THE HORROR: The REAL TS3 Scoop As It Unfolds

[Inge]

Finally being able to have matching wood grains! About friggin' time.

...apart from on the bloody staircases!!     Looks like I will be making mainly bungalows till that is fixed.

[Kaneriz]

Does anyone know how to use the Death Flower?  I have several in my sims inventory but can't figure it out- I assume it's to bring a ghost back to 'life', but I can't find an option.  

Didn't they say the death flower let you beg for your life when you die?  You just keep it in the inventory until it happens.
To make playable ghosts I think it is that Oh My Ghost! opportunity from the science center.
I did not try to verify either though.

I have a playable ghost, and yes I made it through the science center. But now, the ghost won´t die. testingcheatsenabled won´t kill the sim or age him. The ghost is really old and I'm tired of it.

[Lorelei]

Whether you enjoy the game or not relies mostly on whether you were hoping for a better open-ended toy than TS2, with the best features of TS2 ported intact, or destined to be ported in future EPs.

TS3 is a goal-oriented game that forces you to play The One Fambly. If I understand correctly, you can "save as" your One Fambly Household, go mess with another family, and then unfreeze The One Fambly without penalty. Each different One Fambly you choose to create and pilot around makes its own bubbleverse. You can't play, like in TS2, one family and then go directly to family B and expect them to have not done something stupid or fatal or irritating, like get fat/thin, lose jobs, buy stupid crap, move / die, marry, or have a litter of pinto-bean sproglets.

You can take pains to fight the fat puddingy defaults in CAS3, make a passel of Sims, seed them into the low-rent properties available for the dirt poor noob Sims, and interact with them, but you can only control one family. So if you wanted a MATY hood, you'd be out of luck. Even if all MATY Sims could magically fit on one lot, which they can't, then you'd be out of separate homebases. Say you want to make The Butthaus and The Peebase. Butthaus denizens will only do as you command when they are The One Fambly. Peebase will have Sims being independently stupid, no matter how you set your free will toggler. Pees will be dying, losing jobs, divorcing and marrying, get stuff repossesed, burning down their kitchens, staring into space, and generally being dumb Sims. If you get the Butts toeing the line and on track and save your game, and swop to the Peebase, nothing you did in Butthaus registers at Peebase, and now the Butts are off being stupid Sims. The two bubbleverses do not dovetail or overlap.

The objects, hairs, outfits, etc. are severely limited. It is probably because EA hoped to sell us stuff for $20 a set.

Once you meet the goals a few times in the game, it gets boring. While the collecting is entertaining, briefly, now, it isn't going to stay that way.

The ability to customize almost all objects / outfits / hairs is very good. No more mismatched Maxis fug. The selection of objects that can't be customized, however, is puzzling. Other items defy matching, such as kitchen appliances. Most of the default patterns aren't bad.

There are some shortcuts, if you poke about. Say Sim A wants watermelon. Sim B, same household, can haz. But Sim A is at the spa, and Sim B is at work. You can, as Simdeity, go to the household, click to open the fridge, drag the melon in there from Sim B's inventory, then select Sim A, open fridge, drag the melon to A's inventory. Thus A and B can exchange food while being in two different places. I assume this sort of thing is limited to stuff that fits in personal inventories. I assume A can find a rock, you as Simdeity can go to their homebase, drag it onto a surface or floor, then have B pick it up or drag it into B's inventory.

Birthday cake can't go in  the fridge. If you were hoping to haz some caek, forget it; unless you use it right away and deal with the aging up side effect, you wind up with a Sim bitching about soiled food in their Hammerspace / inventory. I don't know if it works only as caek if aging is set to off. Somehow I doubt it.

Being able to wander hood-wide is great. Being able to invite yourself inside other Sims' homes is great. The limitations (no showering, getting booted out at 3am, etc) can probably be hacked eventually.

You can buy books your Sim isn't leveled up enough to use, notably, recipes. AFAIK, they vanish. You waste your money.

