link
[21:00] <Lorelei> the "it's not the real game" and other theories are lulzy

This sums up what I thought of Inges theory.

Oh how cute.  Giggy's attempting to give a serious response to Inge's joke theory.  And it's not even Giggy's own opinion.

He forgot this bit:

Pescado: "It's not the real game" is an irrelevant argument.
Pescado: The problems that exist in the game are deeply rooted design decisions that would not be overturned even within several months.
Lorelei: these [conspiracy] theorists are probably just bitter [that other] people got it before they did AND said it is 90% crappy

Pescado's response would at least have added some weight to the response, rather than just quoting me out of context responding to Inge's facetiousness in like fashion.

[Genlisae]

Simply because I love the conspiracy theories (and my tinfoil hat has been abducted ... I suspect pirates!) I am going to throw a comment made by my fiancée out there upon reading the last few posts.

"I find it funny that giantbomb hasn't reviewed the game yet. Wait, no I don't, they are the guys who got fired and quit from gamespot for not giving an EA game the review that was paid for. EA doesn't want them anywhere near a review of their latest bug ridden POS."

[Mixreality]

I haven't seen anybody report this yet:

> Also, I deleted all the premade families, and after playing 30
> minutes, they're all moving back in... DESPITE BEING DELETED! The
> Goths, Landgraabs, Alto family, all of them!

That's from someone on the newsnet sims group who is trying out the game.

I deleted all the families and all the buildings and nothing and no one came back (played for about two days). What's even better, there are no new random townies generated (perhaps if there was more houses they would come and occupy them). My one and only sim is enjoying his sollitude and living of fishing. I tried to hook him up with the mail woman, but I missed her arrival, then had my sim chase her around town but she dissappeared before he got to her. If she's the new 'untouchable', I'll have to make a couple of 'townies' for spawning purposes. Or just build another house and see what happens. The 'bin' families ('library' families?) cannot be deleted, but they also don't show up in the hood. I like this. Only the little paper boy and the said mail woman are present in the hood along with my One Sim.

[farmersimmer]

Ok I now understand what is going on.

EA leaked a "pirated" copy of the game, knowing that the type of people who would be attracted to gaining the game in this dastardly way are precisely the type of people most likely to track down bugs and tell Pescado about them.   This way, Pescado can come up with solutions in time for EA to use his fixes in a patch very soon after the game comes out officially.   It's all good, folks.

Hehe they left it many months too late.
Not even mods can save this monstrosity,

[Kyna]

He forgot this bit:
... <snip> ...
quoting me out of context

I figured it was something like that.  I knew you'd realise that the prankster in the tea cosy wasn't srs.

Besides, we all know that you've spent your senatorial tinfoil budget wisely - you not only made a good quality tinfoil hat for yourself, you also did the same for Murphy.

[blackcat]

I haven't seen anybody report this yet:

> Also, I deleted all the premade families, and after playing 30
> minutes, they're all moving back in... DESPITE BEING DELETED! The
> Goths, Landgraabs, Alto family, all of them!

That's from someone on the newsnet sims group who is trying out the game.

I deleted all the families and all the buildings and nothing and no one came back (played for about two days). What's even better, there are no new random townies generated (perhaps if there was more houses they would come and occupy them). My one and only sim is enjoying his sollitude and living of fishing. I tried to hook him up with the mail woman, but I missed her arrival, then had my sim chase her around town but she dissappeared before he got to her. If she's the new 'untouchable', I'll have to make a couple of 'townies' for spawning purposes. Or just build another house and see what happens. The 'bin' families ('library' families?) cannot be deleted, but they also don't show up in the hood. I like this. Only the little paper boy and the said mail woman are present in the hood along with my One Sim.

I did the same thing, only left houses. No townies regeneration. Also I spotted a couple of thieves.

