OK, so why would I want this mess?

[mibsywibsy]

Having been invited, oh so politely, to fuck off and die on N99 for not joining in the cheering section for Sims 3, someone give me some reasons to not think it's a total waste of hard drive space.

Hard drive space is trivial; if this is really your concern, you probably ought to upgrade your hard drive.

That said, in my experience it's probably not worth the hassle. TS3 is essentially a stripped-down TS2 given an aesthetic makeover, but with extra bugs, and a small handful of marked improvements and shinies that you will find yourself really missing when you inevitably go back to TS2 (be it from aesthetic disgust, shitty SPT behavior, lack of hacks/non-rabbithole community lots, [X] feature, whatever). CAST is shiny, the rabbithole options/career branches/opportunities for jobs (and only jobs) are shiny, Traits are shiny, some of the new Inventory functionality is shiny, the skill challenges are shiny, unless you are a bedamned 12 the ability to have Sims with different body types is shiny... but it's all rhinestones sprinkled over a steaming pile of EAxian stupid shit. Unless you're sure that none of the shinies will have any allure for you, all that will happen is you'll find yourself playing TS2 and feeling a sense of relief, but kind of wistfully wishing you could give your 53rd Knowledge Sim with the Nature OTH some Traits, and trying in vain to find the CAST button when confronted with a Maxis item that would go perfectly in your living room, if only it was in the right color/style.

[LauraW]

I played Sims 2 since it came out..wasn't that 2001? So for 8 years!  I was also awed by the difference between Sims 2 and Sims 1 and the bugs didn't bother me because it was such a cool game!  When things were a bit boring, I could add new custom careers and make a medieval hood or a Victorian hood...or a hood in the desert or in the mountains. I could make Northern Exposure into a hood!  With Sims 3, we are stuck with the same rabbit holes and without them, I don't think you would have the careers at all. You could live off the land and off writing novels or fishing I suppose, but half the game, the careers and career opportunities would be gone.

This game is a nice casual game, but I find myself logging out every once in a while due to boredom already. With Sims 2, I would play and play and suddenly realize 4 hours had passed and the sun was coming up! I don't think I will be playing this for 8 years unless they give us more content and don't expect us to get it from the Sims Store for astronomical prices.

[seanachai]

TS2 came out in '04. I think TS1 came out in '00?

[vagabondher]

I've been trying to figure out some sort of justification why, although a LOT annoys me about this game, I don't uninstall it and go back to Sims 2 permanently. I think it's because with Sims 2, I refuse to play it without a) most or all the expansion packs and b) a vast array of mods. The Sims 2 base game is horribly boring and the Sims 3 base game falls on the same level - not in being boring, but in being frustrating - but I (perhaps naively) have hope that once we have mods galore and expansion packs to play with, we may very well be singing a different tune.

But hey, I'm probably going to be wrong and when that day comes, I'll be eating crow.

[Peggy_Leggy]

The man goes out and knocks up just whoever, and then doesn't care to visit his illegitimate love children.  He'll hook up with and impregnate mothers and daughters in the same household.  I've got a Jerry Springer-like story going on in my town, and it's been quite amusing so far.  Sims being able to impregnate townies was something I thought would be fun, but couldn't be done in Sims 2.

Ha ha, that's exactly how I'm playing one of my saved games. I have a pro athlete who knocks up women all over town. His favorite conquest so far has been Judy Bunch, an overweight, family-oriented wife and mother. He really had to work at bringing her over to the dark side.

[Scotty]

Having been invited, oh so politely, to fuck off and die on N99 for not joining in the cheering section for Sims 3, someone give me some reasons to not think it's a total waste of hard drive space.