If your Sim gets a craving, I haven't figured out how you can buy that food item at a rabbithole restaurant. I suspect you have to read / take classes / figure out ingredient lists for these items and make them at home.

I suspect that making a building you made into a community lot turns it into a shell / rabbithole, but haven't tried it yet. I'm not sure why you'd bother, unless there is a way to make an alternate set of businesses. Since they are rabbitholes, I'm not sure what the point of that would be. If it just makes it non-residential and little else, IDGI. Perhaps someone else can speak to that.

I miss being able to hire a gardener! It is not exciting, after the first time or two, to see your Sim gardening. It is even less interesting to watch them read.

The maid continues to be mostly useless. Stupid newspapers!

Room dividers are useless for anything but colour-filling floor tiles, AFAICT.

Some of the EAxian houses / lots that you can put into the 'hood are really nicely designed. Kudos to whichever poor overworked EA drone made them. Lighting / water effects are decent. I've seen a LOT worse.

Genetics takes a giant step backwards from TS2. You are almost guaranteed a fugly babby and thus fugly future generations. Skin tones are not blended; all genetics is a coin toss affair. Babbys will get unmodified traits from both parents, at random. "Dyed" hair gets passsed down. If you want to try to outguess the gene blender, make your mating Sims look almost alike. If A has red / auburn / gold / orange hair selected, make sure B has the exact same thing. If A has black / dark brown / light brown / pink and B has brown / dark blonde / blue / light blonde, you will possibly get a kid with Spin-Art-coloured hair. I believe Zaza already posted pix of her Rainbow Brite-headed boy Sim.

Even thin-faced Sims get a weird double chin effect.

Some traits are great, especially skills-based traits. Some traits handicap your Sims instead of help them, though, which means that, for efficiency's sake, you will probably eventually choose traits that make skillinating (or meeting new people, or whatever) less of a pain in the ass.

Wishes and moodlets are both clever.

Job opportunities are a step up from chance cards, though I did get an occasional chance card-like decision pop-up.

It is visually attractive and loads quickly. Build / Buy will frustrate and please in equal measure. In build, the controls are overly burdened with useless sparkly crap. In buy, some items show up only in category menus but not in room-related menus and v. versa. If you know some item "belongs" outside, but is also a decor item, you might find it in one or the other location but only sometimes in both.

There are more "slots" on surfaces, and the 45-degree angle rotation and usable diagonal walls are GREAT.

Cars are a step WAY down from TS2. I don't know why they bothered. Often, my Sims will not even bother to use their cars when they are setting off from home. I got two Sims two cars, and they walked or hailed taxis anyway.

There are few "macro"-like commands, as expected. For example, there is no "recycle all" option for old newspapers, so your Sim will trek back and forth and you must direct it to clean each paper separately. On the other hand, "harvest" and "tend garden" seem to push Sims to harvest or tend all plants nearby.

EA basically ignored what made TS1 and TS2 wildly successful and personal to each player. TS2 was more of a toolbox for independent play ideas. TS3 forces goal-oriented / single household play, has designed the code to be difficult to mod (unless you are a programmer type), has forced mini-games on the player (the mandatory book-reading / collecting stuff/ boring skillinating), and forces fugly Townies on you that you cannot easily burninate, drowninate, or mutilate (many of which will call your Sims with whiny "WRY U NO CALL MEH? U BAD FWEND!" messages if you don't waste time dealing with thier F-liness all the time).

With TS3, you are forced to play how EA thinks you should play, and meet their goals, and so on. As a supplement to TS2 (like the Castaway Stories, or the console version, or Sims Wii), it is fine, and the designers of the visuals are to be praised. TS2 remains superior in terms of making the game yours, personally, and telling stories with multiple households, and designing Sim characters. EA adding more 'hoods won't fix the basic problem, here. It's more like Sims 2.25 or something than Sims 3.

