I was tired when I got home last night, but I wanted to see The Sims 3 in action so I installed the game at 11:30 p.m. and played for about an hour.
I can see that this game is going to be much more goal oriented than the previous two sim games, because of the Lifetime Wish, which is a single wish that each sim will strive to fulfill in their lifetime - I didn't get into it much, but it looks fairly interesting, and something that will make the game feel much more gamey. The Everyday Wishes also seem to push you in a certain direction, making each day feel slightly more goal oriented. Because I only played for an hour I didn't get the opportunity to check out how well the other new concepts are working (namely, the Moodlets, the Lifetime Happiness thing, or the slightly re-worked Careers model... my sim doesn't have a job yet, and I haven't even looked at the new Career Panel) but it all looks interesting enough.
The one thing I will say is that, at first, The Sims 3 feels exactly like The Sims 2, except that you're playing on a lot that's humongous.Up until now, we've been restrained to playing on our own lot, so it's weird looking out the window, and seeing all these houses around you, with other sims in them. I don't think it quite registers in your mind how big of a change this actually is. You feel like you're playing The Sims 2 - but of course you're not.
For example: I dislike what the houses around me look like, so the first thing I'm going to do is destroy them, and do what I've always wanted to do, which is to create an entire neighborhood of my own creation - you can do that in The Sims 2 as well, of course, but all of the houses are on separate lots, and whenever you're on one lot, the others you've created are all rendered in 2D and you can't walk over to them. In this game you can. I'm going to create a very dense housing project and fill it up with the most dysfunctional people on the face of the planet.
But like I said, I only played for an hour, and didn't get to see much. But I can see that there's obviously a tremendous amount of potential here.
Graphically, The Sims themselves look much more modern, but here's my one complaint: the rest of it just sucks. The graphics for the town are god-awful. I feel, at times, like I'm playing a game from 4 years ago. I realize that the developer had to make this game work on a range of computers, but honestly I think that they could've improved the visuals A LOT. And here's the real kicker: on my Core i7 920, with its GTX 275, the game will chug along when my sim starts running down the sidewalk - the system performance can be horrible at times. I'm guessing that the reason for this is that all of the other sims around you are being simulated, so the computer is struggling to keep up. I'll bet that this is a processor thing. But again, the saving grace here, is that the sims themselves look better, and that you can destroy some of those ugly buildings around you, and build your own.
Overall, then, from one hour of playing, the gameplay looks to be much improved, but the graphics, for the most part, kind of suck - a bit disappointing in that regard, really. I'll post back later when I've had a chance to really sit down and play the game in earnest.
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