I have gathered from this forum that:

You're stuck with balloon faced Sims.  And second generation Sims are even worse.
You're stuck with nasty dead-looking eyes.  (About 80% of my reason for thinking I'm going to hate this.  All I can think of when I look at them is a Victorian porcelain doll in a horror movie.  You know the one that tries to strangle the hero the minute s/he falls asleep.)
The Story Progression Toggle is either borked, not borked, or works for a while and then stops.
You can only run one family at any given time because the game will randomly delete them if you run any other family.  This problem is either fixed or not fixed by aforesaid SPT depending on whether it's borked on purpose or not.
Most of the game consists of chasing all over the open concept neighborhood collecting stuff which has no use in the game other than display.
Relationships are either too easy to make or too hard.  Or both at once.
All public areas are rabbitholes.
EA has given TSR some sort of perk which has allowed them to make their own content creator. (Which accounts for a good chunk of the remaining 19.56% of the reason I'm avoiding this turd.)

So. Anyone want to address the .44% that still thinks I might buy Sims 3 once the price drops to $1.98 US.

Oh, don't listen to those morons at N99. I was banned there years ago for calling Barb a fucking bitch. Most of those people over there are a bunch of sheep anyway. I have tried getting back in there a couple times, just to see whats going on, and maybe point and laugh at that group of sad sacks. But I'm still banned. But I could care less.

Anyway, if people don't like the game, that's their business. No reason for people to get their panties in a bunch just because you don't agree with them. I'm surprised N99 is still around. May they all fry in hell. I hate them even more than T$R, and that's saying something.

Sorry to derail this thread, but I see N99, and I just have to say something. :lol:

[Blaise]

Having been invited, oh so politely, to fuck off and die on N99 for not joining in the cheering section for Sims 3, someone give me some reasons to not think it's a total waste of hard drive space.

Oh, don't listen to those morons at N99. I was banned there years ago foe calling Barb a fucking bitch. Most of those people over there are a bunch of sheep anyway. I have tried getting back in there a couple times, just to see whats going on, and maybe point and laugh at that group of sad sacks. But I'm still banned. But I could care less.

Anyway, if people don't like the game, that's their business. No reason for people to get their panties in a bunch just because you don't agree with them. I'm surprised N99 is still around. May they all fry in hell. I hate them even more than T$R, and that's saying something.

Agreed. And I have not been banned at N99. But the place is full of brainless stepford wives - morons is a kind epithet for some of the N99ers. If someone called Pescado an asshole, he'd be flattered I expect.

Anyway, I can understand your desire to open discussion about this, but in the end, if you hate the game I don't think lots of mods, CC and a $1.98 price tag would sway you too much. I agree with so much of what you said, especially the creepy eyes. To me the Sims look doughy and demented.

P.S.: In the years I have watched things over there, I can assure you that Barb IS a bitch. Quite nasty under the happy, happy exterior.

[Scotty]

I actually like the game. More than I thought I would. For a long time, I was determined that I was not going to try it. I hated the look of the Sims for the most part. Then I did start playing, I thought it would be just to check it out and see what it was like. I ended up playing ALL DAY yesterday. lol. I love it now. True, there are a few things I don't like. I still think the Sims look pretty creepy. And as usual, the townies are fugly. But I chalk it up to EAxis usual ineptness when it comes to creating Sims. It looks like they so it in their sleep, stoned. I have some good looking Sims in my game, but those are made by me. I am not the greatest when it comes to making Sims, but they look better than the Maxis ones.

As for Barb, I used to be a big supporter of N99. There was a huge fight across several Sim sites, and I finally saw her true colors. Ah well, I wont get into what went on, this was years ago when Sims 1 was still in its prime. But, I'm sure she remembers me. lol.

[Lerf]

Oh, I wasn't banned on N99, and I'm still posting and hanging around the Sims 2 board, but basically I wasn't saying that Sims 3 looked like the greatest thing in the world and snarked at for it.  Barb had absolutely nothing to do with it.    The reallly funny part was when someone asked a serious question about modding I was one of the only two people on the board who knew the answer.  At this point, though,  I wouldn't go back on the Sims 3 board over there if it were the only source on the game on the internet.  However, I wouldn't miss NoCommente's postings in the Sims 2 Pictures and Videos section for anything.