In many ways, TS3 feels like a precursor to TS2 (something the designers may have picked up on, as the 'hood is supposedly a "prequel" 'hood to TS2's Pleasantville), even if you are comparing base game to base game. TS2's handling of genetics is far superior. TS3's handling of object custom design tools and colour wheels is superior to TS2's (think of all the permutations of Maxis Match items and multiple items / recolours for objects, or just how many different eye colour / design files there were) EXCEPT when designing Sims. You can make "monsters" in TS2, or simply design realistically-proportioned faces, for the most part. In TS3, even the thinnest face is still puddling-y and pudgy, and there are serious clipping problems with the fugly hair and with fat Sims holding things.

The fact that there ARE fat Sims is a bonus.

I like that there aren't any supernatural creatures wandering about (except ghosts). If your style is more realistic, the basic set-up of TS3 works with that. The ghosts are more like translucent Sims than ghosts, since they can apparently breed and wander about being just as boring as non-ghost Sims. I haven't had any Sim deaths (other than random people I don't recall my Sims meeting!), but other people have apparently been perplexed about what to do with tombstones, etc.

I like some of the subtle humour, which was always a highlight of EAxean SIms games. Nec and I both have wandering gnome statues. Hers is still on her lot, doing creepy and funny things. Mine apparently wandered off-lot and vanished. (Boo!)  I also like it that the peeing obsession has simmered down. I had a pregnant Sim yarf (and it was green, not blue, hooray), but not one has peed anywhere but in a terlet (that I know of).

I understand why we aren't allowed to follow Sims into their jobs, but am rather sad, too. Since there are various scenarios your Sim can choose, they COULD have scripted each scenario with random Sims playing co-workers / boss, and designed interiors. it would require vastly more power and time, though, and I suspect that after the first few dozen views, it would get boring anyway. I didn't like the cut scenes in TS2 much.

Tutorials answer a lot of questions I don't need help with, but do not answer a lot of things that would benefit from a step-by-step pro and con breakdown in a tute (such as how to switch from Fambly A and Fambly B, how to move with and without your stuff, pros and cons of various settings in Options).

As already noted, stopping Story Progression does not stop non-One Fambly families from going about their business of being stupid and Simly and moving away / dying / breeding / having babies suddenly appear out of nowhere with no explanation. The memory system was buggy in TS2, but at least you could peek in and get an idea of what happened to that Sim, and with whom, where. In TS3, you have to keep all those events in your user-edited bio or just remember them.

I'm not sure what function the "fave clour" serves, though apparently "fave food" gets a happy reaction from the Sim, and I assume that "fave music" is the same, though I did not note any increased enthusiasm from my Sim.

Stuff still breaks for no apparent reason in your house, not from misuse or overuse. It breaks ONLY so your Sim has to fix or replace it, and thus make the tinkering / handyperson skillination useful. PROTIP: it is less of a pain in the ass to just go into build/buy and replace it. SRSly. Unless you like the idea of a Sim you may actually like getting electrocuted while fixing a cheap appliance, which, of course, you might. You may also get an opportunity to go WAY outside your Sim's chosen job description or skillset, like my journalist / non-tinkering / non-cooking-skilled Sim did: she was asked to fix a restaurant's plumbing. WOT?

The lack of loading screens between destinations is great; props for that. Occasionally I'll move too quickly for my laptop to keep up with, and I'll see blank grey meshes take on their specific colours, or have things like watering cans pop into Sims' hands belatedly, but those are minor quibbles, and well worth not having to get up and get a drink while a non-homebase destination loads up. How will EA handle getting from 'hood A (the default) and other rumoured 'hoods we can add? Will The One Fambly be able to use a "travel" rabbithole to get from A to B, or will THAT mean loading screens? Will stuff done in 'hood B carry back over into hood 'A? If The One Fambly members meet mates or accept jobs in 'hood B, will they still have them when back in 'hood A? It will be interesting to see what happens.