[LFox]

I deleted all the families and all the buildings and nothing and no one came back (played for about two days). What's even better, there are no new random townies generated (perhaps if there was more houses they would come and occupy them). My one and only sim is enjoying his sollitude and living of fishing. I tried to hook him up with the mail woman, but I missed her arrival, then had my sim chase her around town but she dissappeared before he got to her. If she's the new 'untouchable', I'll have to make a couple of 'townies' for spawning purposes. Or just build another house and see what happens. The 'bin' families ('library' families?) cannot be deleted, but they also don't show up in the hood. I like this. Only the little paper boy and the said mail woman are present in the hood along with my One Sim.

I'd like to make an Adam and Eve style neighbourhood that starts with only two people and grows until its a massive town.  Sadly until there's a way to remove the check for incest relationships that can't happen.

Anyone else notice how useless testingcheats is now?  Before you could do anything and everything including that ^ .  Now you can't do a damn thing with it except change traits and freeze motives.

[Giggy]

I feel very stupid. I think my humour meter is broken again.

[BlueSoup]

It sucks that it takes twice the number of old rotting newspapers now before the damn paper delivery kid will stop coming.

[simsdesperado]

I played it for some hours, and while I have no issues with the sims, or the gameplay, I do have some concerns regarding the graphics. I have an nvidia 8600 videocard with 512 mb memory and inspite of the fact that all settings were on high and gameplay was smooth, the textures look very blurry and pixelated, especially on close-ups. Even the sims's skins. Also, I noticed that from a normal play camera height, texture details go missing. I made a sim with red and white polka dots shoes and the dots were visible only when I viewed them in extreme close-up. I also have an issue with the dark shadows on the objects. I tried to make *white* towels but the result was more like dirty white towels. And the same thing happened with the curtains, the bedsheets, the leather couch that's also in sims2.  And the indoors lightning seems to suffer from the same drawback as the radiance lightning mod for sims2. The objects near the light source glow and appear overexposed while those a few squares away are very dark. Maybe I don't play enough games to make a reasonable comparison of what is realistically achievable in terms of technology, but I find these issues very annoying, especially when we had very beautiful clean textures in Sims2 and the lightning was good even though it was not realistic. Maybe it's an issue with my card, or maybe it's just the way the game renders objects. But if that's the case I don't think it should render objects with lower quality when you're inside the lot. It's very annoying because things seem hazy.

Anyway, the other issue I have is CAST. I find it a bit difficult to use, it's quite intuitive, but do we really have to approve each and every recolour for each and every recolourable subset? There are too many steps I think and it is time consuming. Also, it takes up too much screen space. I don't see why do we need to have the saved recolours window pop-up when we save the recolours. It takes up additional space and you need to move the camera so you can see the object you're trying to recolour in the little space that's left. Also, it cannot be moved to another area on the screen. It was possible to move them in Sims2 so why not in Sims3?
Edit: I also find annoying that we now have buttons for raising and lowering the camera view. Why did we need that?

For the good parts, I like that sims can play in the bathtub with the little rubber ducky, it looks so cute. Can't wait for the censor blur to be removed so I can see the whole animation! I love that sims can ranomly meet people, and find things to collect. Also, the cemetary at night is awsome, I can see my sims having some halloween parties there. And the ghosts actually look very nice in game. The neighbourhood is awsome, haven't had the time to explore it all, but what I've seen so far looks good. Free roaming is great! Also, did anyone notice that in the scrolling text that appears while the game loads, they say that online experience is not rated by the ESRB. Could it be possible that they intend to release an online version too?
Edit again: I also had my sim use the toilet and bathtub to sit on while eating. I think it's cute. My sim stoped using them after I bought her a couch so I don't mind it if they do eat sitting on the toilet if there's no chairs available.

[Tyyppi]

Also, did anyone notice that in the scrolling text that appears while the game loads, they say that online experience is not rated by the ESRB. Could it be possible that they intend to release an online version too?

This probably refers to custom content you can download from other users.

[BlueSoup]

Also, did anyone notice that in the scrolling text that appears while the game loads, they say that online experience is not rated by the ESRB. Could it be possible that they intend to release an online version too?

I doubt it, I bet they mean the exchange features price gouging.