I'm trying to convince my husband that it's safe to Arrr! Sims 3, but he has veto power because he's the one who will have to clean up any messes.  And I don't want him to have to deal with that because his regular job is doing computer stuff at a large university.  He doesn't, thank Ghu, have to deal with students, but staff and faculty are capable of sufficient stupidity to bring him home grumpy.  (My favorite is still the faculty member who, upon sitting down at her shiny new computer for the first time decided to free up HD space by getting rid of all the expendable files.  You know, the ones ending in .exe.  I leave the aftermath to your fertile imagination.)  And on weekends he works on the computers at his Dad's business.  It's a motorcycle dealership and repair shop.  Envision  biker employees with internet access using the computers with the inventory information, and a father who 1. keeps putting AOL back on his system though it's not necessary (AOL is a virus) and 2. will click on any popup even if it says "Get your hard drive wiping virus here in only one click!".    Now do you see why I don't want him to have to take some virus off my system when he could be out having fun planting bamboo in the backyard?

[J. M. Pescado]

But I chalk it up to EAxis usual ineptness when it comes to creating Sims. It looks like they so it in their sleep, stoned.

That is probably not that far from the truth. I mean, you're a developer. You don't have any actual stake in these sims. You mash the random button a few times and call it a day.

[Slymenstra]

Well I am not a sheep, but I find myself enjoying the Sims 3.  I have always been a player, with a side of builder.  I have never created any custom content but I have over 4 gigs of DLs for Sims 2 

I certainly agree with a lot of the things people dislike.  I am also really pissed that half the game content is for sale at the Sims Store.  I refuse to buy any of it and will gladly donate my 10 sim bucks to a worthy cause 

It's strange because I like a lot of the things people are disliking.  I like the random quests, and the collecting.  I love the entire neighborhood aging and dying.  I love the seamless neighborhood.

I miss everything that is in Sims 2; seasons, apartments, OFB, pets etc.  I dislike the random clones/births.  I  hope some of the rabbit holes one day turn into usable places.  I think they put the lighting in the game on improperly.  The lighting is so harsh and unflattering outside of CAS.

I guess it comes down to a lot of the Sims 2 is missing from the Sims 3.  Like it was created by people who have never even touched Sims 2.  I will play it...but like everything, if it gets old, move on to something else.

[J. M. Pescado]

I certainly agree with a lot of the things people dislike.  I am also really pissed that half the game content is for sale at the Sims Store.  I refuse to buy any of it and will gladly donate my 10 sim bucks to a worthy cause 

Give it to me and I'll invest the effort in figuring out how the Store works.

It's strange because I like a lot of the things people are disliking.  I like the random quests, and the collecting.  I love the entire neighborhood aging and dying.  I love the seamless neighborhood.

The random quests and collecting are optional, so no complaints there. Entire neighborhood aging and dying...mixed bag, and also optional. Seamless neighborhood...eh, it's not bad. Has its flaws, but they're not unsolveable.

I miss everything that is in Sims 2; seasons, apartments, OFB, pets etc.  I dislike the random clones/births.

Now the game messing with my sims so that I can only play one fambly? Not cool!

[Lorelei]

This game is a nice casual game, but I find myself logging out every once in a while due to boredom already. With Sims 2, I would play and play and suddenly realize 4 hours had passed and the sun was coming up! I don't think I will be playing this for 8 years unless they give us more content and don't expect us to get it from the Sims Store for astronomical prices.

Yes.

I've noticed several of us bitching about the incredibly slow "ultra" speed setting, and the fact that if you only play one or two Sims at once, you spend 75% of the game  watching a Sim do something incredibly boring, such as reading, writing on a computer, gardening, sleeping, or working inside a rabbit hole work location.

Fishing and painting are slightly less boring because the image or the fish may vary slightly, but once you have seen all the game's fish and painting images, they are about as exciting as watching water boil. Fishing is the only game activity that has a "do it until I tell you to stop or until it is done" aspect; gardening comes close, though Sims will stop Doing That before they finish tending / harvesting / watering / weeding the WHOLE GARDEN. I said DO IT. That doesn't mean do HALF of it. There is also no "fertilize many" option, which is a pain in the ass.

