Only ONE Household To Play Per Game?
Unfortunately, whatever The Sims 3 brings to the gameplay experience, other important elements have been lost in the shuffle.
I'm not talking about the sparsity of gameplay objects in The Sims 3 -- most everyone knows that this is the Sims way; the first game is basic, and additional details are introduced with expansion packs. I expected this.
What I didn't expect, with all the talk of "an entire real-time town to play in" was how seriously The Sims 3 would limit gameplay options.
For all intents and purposes, you can only play one Sim family effectively now. The Sims 2 days of playing multiple Sim families, intermarrying them, and building multi-generational dynasties are gone.
Because The Sims 3 runs every household in the town you're not currently playing automatically, your other Sim families will age, move, change houses, and jobs, and so forth, while you're playing another family.
In Sims 2, any household of yours you weren't playing stayed "frozen in time" until you came back to it. Not so in Sims 3. As soon as you leave a house lot, the game takes it over. It's out of your hands.
You can turn off the automatic "storytelling" (as they call it) by the game, but your currently-unplayed characters will continue to age, regardless. That teenage son you wanted to go create and "grow up" a girlfriend for? By the time you return to the teenage boy's house lot, he may be a senior citizen!
You can also turn off aging, but it's game wide. Your secondary characters won't age while you're away -- but neither will anyone on the lot you're playing. Toddlers, for example, will stay toddlers indefinitely.
The ability to play multiple families helped keep the Sims 2 from getting boring. Tired of family A? Well, you've got umpteen other characters to play around with -- and family A will be right where you left them if you decide to come back.
Not so with The Sims 3.
The other major disappointment for me was the character modelling. As others have mentioned, for all the talk of greater customization, I found most of the town Sims in The Sims 3 (male and female) look eerily alike. Most everyone seems to share a default husky body type, and a strangely rounded puffy face, typically with high cheekbones and a snub nose.
It's very hard to make truly distinctive body types. Fat, thin, or buff, they all just look like style variations on the basic husky/puffy default body type in the end.
Perhaps the inevitable Sims 3 expansion packs will fix some of these issues. I hope so.
Meanwhile, I can't in good conscience recommend this game to anyone who likes a broad-based Sims game with many play options.
I've already uninstalled my copy of The Sims 3 and put it away in a drawer -- I'm already back to The Sims 2 stuff.
Sad. I really did want to love this game.
Hope this helps someone else make an informed decision.