OK, so why would I want this mess?
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:
Quote from: slymenstra on 2009 May 30, 06:08:05
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. :P
Quote from: slymenstra on 2009 May 30, 06:08:05
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.
Quote from: slymenstra on 2009 May 30, 06:08:05
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:
Quote from: LauraW on 2009 May 30, 01:32:05
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:
Quote from: Lorelei on 2009 May 30, 06:48:49
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:
Quote from: GelatinousSubstance on 2009 May 30, 00:42:37
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.
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