Bottom line: It isn't open-ended like TS2. If you don't mind being forced to play legacy-style, and re more into designing and building, or if you are a casual player who won't be likely to tire of the mini-games, it is not a bad game, though NOT worth $50. If EA had chosen to promote this as a Simverse goal-like game, rather than as a successor to TS2, I suspect we'd be less RAEG-filled.  Play it as a supplement, not as a game that takes what we actually LIKED and WANTED in TS2 and ignores that in favour of selling content online in the EA Store, "shinies" we honestly don't need, mini-games and rabbit-hole community lots, etc. TS3 makes it difficult to form an attachment to a single family, if you want to explore all the different traits / careers / etc. TS2 allowed players to make as many different "worlds" and "families" as they could think up (and their machines could run)...you could have a Sci Fi 'hood, a Victorian 'hood, a 'hood that included the mystical creatures, a 'hood that was free of werewolves and plant people and so on (beyond the defaults, which could be kept away with hacks and mods if you wanted), a 'hood that had both Sims and buildings YOU designed and liked, and so on.

[BlueSoup]

You can buy books your Sim isn't leveled up enough to use, notably, recipes. AFAIK, they vanish. You waste your money.

Nah, they just won't show up in the reading list until they're at the proper level to learn the recipe.  Then they're back in the menu for reading material.

If your Sim gets a craving, I haven't figured out how you can buy that food item at a rabbithole restaurant. I suspect you have to read / take classes / figure out ingredient lists for these items and make them at home.

You can click for them to go shopping at the grocery store, and then shop by recipe for whatever they want to eat.

There are few "macro"-like commands, as expected. For example, there is no "recycle all" option for old newspapers, so your Sim will trek back and forth and you must direct it to cleam each paper separately. On the other hand, "harvest" and "tend garden" seem to push Sims to harvest or tend all plants nearby.

For recycling and garbage I tend to just grab them and drag them to the trash can in live mode.  I don't bother directing my Sims to throw them out anymore.  Harvest, tend garden, weed and water garden are all macro-type commands and they'll keep going until every plant on the lot is done.  If they need to go to the bathroom or eat badly while this is happening, that action will insert itself into the queue, then they'll go back to it.

[LurkieMoar]

Thank you for the analysis.  As one who has not yet downloaded the game, I find the discussions here intensely interesting, and this snippet in particular :

With TS3, you are forced to play how EA thinks you should play, and meet their goals, and so on. As a supplement to TS2, it is fine, and the designers of the visuals are to be praised. TS2 remains superior in terms of making the game yours, personally, and telling stories with multiple households, and designing Sim characters. EA adding more 'hoods won't fix the basic problem, here.

<snip>

Bottom line: It isn't open-ended like TS2. If you don't mind being forced to play legacy-style, and re more into designing and building, or if you are a casual player who won't be likely to tire of the mini-games, it is not a bad game, though NOT worth $50.

<snip>

is going to help me to decide whether to bother with the new shiny game or not.  I don't like to be forced into playing an open-ended game such as The Sims in one particular way so, unless the final release fixes the above gameplay issue, EAXis is going to have to do without the cash from people such as I.

[Lorelei]

You can buy books your Sim isn't leveled up enough to use, notably, recipes. AFAIK, they vanish. You waste your money.

Nah, they just won't show up in the reading list until they're at the proper level to learn the recipe.  Then they're back in the menu for reading material.

If your Sim gets a craving, I haven't figured out how you can buy that food item at a rabbithole restaurant. I suspect you have to read / take classes / figure out ingredient lists for these items and make them at home.

You can click for them to go shopping at the grocery store, and then shop by recipe for whatever they want to eat.

There are few "macro"-like commands, as expected. For example, there is no "recycle all" option for old newspapers, so your Sim will trek back and forth and you must direct it to cleam each paper separately. On the other hand, "harvest" and "tend garden" seem to push Sims to harvest or tend all plants nearby.