Let's say you get ambitious and decide to play with more than 1-2 Sims in a household. Juggling their needs is more frustrating than challenging. Getting two Sims to sit at the same table, sleep in the same bed, sit on the same sofa, etc., is an exercise in frustration. More than likely Sim A will sit in the diningroom, 25 tiles away from Sim B, who made and served a meal, who is sitting at a counter. Sims can spam up wants / wishes to Woohoo and be offering menu options to allow it, but the "you're in my way" bed dance often cancels the action out of queue. Fine. I don't want any more useless pink- or blue-cocooned larval sproglets anyway, especially if their genetics are going to be a major horror and disappointment in the end, so screw you stupid Sims and your wish to reproduce MOAR if you can't get down to it. Sometimes they will accidentally wind up on the same couch, but it has not happened by design very often.

Non-controllable Sims in your Sims' domicile will be asshats and not particularly amusing asshats. Visiting other Sims is a GREAT idea, as is the wanderable neighborhood. Don't get me wrong. I like that aspect. I like being able to swoop back and forth across the 'hood without loading screens. Visiting other Sims is also broken, at least from my perspective, as you can't take care of most of your needs while visiting.

I miss being able to buy clothes at a store, or sit in a restaurant, or go to a club / pub, or work out at a gym, or shop inside a supermarket, or....etc. Honestly, I was not aware you could go inside the library, as I got so tired of running up against  empty buildings I couldn't go inside, I stopped even trying to enter most of the others.

There are some amusing details, such as the wandering Magic Gnomes, and egg plants (not eggplants). The ability to match furniture items / design things, the CAS sliders (but not the extremely limited parameters of those sliders),  etc., are nice enough. Some of the pre-made buildings (NOT rabbit holes) aren't too bad.

There are hardly ANY content items included in the game, and it fills me with rage that EA apparently decided beforehand to strip them out and sell them individually to make a bigger buck, thus crippling the already grossly limited hair / clothing / object selections. Why are all accessories only worn on one arm / hand?

One glaring omission, since they decided to add this "collecting" aspect to the game, is a place to PUT all the crap you collect. Unless they are planning to make Simmers PAY for a collector's cabinet (that I see functioning like a fridge) or collector's shelves (big enough to either display all the different cuts or different colours of gems), or a place to put multiple bug / butterfly cages (they stack, but if you collect each one, that's a lot of bugs to stack!), or a safe / vault to put smelted ore bars into, this was a rather stupid thing to neglect. Are they going to make us pay for card tables, or the Charades game, or pianos, or easels you can actually put in your inventory and use other than in your home? (Why can't Sims set up as caricature artists in the park and make some bucks like that, if they allow buskers?) Are they going to make us pay for female outfits that aren't trampy or dowdy or both, and male outfits that have an ounce of style? Why are most of the game / entertainment toys sports-related? Foosball, football / baseball are all well and good, but there are a lot of different group activities that they could have opted to include instead. Not everyone enjoys being out IN THE SUN getting sweaty IRL, and not all Sims, esp. Couch Potatoes, are going to dig that, either. It would be nice to have the option to put mobile phone pix in an album, and if they weren't so DARK all the time. Better yet, why not a "real" camera? (To really fantasize, it would be neat if your Sims could "video" things and then "play" those videos on a DVD / VCR machine onto the TV. Home movie night! When using one video button, it could go where videos go now, for you, the player, to use. When using a Simcam, they could go in another folder, and be limited in length, and be replayable / sharable.

Another fantasy would be an auction house to get rid of the surplus of rocks, gems, paintings, etc. Sims struggling with poverty could sell off household goods, perhaps. You stand a chance of earning more or less than the default selling price or catalogue price if you auction your goods, or of the goods not selling because of a glut on the market of a particular item.

Why can't Sims sell fruits / veg / fish at home in a stand? Where did the kid lemonade stands go? Why aren't there any lemon trees? I suppose some of the things I miss will be added in an EP.)

