My review of TS3. What I liked, don't like.
Doc Doofus:
Well, I have had one night of playing. I made a little self-sim of Doc Doofus, the first time in nine years I have made one. (Some people suggested they wanted one to torture, so I'll upload him here as soon as I figure out how you export).
There are some things about TS3 I am VERY PLEASED about, and others that are a real Squeeze Technique issue. But first the good things.
I am so very, very pleased that there is an actual town that you can explore. You can run around to your heart's content from house to house, park to park, store to store. This is how I always wanted it to be. The first time I played GTA Vice City, I asked myself, why can't the Sims be this immersive? And here we are closer to that, although this isn't quite that immersive yet. And we don't have chainsaws. (I'm counting on Pescado to make that his FIRST MOD. I want CHAINSAWS, DAMMIT.) The freedom of it all is such a huge rush. I can understand some people used to TS2 being too stunned to appreciate that yet. Going from TS2 to TS3 may be a shock, but going from TS3 to TS2 basegame would be a huge letdown.
I have yet to fully experience the story progression of the rest of the town. I'm sure it's happening, but that will take more play on my part still. I've only had about a week in-game.
Now for the negative, and it's a very big negative. The Sims themselves are FUGLY beyond belief, and I fear the tools that one might use to fix that don't exist, and, worse yet, may never exist. In EA's quest to make the game more moddable at game time, it appears to have been made less moddable overall.
I am OUTRAGED that there is no BodyShop program. If we had that, we could at least begin the process of trying to customize skin textures (dear God, they are ghastly), to maybe make things a bit more Stefan-esque. But I think it may be worse than just that, because it appears that the skin textures available in game-CAS may not be really moddable at all. The actual skin color choices seem to be color swatches which, I am guessing, are applied to a single global skin texture. If that is the case, then we can do some good by changing that global skin, but we won't be able to have distinct inheritable custom skins. We might end up having only our choice of one global default skin, not changeable in game. If that's the case, then a BodyShop program would offer no relief for changing skins. We can probably customize skins using custom clothes, if we ever get tools for that -- that's how we often did it in Sims 1 days -- but that would clearly not be inheritable.
If the default skin is truly awful, even more so are the eyes, which are hideous. If I had had the tools, I would have stayed up all night making new eyes alone. But, no tools. EA's message to world: "Suck on it."
It would be nice to customize the make-up. Same problem. In fact, let me say, the tools are so specialized for changing the color of the default game makeup (and clothes and hair) that I find it hard to visualize how they would be easily extensible to custom made makeup. The hair and makeup come in four different colors which can be color-changed with a color-wheel, thus enforcing a four color scheme, not allowing for more sophisticated coloring. This might seem nicer than in Sims 2 where you had to make (or download) at least five different colors for any hair tone, thus a timesaver, but it has to come at a grave price in customization possibilities. I imagine a first-time player of the game might find it dazzling to play with the color wheels, while those of us that remember headier days of Sims 2 and being able to make our own textures with Bodyshop and Photoshop 2 are bound to be left-down. And if/when tools for importing content arrive, just think of the difficulties of translating a custom hair tone into something that could fit into the four-color color-wheel system of the game. What a bitch.
Also, I am very disappointed by the face manipulators and default face structures in the game-CAS. I have heard some people say they are more powerful than the equivalent TS2 tools. This is UTTER, COMPLETE, TOTAL BULLSHIT. I fought with the TS3-CAS last night, trying to come up with some eye shapes that wouldn't look like space aliens or hentai and came up short. The jaws can either be round and fat or pointed like a hatchet. It would take a loving Sim-mother to look at just the face-shape of any of these Sims and think they were lovely. I am despondent over this. I don't see how any tool could come out to change this. I was looking forward to making some replacement default face structures, as we did for TS2, but if you can't even get half-way there with the CAS, I don't think it can be done short of going to Milkshape, and with or without that drastic step, there's a chance that a decently shaped face might be incompatible with the game tools and animations. We might be stuck with this shit for a long, long time.
And since I spent most of my fun time during the last several years trying to de-fuglify ugly townies and Sims, this leaves me in a quandary about where this is all going to go. EA always had a certain cartoonish style to their Sims content. It was, at least, a certain consistency and humor to it. But it was something that CC makers immediately veered from. Even the lowliest of pre-teen skin makers wanted to make their Sims look like Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers, or whoever they idolize nowadays. I dread to think of what that will look like with TS3.
Please, JM, please, make me a chainsaw!!
Czezechael:
For custom content (shall it ever exist) and the CAStification of it, I'd just readily assume that CC would use some variety of greyscale base with some system to denote what texture goes to which area. That seems to be how it works with the game at present, anyway, though it may be woefully more complicated to create CC as a result. That seems to be a common trend with this iteration of The Sims, "making it harder to do what made people actually like our stupid game".
Anyway, I haven't had any problems with the CAS facial editing tools, though I don't like the general lack of extreme ranges and have troubles with the cheek bone sliders. I've successfully made little vinyl skinned simulacra of my partner and friends and I have aggravatingly high standards for such.
Of course, the possibility exists that myself and everyone I know is ugly. I'm open to that.
Insanity Prelude:
Little late for it to be his first hack. ;)
Lorelei:
Nice of you to review the game, but why you saw fit to start a brand new thread when a thread ALREADY EXISTS where people are reviewing their impressions of the game...THAT I do not understand. Kindly do a search next time to see if your desired topic of discussion already has a thread where it would fit.
Thanks.
Gus Smedstad:
There is? There's Pescado's impressions, but that doesn't seem like a general review thread to me. I was looking for one earlier, too, because I trust the people here to be more sophisticated in their understanding of the game than anyplace else. I eventually ended up buying it anyway, and I'm mostly enjoying it, despite the puddings.
- Gus
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