For recycling and garbage I tend to just grab them and drag them to the trash can in live mode.  I don't bother directing my Sims to throw them out anymore.  Harvest, tend garden, weed and water garden are all macro-type commands and they'll keep going until every plant on the lot is done.  If they need to go to the bathroom or eat badly while this is happening, that action will insert itself into the queue, then they'll go back to it.

Thanks for the corrections. It's less frustrating to know that I didn't waste my cash buying them originally, though I did "motherlode" and buy them again to see if they'd go away again. I will probably end up with two copies. Can Sims use the same books, or does each Sim need his/her own books?

I did see recipes in the grocery store, but, of course, my Sim was not cooking-skilled enough to see the recipes for or make the food she craved yet. That does make a weird kind of sense, now.

I suppose I need "moveobjects on" to drag and drop in live mode.

[BlueSoup]

You'll end up with two copies, but each Sim needs their own copy since immediately after learning the recipe the book vanishes.

I don't think you need moveobjects on, but I'm not positive on that since I usually have it on.  I think it's a default state though.

ETA: I actually forgot that in the skills journal under cooking, each recipe they've learned will show the ingredients necessary as well.

[Inge]

You'll end up with two copies, but each Sim needs their own copy since immediately after learning the recipe the book vanishes.

That seems silly and unrealistic.  They should be able to put it on the shelves or give to another sim.   Only if they borrowed it from the lending library should it vanish after use.

[BlueSoup]

That seems silly and unrealistic.  They should be able to put it on the shelves or give to another sim.   Only if they borrowed it from the lending library should it vanish after use.

Then I guess we can hope for a hack from you to correct this?    Library books indeed never make it into their inventory.

[GayJohnScarritt]

Save yourself up 40,000 Life Points and buy the Collection Finder thing, or what ever it is.. you can then see all the seeds on the map... so yeah its hit-and-miss.

Yep, my starting sim grabbed that after her LTW was fullfilled, and thank goodness it's transferable to other sims.

I suppose I need "moveobjects on" to drag and drop in live mode.

Nope, you can just grab/drop papers/plates over to the road-side trash can, no cheats needed.  The can will light up when the object is in the right place (like the fridge lights up when putting food/harvestables in).

[J. M. Pescado]

Recipe Books as magic scrolls is something that is targeted for termination. I doubt Inge would want to do that, being that Inge doesn't want to touch MSIL, plus the rules on Monolith Blobs and all, you know.

[DaSpecialone]

After playing a bit today, my top annoyance is sims who insist on going to bed at night, whether they are tired or not. My guy wanted to go fishing before 6am, so I cheated his energy and kept him up, and then at 4am, he went to bed instead of going fishing. WTF, dude. He was about 90% of full energy at the time.

How in the world did you extend his energy?

[Inge]

I didn't say I didn't want to touch that scripting per se, but I do have a strong feeling that I don't want to reengage in the hassle I had in sims 2 where virtually everything either of us made clashed with something the other made and I constantly had to field support questions about compatibility.  I can see myself sticking to standalone hacked objects, if I do anything at all.  Maybe it is possible to make a permanent recipe book as an alternative to the disappearing ones.

[rufio]

I have insomnia tonight, so I played around a bit with social interactions.

Platonic social interactions are Win.  I like the ability to talk about things that actually have contextual relevance - my sim was gardening, and had options to talk/boast about gardening; she determined that the other person was a Natural Cook, and gained options to talk about cooking; she discovered that the other person was a snob and had the option to mock them for it; a toddler started crying, and she gained the option to complain about it.  Furthermore, since the conversation is now governed by the state of the other person, it's no longer a matter of repeating Social Interaction X Y times to achieve efficient gain in friendship points - that was what made autosoc in TS2 necessary, because social interaction had become another mindless skilling game.  Now you actually have to keep track of where the conversation is and react logically, and ease it into certain directions; you have to keep track of what you know about the other person, too.  I stopped directing the conversation for a bit, and the message turned into "Sim X sees that Sim Y is bored," followed by some interactions initiated by Sim X.  Plus, there are all these fun moodlets that pop up over the course of the conversation that make it that much more realistic.  Having my sim make friends was actually my favorite experience with TS3, so far.