How is the second 'hood supposed to work? Will it be a destination tacked onto the current 'hood, so you don't have to ditch your playables to explore it, since they were asshats and practically force us to play The One Fambly, or will it be a matter of "play THIS 'hood OR THAT 'hood, you can't play both with your One Fambly Sims"?

Camera / nav controls are horrible. If you try to move an object or Sim, you may find yourself zooming halfway across the 'hood without much effort.

Whereas it may not be entirely fair to compare a fully-expanded TS2 to a base game TS3, some of the choices made are illogical or maddening. On the plus side, the game is fairly stable. I stress-tested it and it ran in the background / foreground well for four days, at which point I was too bored to keep going.  Again, 75% of that was spent with the game forcing me to sit and do nothing while Sims skilled, slept, or worked, which, frankly, is BORING. Since you can't switch to a different household and deal with different family issues without risking your One Fambly going off and doing something stupid / dying / losing their jobs / spawning / moving random idiots into the household / cloning themselves / moving out of town, the boredom sets in QUICKLY.

[J. M. Pescado]

Whereas it may not be entirely fair to compare a fully-expanded TS2 to a base game TS3, some of the choices made are illogical or maddening.

I dunno, it seems fair to me. After all, TS2 was made first. TS3 is supposed to be BETTER, meaning it rightfully SHOULD have everything the PREVIOUS game did and MOAR. Selling something as "new and improved" without actually being new or improved is kind of a sham.

[anonymouscoward]

Not only that, a good game does not need CC or additions to make it a good game; A good game should only be enhanced by the aforementioned - Something is very wrong and naive about thinking otherwise.

I agree in principle and disagree in practice because while it is true that a game with bad game play and mechanics is technically speaking a waste in every sense, at the end of the day, I hate games (mind you I talk about my own opinions here purely out of a desire for self aggrandizement and not to offer an alternative example). I could not put it better than to borrow from J. M. Pescado's comment in another post about games and toys. If it is not a toy, it is not for me. If it sucks as a game but makes a great toy, I will jump on it any day.

I am the kind of gamer who doesn't even bother trying to play a game as is out of the box. The first thing I do after installing is use the cheats. The second thing I do is look for the modding tools, and the third thing I do is look for the mods. I approach any computer "game" like I used to approach Legos (back when they only had a few block shapes, for any of you youngsters here). Considering the number of main stream RPG and FPS games that come with unlimited modding tools included (some even come out with APIs and SDKs!), I think the smart (non EAxis mentality) developers understand the validity of this "play style", and many is the game that still enjoys a strong fan base due to its moddability (that's not even in the dictionary....) but was unanimously panned by critics and players alike for its out of box limitations.

I only started playing TS2 last year after the last expansion had come out when, after having grown tired of trying to brighten up and depthafy (I made that word up) a recent top rated next gen RPG (with a great modding tool), I discovered accidently and to my utter surprise and shock just how aesthetically pleasing and potentially interesting TS2 had become with all the CC and mods. I had completely written the franchise off in 2000 after taking one look at a screen shot and hardly even noticed the second installation's arrival on the scene. I almost soiled myself when I saw some of the almost photo-realistic CC sim textures and, um, er, well, some of the mods, shall we say. I became suitably addicted right away, had amassed upwards of 16,000 package files within a month, and the only reason I didn't dive into scripting myself is because of the general weirdness of the proprietary language and the fact that almost everything I needed had already been made by those such as the aforementioned personage, and finally because TS3 was coming out and that would certainly be a major leap forward wouldn't it of course. Oh yes certainly..........

er....

I have to admit I have become briefly addicted to TS3 already, and I think that that one black haired pony tailed towny girl from the theatre is actually kinda cute (the one in the poster on the outside wall, she is your band mate if you do the musician career, at least for me), so the dough-boy look doesn't bother me. I actually managed to get my very first two sims, a self and a custom designed partner, to give birth to offspring, happened to be female, that has become in the end more attractive than Mom, on whom I thought I'd done a pretty good job all things considered, admittedly after a toddler and child period marked by some serious soul searching. So unless the fundamentals of the new look completely turn you off, there is hope. And limited as they are, the few cheats currently available are enough for my budding needs, currently limited to sleep deprivation and age-transition-murder (though I find less homicide required in TS3 vs TS2 because as someone else mentioned above, at least the TS3 sims are believably ugly and dressed compared to the overall escaped-from-the-asylum look in TS2).

