THE HORROR: The REAL TS3 Scoop As It Unfolds

[Zarifeke]

I created an entirely new game and transplanted my family from my other save, and they still had all their inventory when I checked on them. On the other hand, I've heard other people saying they've lost inventory as well. Probably some kind of retarded bug -_-

[Acid_fairy]

Did anyone else notice an inventory wipe after switching house holds?

Same just happened to me, for the first time in about 10 switches. And it only happened to one sim out of a family of 4. But her guitar and song books were gone.

I also keep getting a bizarre and creepy glitch with young adult aged Bella Goth; when she's lying or sitting down, even in the bath, her body keeps almost 'jumping' into a standing up position for a second. Then she goes back to how she was. A few seconds later, she jumps up again. It's creepy and god damn irritating.

[Sigmund]

I've also noticed this inventory problem. My main sim only had one object in her inventory, but it was gone after I switched back to her household. Damn irritating, too, since it was the most expensive laptop and she has the computer whiz trait.

I was trying to figure out how to get a "romantic interest" to move in, get married, engaged... anything really besides fuck buddy.

This takes for bloody EVER. Maybe it had something to do with my Sim's traits or something, I don't know, but my Sim had the option to "try for baby" long before she had the option to "ask to be boyfriend" or whatever the option is. I was beginning to think they'd be elders by the time they got engaged.

[Insanity Prelude]

Had a bit of trouble starting at first- COMODO would do it usual "I don't recognize this program, is it safe to let it do X Y and Z?" routine, but that would for some reason lock up everything. Once I got it set to let the damn game run (but not connect to the internet!), it started up fine. Anyone else have this issue?

You guys weren't kidding about the load times- the seamless neighborhood is amazing. The interface, however, is a pain in the ass.

Why include a beach if Sims can't swim in the ocean?

Bikes are something that should have been added to The Sims a long time ago.

It needs MOAR furniture badly. More hairstyles would be nice, too. So would more clothes, but the lack of furniture and hair options hurts more.

New CAS would be great if it weren't for the whole Puddingface thing. The sliders don't seem to have a huge effect the way they did in TS2.

There's too many premades taking up the good real estate, and I'd bet deleting them's as much of a Bad Idea as it was in TS2.

If Sunset Valley is Pleasantview in the past, why didn't they name it Pleasantview?

I haven't played much yet so much as I've mucked around in CAS- more observations forthcoming, probably.

[Tacuitacitum]

Did anyone else notice an inventory wipe after switching house holds?

If Sims are able to switch jobs and breed behind your back like people are saying they are (I don't doubt, I just haven't tried this yet myself) then it might be reasonable to assume they might dump their inventory somewhere stupid, sell it or bin it and so on. That most certainly is a DNW.

Is it possible that EA will deliberately change or update the May 5th release so that saves and so on made with this release won't work with the actual release, or that "well, it's not the final game that was leaked!" ? Or is it too late for them to do that by now?

[Mootilda]

Much too late.

[Zazazu]

Thanks Blue Soup. I had read that the wants didn't stick or weren't locked when you left to play another family. I just wondered if they would pop back in again a while after returning or if they were gone for good.

The wants not sticking is not a huge deal. Usually you'll get a bunch thrown at you when you reenter the house, and since the wants are mostly stupid crap like "Ask Ann about her day" or "make the bed", they are easy to fulfill. What sucks is losing opportunities, especially if the opportunity happens to be delivering 20 high-quality produce to a store and you're almost to the point where you have the amount. Between that issue and growing up, I've never been able to complete the elementary school opportunity that involves free game tickets.

I was trying to figure out how to get a "romantic interest" to move in, get married, engaged... anything really besides fuck buddy.

This takes for bloody EVER. Maybe it had something to do with my Sim's traits or something, I don't know, but my Sim had the option to "try for baby" long before she had the option to "ask to be boyfriend" or whatever the option is. I was beginning to think they'd be elders by the time they got engaged.

I've tested with identical trait mixes and had different results. And now I'm suffering from the same thing again...Nathan really wants his first kiss with Haeju (demon spawn), and since his intended is already an adult, I figured I'd let her get a little for now. Yet even though they are best friends, even though I've done every romantic action at least twice, no kiss options have appeared and they are still just best friends.

Curtains are a mess. Many of them cut through windows. All windows.

Oh, and BFFs are back.

[Honeywell]

Did anyone else notice an inventory wipe after switching house holds?