Romantic interactions are Fail.  Maybe it's just that TS3 lacks chemistry, or something, but basically you can just walk up to anyone, doesn't even matter if you've only just met, and be married by the end of the night.  I did kind of like the idea that you have to build up to more advanced options gradually, for the same reason that I like the fact that you have to direct conversations to particular places, but since there's no "long-term" relationship status to stop the higher interactions from working, it doesn't wind up mattering very much.  Actually, I think this would be a good thing if it were an open-ended game - you can then choose whatever mates you want for all of your sims - but since you can't control everyone it just works out to all of your sims ultimately falling in love and having spawn by whoever the first person they meet is.  And to be honest, wooing these fugly playdough sims is just not very interesting, especially when they just seem to be cloning themselves anyway.  I really wouldn't mind if sims fell in love and woohooed and had babies on their own as long as it actually made some fucking sense.

My enjoyment of these games is dependent on my being able to write some kind of story about them in my head, and when stuff happens for no logical reason it doesn't work, and I can't bring myself to think of the game-generated sims as real people anyway.  I didn't think the mere fugliness would be enough to turn me off of TS3, but I'm beginning to rethink that now.

Also, is there a way to make sims selectable via testingcheats and then make them unselectable again?  I see that with shift+click you can add them to The One Family, but there doesn't seem to be a way to un-add them afterwards (except, presumably, by switching families and then adding them to The One Family again).

[Madame Mim]

I just got an offer to pre-order the game - http://static.jp.eaplay.com/email/sims3/au/?email_view=637 - the great bonus being a liquid filled Sims mouse mat - yehaw!!!!  

What really got me is that although the prices listed stay the same as I've previously been quoted (just under AU$100 for the standard game, just over for the collectors edition) there's a little add on the main page that says I could have it for AU$19.95 if I trade in any two games from their acceptable games list - none of which are PC versions, or, really, games I'd expect most Sims players to play (although I did only give the list a quick glance when I realised there were no PC games).

[Inge]

Romantic interactions are Fail.  Maybe it's just that TS3 lacks chemistry, or something, but basically you can just walk up to anyone, doesn't even matter if you've only just met, and be married by the end of the night.  I did kind of like the idea that you have to build up to more advanced options gradually, for the same reason that I like the fact that you have to direct conversations to particular places, but since there's no "long-term" relationship status to stop the higher interactions from working, it doesn't wind up mattering very much.  

But could this be another thing that is trait-based?  Maybe some sims are happy to marry someone they just met while other sims would expect to know them for a while first?

[Lorelei]

After playing a bit today, my top annoyance is sims who insist on going to bed at night, whether they are tired or not. My guy wanted to go fishing before 6am, so I cheated his energy and kept him up, and then at 4am, he went to bed instead of going fishing. WTF, dude. He was about 90% of full energy at the time.

How in the world did you extend his energy?

Shift-cntl-C (IIRC), 'testingcheatsenabled true', drag energy bar manually with mouse...at least, that's my guess.

[rufio]

But could this be another thing that is trait-based?  Maybe some sims are happy to marry someone they just met while other sims would expect to know them for a while first?

I don't think so - there were no trait-specific interactions in the Romantic menu, and the sim I did this with was Evil/Ambitious/Lucky/Excitable/Athletic.  No romantic traits at all.  She wasn't after him for his money either, because he wasn't rich.  Basically, all you have to do is keep doing a variety of different romantic socials until you get to the "very alluring" stage and then you start getting the "go steady" and then "get married" options.  Once you've figured out how the directed platonic socials work you don't even have to think about it.