But everyone's comments about becoming bored after the first positive impressions started wearing off also apply to me. I think this will be temporarily mitigated by "letting go" of families that have become maximized and starting a few new families on completely different tracks. The key disappointment for the time being is that you really are forced to start with a family or group of roommates and have them work different schedules otherwise you end up with the problem mentioned by others vis a vis drooling on your keyboard at speed 3 (4) while waiting for work to end.

Now, if, as I read somewhere, it is in fact impossible to script TS3 because of the encryption, then that is basically a show stopper. I will purge the abomination from my hard drive and probably defecate on the CPU heat sink of the brand new machine I BUILT only so I would have the fastest possible rig before the game came out (I will do this with the power on, of course). However, if on the other hand, it turns out that the "encryption scare" was just that and in fact the scripting paradigm has magically become object-oriented and you only have to override a class or do some inheriting to turn Pleasantview into Nightmare on Elm Street or what have you (not my taste, just an example), then I will likely have to be physically restrained, my computer locked away, and force fed from an IV drip to avoid death by starvation and lack of sleep, if I am not first evicted from my home or stabbed by relatives.

Just my two cents anyway.

[Mire Krisma]

Has anyone tried using Numerators BaseGame Program for TS2, and just seeing how bad the difference between the two vanilla games is? All these years with expansions installed has my memory skewed.

I'm not falling for this obvious attempt to hold back content. I bought only four EPs from TS2 ( the good ones ), and saw straight through the bullshit when it came to the Stuff packs. This is shameless swindling, but you can't expect less from EA these days. I could have arr'd all of it, but something in me still wants to hold EAxis with some respect.

[J. M. Pescado]

I LOVE Bartle and I think maybe you have something here. Sims 2 appealed to a variety of people on the hierarchy, maybe killers a little less than the others. Sims 3 appeals to the achievers most of all I think, maybe a bit to the explorers although once you have collected umteen rocks and seeds, it gets a bit boring. I have taken the quiz in the past and am a socializer, which is probably why I enjoyed Nightlife the best and the lightbolt attractions. The chat nests are very nice but again, its all the same thing. Building a romance is so easy and so predictable compared to Nightlife.

I don't really think the Bartle typology really applies to the Sims as a single player game, necessarily. I mean, I'm a Killer. This probably comes as no surprise. However, the Sims is simply not where I choose to explore my Killer nature. It's single player. There's no one to kill!

[Marhis]

I don't really think the Bartle typology really applies to the Sims as a single player game, necessarily. I mean, I'm a Killer. This probably comes as no surprise. However, the Sims is simply not where I choose to explore my Killer nature. It's single player. There's no one to kill!

Hee hee, the Bartle study is not to be taken literally. For example, your Killer type fits perfectly with your "master puppetteer" kind of gameplay.

[MaryH]

I could have arr'd all of it, but something in me still wants to hold EAxis with some respect.

Why bother? EAxis is a corporation of soulless, blood-sucking money leeches.
They don't respect us-only our money.
 

[mibsywibsy]

Has anyone tried using Numerators BaseGame Program for TS2, and just seeing how bad the difference between the two vanilla games is? All these years with expansions installed has my memory skewed.