Same just happened to me, for the first time in about 10 switches. And it only happened to one sim out of a family of 4. But her guitar and song books were gone. <snip>

Ok, so I guess it's a bug instead of a feature.  Do you think if EA tried really hard they could come up with a bug that would piss off people more?  I was just checking the game out so I wasn't really invested in my progress but if I was playing "for real" and actually paid money for the game I'd be screaming pretty loud about now.  

[madamejeanie]

MJ Chun confirmed that many of the characters in the ads will not be in the game.  Apparently she wasn't too happy about it either.

Interview here: http://sims3nieuws.blogspot.com/2009/05/sims-3-nieuws-exclusive-interview-with.html
[/quote]

I see that the game is set up to do auto-saves during gameplay.  This worries me.  I sometimes get up and walk away from my game for an hour or two.  I almost always pause the game when I do that, but there have been times when I forgot to or was called away too suddenly to do so.  If that happens while playing Sims 3, a great deal of irreparable damage might take place while I'm not in control and the old stand-by option of "quit without saving" won't apply.

BTW, I've been trying to download this for two days now and I have less than a third of it downloaded.  I'm about to just give up.  BitTorrent slows my entire network down to a crawl while it's running.  The kids are starting to complain.  LOL

[Sammy]

So, after 40 hours and something minutes I finally finished torrenting the game. Installed without a problem and the game neither crashed nor caused my laptop to explode/catch fire while running it.

The first thing I did was create a family. I'm not nearly as impressed as a lot of people seem to be about the CAS. The sims are butt ugly and no matter what I did I couldn't change the overall appearance of my sims very much. The "advanced" controls were rather pointless. They're more basic and there is very little you can change. I find it's a huge step back from Body Shop. The sims heads are strangely large, as well.

The weight slider was neat, though setting it to the skinniest point  didn't seem very skinny at all. I was expecting some walking skeletons. :/ All the sims seem short and stocky.

The clothing meshes weren't so bad, though I'm not sure how I feel about choosing patterns and colours. It seems like a giant pain in the ass to me. It might be that it was just overwhelming at the time and figuring out how to save specific choices as "custom content" will probably help, but I'm rather disgruntled at the moment.

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.

I tried following the tutorial, but got bored rather quickly. "Blah, blah, yes I know how to buy a couch. Jobs, blah, blah, blah." I might going through it again if it has any useful stuff... maybe.

I think the idea of an open neighbourhood is good in concept, but in reality it... really pisses off people like me who need to keep a eye on the entire area so sims aren't doing what I don't want them to do. The buildings and scenery are amazing, I admit. I don't know how I feel about sims disappearing into buildings. Sure, it gives the sims more options (like going to a concert), but I feels more like a game, like Pes said, and not a toy. While I have told my sim to go to a concert, I can't follow them and tell them to throw their bra on stage keep the story I have going in my head. It's like running into a wall.

Speaking of stories, I don't like how we're pretty much forced into playing along with Eaxis "storyline". My neighbourhoods are rarely "normal". In TS2 I have a zombie apocalypse hood (zombie apocalyse in TS3, by the way, would be very exciting), a sort of gloomy, dictatorial vibe, Stepford-Wife-ish background, etc. With townies doing whatever the hell they want I can't give my neighourhood any theme of my choosing.

I do like how the sims have personalities now, from their traits. One sim was walking down the street, shouting and being rather obnoxious while another ditzy teenager with huge earings easily grew bored of listening to my sim squee over her new house. But like I said, it's rather superficial.

Decorating houses is going to become very tedious now, me thinks. I love how we have the option of changing little details, but only to a point. Just like in CAS, it feels like a pain in the ass. I haven't quite figured out how to save a specific design as a whole instead of just a certain pattern combination, but once I do, hopefully I'll feel differently.

I've noticed that a lot of furniture seems to have been taken directly from TS2 and recycled, but what else is new? This displeased me. I also noticed, as I was poking through the usual assortment of ugly window coverings, that windows actually bleed through.



I tried a bunch of different window coverings, but the same thing happened to all of them. I didn't try different windows, but I can only assume, this is Eaxis afterall, that it's the same for all of them.

Soon after the window covering incident I saved and exited.

[DansGirl]

N00b here.... Although I have been following this topic religiously for the past few days.  

I just wanted to contribute my seemingly normal-near enough good looking sim for you to see :



Also I dont know if this actually means anything but for some unknown reason I was nosing around in the Sims 3 files and I found something that said DevTest. [Prepares to be made into N00b pie] I wondered if that meant this was the developers version or not. I have no knowledge of anything too technical but thought I'd air my findings.

[VeilSethekk]

In addition to the "bug/feature" fishing out of swimming pools, I managed to run into this interesting act of EAxis stupidity:



YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!