[Roflganger]

Appreciate: That you can customize a face and then choose feature archetypes without totally fuglifying the Sim.  In TS2, once you'd made adjustments, picking a nose archetype would put the nose in all kinds of hideous positions, seemingly relative to whatever face archetype you originally chose.  

Hate: Crappy textures.  All clothing looks like it's made of leather, and against-the-skin clothing like wifebeaters look absolutely hideous.  The latter might be due to my less than awesome card (7600) but blah, the textures are not very winful.

[rufio]

It ultimately does not matter though, since there is no guarantee that the sims you spend so much time making in CAS are not just going to skip town and be replaced by random pudding-face townies.

[Mr. Snooley]

I agree with rufio 100%, and ultimately that "feature" makes this game unplayable.

Ah well, only 1 more week until I can smack trashcans off the road from my own made Sims, instead of some ugly crackheads wich have adopted 6 Alien Toddler Larva's.

[kazebird]

Whoever thought the moving 'feature' was a good idea was an absolute moron! Worst of all, even though minor code changes are possible, it looks like we may be stuck with this 'feature'.

Oh well...

If anyone needs me, I'll be playing TS2, making a new family. I'm thinking of him living in the forest with nothing but a fridge, two walls, a roof, and a garden plot.

[Ryslin]

I am curious to see if the male voice 1 grumble stays in the game on launch.

It is distinctly cussing right now. Won't that get some knickers in a twist.

[phyllis_p]

I've now married off the three children of my founding couple, and said founding couple has bitten the dust.  The guy died at 90, but the woman hung on until 98.  I'm not sure if it was because she lived a good life, or if they were just giving her a little more time to meet her lifetime goal, which she finally did a couple of days before passing on.

I've been watching the homes of the three children -- Grant, Moira, and Angelica -- with interest.

Grant and wife Felicia stayed in the founding home.  Felicia has no mother in her family tree, just a father and a brother.  Since her marriage, her father has "acquired" another son, which was announced in the paper and verified in the family tree.  However, in the paper it said "mother and child are sleeping well," as it always does.

When I moved Moira and Angelica into their husband's homes, I noticed a number of other people living there and was curious about who they might be.  I used the "save as" option to save the neighborhood under a different name, and went into the saved copy to investigate -- did not want to lose progress with my primary family.  Moira's husband had an unrelated young adult male living there, who apparently was only an acquaintance of her husband's.  Angelica's husband had his father living there, plus another man with his teen son who were also mere acquaintances.  This says to me that the game sticks random people into households rather than finding them their own places to live.  Not sure why they'd do that -- maybe it's to help these other Sims make friends etc.  

Anyway, after determining who these people were, I went back to my original neighborhood (and threw out the saved one) and used edit town to evict these barely-known people.  When you do that, you get the option to merge them with another family, move them into their own place, or trash them.  I've been watching Angelica's and Moira's houses since then.  No spawn yet, and no strangers have moved in.  Grant still has good relationships with his sisters, and Felicia gets the want to hang with her father sometimes.  She has a relationship with her eldest brother, but not with the newborn over there.

Oh, also, I've been keeping an eye on Mortimer and Bella.  They are both elders now and never married.  Mortimer lives alone.  Bella still lives with her brother, Michael.  I would see Mortimer and Bella interacting playfully in town sometimes, but I guess if a player wants them married, they have to play that family or keep their fingers crossed.  Just an interesting observation.

[timelycorruption]

From Wikipedia:

EA later commented the leak was a "buggy, pre-final" version. EA claims that more than half of the game is missing and is susceptible to crashes or worse.

Of course it is, EA made it.
Reading this thread, it sounds like the cracked out Sim City player's answer to "How many buttons can you have in one game?"

you get the option to merge them with another family, move them into their own place, or trash them.

Is it okay to trash people in Sims 3, or would no one know yet?