I build in Base Game environment all the time, and I have a bunch of families specifically for testing. Honestly, base game to base game, TS3 is markedly superior, if you look at gameplay features it has to begin with, that were added to TS2 in later EPs - ie, what you get for "free" with each barebones game:

- Lifetime Wants/Wishes
- Inventory
- Car/Vehicles (not that it really makes a difference in 3 per se),
- Walking to lots (again, ditto, and it's annoying you really can't choose)
- Cellphones
- Gardening
- Fishing
- Collectioneering (which also serves a useful function like BV beach combing, where your broke-ass CAS Sims can get money essentially "for free")
- Custom novels
- Community lot weddings
- Various superpowers/perks from assorted grinding (aspiration and hobby perks in TS2, the skill challenges and some of the trait superpowers in TS3)

The community lots in TS2 base game are amazingly shitty, too: you can't plonk the vast majority of even base game items that would be useful, there's no restaurants ala NL, the only really worthwhile thing you can do on them is gain Body from swimming (epically slowly, although a bit better if you use hacked collection to plonk some of the career rewards), Cooking from grilling shit, get free food from the aforementioned grilling, and public Woohoo for Romance sims. Oh, and free hygeine. Pretty pointless if you're playing anything other than the Ghetto Superstar challenge, or something that forbids you Aspiration Rewards, such that folding time becomes necessary. Now, it's true, the TS3 community lots suck an ass compared to the NL level of functionality, and are nothing compared to the awesomeness of OFB owned businesses, but in a lot of ways even the rabbithole buildings are way better than base game TS2 community lots. They just... really fucking sucked.

TS3 Base Game completely falls down in the area of items/hairstyles/clothing: TS2 just had more. Much, much, much more, and honestly, for all people bitch about Maxis fug, a lot of it wasn't all that bad, especially the furniture. The people accursing EA of intentionally holding shit back are almost certainly correct. Also, for what it's worth, although most of the "advanced" CC came from the modding community and various poking around, the TS2 base game had a lot more provision for CC when it came out - the ability to make wallpaper, terrain paints, floors, and crappy MSPaint recolors of existing Maxis body shop meshes were provided with HomeCrafter, Body Shop, etc. CAST makes up for it in a lot of ways, but a lot less so for Body Shop stuff compared to anything else.

Everything else you'd be comparing, like the awful genetics in TS3 or b0rked Story Progression Toggle, the Rabbitholes, the ability to create and import your own neighborhood terrains, etc, is pretty much a matter of innate game design/engine coding and not liable to change much with further EPs. Although hopefully someone, somewhere, somehow, will be able to fix SPT.

[Sagana]

I keep launching TS3 after reading about this or that cool thing, to find I'm not as enthralled as I thought I would be.  It's really not a bad game concept, but I simply have not become attached to any of the sims I've made.  Their traits do not make them any deeper, or more complex than their TS2 counterparts.  The game still requires the engagement of my imagination to make them live, but the wall of text spam repeatedly slams me out of immersion.

This, exactly. I don't think the game works at all for storyteller types. Ok, I can't do 20s or Wild West or something because there's no custom content yet. That's no big deal. But I also can't do a modern character without the game messing up the personalities (and yeah, taking an "extreme" shower doesn't make someone a daredevil and I'm sick of "extreme" games of chess <eyeroll> after about 2 seconds.) No matter how 'base' the base TS2 game was, I could still make MY characters. I can't do that in TS3. I can only make game pieces who want to learn to cook because they happened to make dinner or pick up shiny things because there's one laying around. I admit I've never been big on the "humor" element anyway. Any of the jokes tend to get old really quickly. But I'm even disappointed with the gardening. It feels unrealistic and I don't want to grow cheese and eggs. :p Bah. I don't think modding can make this game into something I enjoy. It's broke at the base of it. Pescado can probably mod it so his characters have the right wishes, but like TS2, I bet he can't give that to rest of us. For TS2 the non-immersion parts were ignorable so I could have that anyway. For TS3, not so much.

[mibsywibsy]

This, exactly. I don't think the game works at all for storyteller types. Ok, I can't do 20s or Wild West or something because there's no custom content yet. That's no big deal. But I also can't do a modern character without the game messing up the personalities (and yeah, taking an "extreme" shower doesn't make someone a daredevil and I'm sick of "extreme" games of chess <eyeroll> after about 2 seconds.) No matter how 'base' the base TS2 game was, I could still make MY characters. I can't do that in TS3. I can only make game pieces who want to learn to cook because they happened to make dinner or pick up shiny things because there's one laying around.