I had this very wonky animation show up when the toddler was watching the cooking channel with her mom.  She sits normally for a bit, then she gets excited or something and this happens.

[Samethana]

This game reaches a whole new level of craptastic.
Whereas the change from TS1 to TS2 was awesome (better graphics, better gameplay, better interface), the change to TS3 is a major setback imho. The sims are awful (and I'm not one of those face1 type lovers), the interface sucks majorly and the entire build/buy mode is even crappier than the TS1 one.
If there was no TS2, I'd rather play TS1 than this non-game. I'm going to unpre-order immediatly and throw this piece of crap off my precious computer!

[jonas]

Well, that's just creepy as hell...

Maybe she's got special powers.  You should rename her "Stretch".  

On the other hand though, EA never ceases to amaze me with the sheer amount of bugs they have in their released games.  They are now renowned for it and still it goes unaddressed.  Completely sickening especially when they delay the game "to make improvements"  (see - "really we don't see as much of a profit in our designated quarter if we release it on our original date")

Profit schmoozing and all, they could take that time to fix these things. But they don't.

[Sigmund]

Well, that's just creepy as hell...

Maybe she's got special powers.  You should rename her "Stretch".  

On the other hand though, EA never ceases to amaze me with the sheer amount of bugs they have in their released games.  They are now renowned for it and still it goes unaddressed.  

A lot of toddlers animations seem to be glitched as hell. The first sim I played with a kid, I had her pick him up, snuggle him, teach him to walk and talk, and so on. At times, there were large gaps of space in between her and the child that obviously weren't supposed to be there. Other times, arms and legs were rammed through the other sim. 

[Menaceman]

It looks like stretchSkeleton gone wrong.

[Piffle]

The traits are neat, I admit. While I haven't played long enough to see how they individually effect a sim, I know by reading that it's mostly superficial and that they don't really change anything in the long run. You're not evil by taking a "wicked shower" or however it went (I know it was mentioned earlier?). I want evil sims to set fire to bushes, trip sims, poison someone's "blended drink". The way things are currently is rather corny and childish (hurr, I know it's a "kids" teen game), but dammit I want some evil-take-over-the-city-sims.

My test Sim has the following traits:  Friendly, Good Sense of Humor, Over-Emotional, Hopeless Romantic, and Evil.  Her Evil trait has so far surfaced in autonomously scaring her neighbor and kicking over the same neighbor's trash can.  She also "fiendishly" ate ice cream directly from the carton, but I'm not sure if that's different from how any sim Eats Quick > Ice Cream.  Clearly, we are dealing with the second coming of Hitler in this sim.  So far the only Evil want she has rolled is to donate money to undermine a charity.  Other than that, she pretty much wants to gain gardening skill and have her first kiss.

[netza]

I played it for some hours, and while I have no issues with the sims, or the gameplay, I do have some concerns regarding the graphics. I have an nvidia 8600 videocard with 512 mb memory and inspite of the fact that all settings were on high and gameplay was smooth, the textures look very blurry and pixelated, especially on close-ups. Even the sims's skins. Also, I noticed that from a normal play camera height, texture details go missing. I made a sim with red and white polka dots shoes and the dots were visible only when I viewed them in extreme close-up. I also have an issue with the dark shadows on the objects. I tried to make *white* towels but the result was more like dirty white towels. And the same thing happened with the curtains, the bedsheets, the leather couch that's also in sims2.  And the indoors lightning seems to suffer from the same drawback as the radiance lightning mod for sims2. The objects near the light source glow and appear overexposed while those a few squares away are very dark. Maybe I don't play enough games to make a reasonable comparison of what is realistically achievable in terms of technology, but I find these issues very annoying, especially when we had very beautiful clean textures in Sims2 and the lightning was good even though it was not realistic. Maybe it's an issue with my card, or maybe it's just the way the game renders objects. But if that's the case I don't think it should render objects with lower quality when you're inside the lot. It's very annoying because things seem hazy.

Just wanted to say that I have the same card and the same problem with grey textures that should be white... dunno if it's the game or the card though that does it... but I guess on the game.