[SimKat]

Now that's classic and hilarious.

[Pyrobon]

Well, i've enjoyed the game a lot. My main complaint is sleeping takes a LOT of time, and it doesn't speed up much when going into Speed 3. Anyone having the same issue?

[Inge]

That's probably why they put the enforced sleeps into SimSocial, to get us used to the idea.

[BlueSoup]

I wonder if I've discovered another bug, this time of the cheaty variety:



I canceled the action of writing his novel at the same moment he was to move up a skill level, and it went up two levels instead.

[tessieroo]

That's probably why they put the enforced sleeps into SimSocial, to get us used to the idea.

Along those lines, I'm also hearing that the needs aren't that easily met in order to leave you free to do other stuff. (skills, friends, etc) Didn't EAxis say we wouldn't have to concentrate so much on basic needs this time around? So another FAIL.  

[VeilSethekk]

Along those lines, I'm also hearing that the needs aren't that easily met in order to leave you free to do other stuff. (skills, friends, etc) Didn't EAxis say we wouldn't have to concentrate so much on basic needs this time around? So another FAIL.  

I'm thinking that's why they made the No-bladder and No-hygiene things as rewards, possibly to ease off the needs pressure. The fact that there's no Need rejuvenator thingy like in TS2 doesn't help either.

[discrete]

 

I can't stand the uglyness. I've spent two hours in CAST to create a decent looking sim and I failed hard.
The so-called advanced sliders are fail especially in the eyes and lips departments. TS2 Bodyshop is way better.
I couldn't give almond shaped eyes and full lips to my sim.

I played for a few hours but TS3 didn't impress too much.
Sims are ugly and it's difficult for me to play if I can't stand the sims of the neighborhood.

[Zarifeke]

The REALLY bad one is energy. It seems to go down relatively fast, and take a long time to sleep to get it all back. It's a little better with the best bed, but with money being a lot tighter than normal, it takes at least some time to get one. Also I don't think there's a lifetime reward that touches energy, of course.

On the other hand, hunger is SPEEDY. Basically one decent meal fills you from empty to full, and they eat it fast. This could be offset by the fact that cooking takes a loooong time sometimes, though.

[vcpink]

If you want to play the game without those pesky little "motives" do this:
1. ctrl-shift-c
2. testingcheatsenabled true
3. Enter
4. Shift-click on mailbox
5. Make All Happy
6a. Repeat 4-5 as needed, or;
6b. Shift-click on mailbox
7. Make Needs Static

Done, no more pesky "motives" to hinder you. Have fun.

[Sigmund]

If you want to play the game without those pesky little "motives" do this:
1. ctrl-shift-c
2. testingcheatsenabled true
3. Enter
4. Shift-click on mailbox
5. Make All Happy
6a. Repeat 4-5 as needed, or;
6b. Shift-click on mailbox
7. Make Needs Static

Done, no more pesky "motives" to hinder you. Have fun.

Alternatively, you can click and drag on the needs bars when above cheat is enabled, just like TS2. I find it more convenient if, say, I don't want my sim to pass out from exhaustion yet, but don't want to keep refreshing all of the motives for everyone.

Edited because I can't type.

[FourCats]

Do not run. Ever. I set up my shortcut to go straight to the cracked exe, bypassing launcher.

Sorry if I sound stupid but how do you do that, I have just been turning off my wifi before I launch the game, but if there is another way please let me know.

Left-click the desktop shortcut, select Properties.  Edit the Target path to go to TS3.exe instead of the launcherwhatever.exe.  Apply. Save. Voila.

My preferred way is to go directly to the cracked exe, and right click drag it to my desktop and choose short cut.  Then I move it to my tool bar.

[nanacake]

So many people watching this thread! But not enough? I do hope word of mouth wins vs the L&P that EA has/will continue placing out over the tubes. It seems like TS3 ads have panned all over the websites I visit in the last week or so. Regardless, unless I can convince my beau I can has torrent....
"5GB! And then you have to move your downloads over too?"
"What downloads?! There is no custom content ....yet."
"LIES!" *fingers in ears*

*sigh*
Don't think I'll be trying it soon. Needs more coaxing. I just can't be that cruel to send my iMac to it's grave yet, at least not until a proper backup is made. Did Rohina get it to work on mac?
Also judging from the chair bug, I guess no one will be making custom chairs. lol

[Acid_fairy]

Ha, my sim who was following the 'evil' path of the criminal career track just got arrested. There are even options for how you should spend your time in jail, as if you were at work. Made me lol.