How the hell is that any different than TS2, though? In both games, the Want trees are pretty much completely deterministic, and adding "life" or individual personality to a Sim pretty much comes 100% from player imagination and creativity. What the text says when you click on a shower to play that animation really doesn't say anything in terms of storytelling or whatever. Whether you come up with a cool personality and plotline for any given Sim is mostly going to come from you, because in both games there's not all that much going on that's not going to be the same across every single Sim you have.

Now, TS3 currently sucks for storytelling and sandbox play because Story Progression Toggle is borked; but if that gets fixed, honestly, it's probably going to be a slightly better game for storytellers, because if you're the type who likes to make up the story of your Sims as it happens through random stuff in play, the space for random crap is a bit bigger in TS3, because of Traits and the random missions at jobs, having actual bosses/coworkers - but that's really just a matter of slightly more inspiration fodder, really; unimaginative people will still probably fail it up and write crappy stories; creative people will come up with amazing ones no matter how barebones the game is. Have you ever read a Legacy? 99.9999999% of them are boring as shit and basically the same thing, because the lives Sims are pretty invariant (skill up for career, get promoted, acquire mate, breed, raise spawnlings, die, repeat with next generation) and most "Storytellers" don't bother to make up enough of a personality for their Sims. More random shit occuring = more stuff to get inspired by, or directions to take the plot, although in the end I think the quality of most TS3 stories will probably be as bad as those in TS2.

If you're talking about just using the in-game engine to make dolls of your pre-existing characters and act out the storylines you want through animations, that's machinima, and whether TS2 or TS3 is better for it comes down to the aesthetics of the Sims + animations + CC, not any of the ways the game handles personalities or Wants or any of that shit. Your complaint about the gameplay itself makes, like, no sense, because for machinima people, the gameplay aspects pretty much just get in the way, which is why there are poseboxes, animation mods, etc etc, and really SRS BSNS storytellers are always cloning their Sims willy-nilly and constructing enormous sets that they don't actually play.

There's a lot that pisses me off about TS3, but in terms of the storytelling sandbox specifically, the "it is game, not toy!!111eleventy!1" argument makes no freaking sense. Lack of CC, SPT, potential unmoddability, yeah, sure, but I really don't get where "zomg it forces you to do grindypantsery!!!" comes from. Not much more than TS2, really.

[EsotericPolarBear]

I LOVE Bartle and I think maybe you have something here. Sims 2 appealed to a variety of people on the hierarchy, maybe killers a little less than the others. Sims 3 appeals to the achievers most of all I think, maybe a bit to the explorers although once you have collected umteen rocks and seeds, it gets a bit boring. I have taken the quiz in the past and am a socializer, which is probably why I enjoyed Nightlife the best and the lightbolt attractions. The chat nests are very nice but again, its all the same thing. Building a romance is so easy and so predictable compared to Nightlife.

I don't really think the Bartle typology really applies to the Sims as a single player game, necessarily. I mean, I'm a Killer. This probably comes as no surprise. However, the Sims is simply not where I choose to explore my Killer nature. It's single player. There's no one to kill!

Fight Club
Zombie Apocalypse

There's some bleed through of that thar killar nature. 

[mibsywibsy]

I don't really think the Bartle typology really applies to the Sims as a single player game, necessarily. I mean, I'm a Killer. This probably comes as no surprise. However, the Sims is simply not where I choose to explore my Killer nature. It's single player. There's no one to kill!

Fight Club
Zombie Apocalypse

There's some bleed through of that thar killar nature. 

Yep! Plus, pretty much all my RL friends who play the game at all are basically all about using it as a torture/humiliation simulator. Locking Sims in rooms with no doors and starving them, burninating them, and of course the infamous pool ladder trick - Maxis put in a joke about that in TS2, FFS!

One of the guys where I work actually made Sims of all our interns and took great glee in making them pee themselves, etc. It was hilarious.

[Scotty]

They removed the pool ladder trick! That was my favorite way of eliminating butt fugly sims that I didn't want.