The Sims 3 A Broader Game Than Its Predecessor

Jason Ocampo from IGN previewed the Sims 3 and found the game a lot more broader then The Sims 2. The game seems to focus more on the bigger social and community aspects of sims rather than micro managing the daily life of one sim. He said:

The Sims 3 is a much broader game than its predecessors, more concerned with telling stories than with focusing on the ordinary minutiae of everyday life.

The breadth of customisability has been upped for The Sims 3. Apart from creating your sims looks size etc, you can now also design the texture or cloth pattern for your sims clothing.

Another nifty new feature is the ability to basically create cloth patterns and even textures on clothes, and then dragging-and-dropping those patterns onto other clothes. It's possible to create matching wardrobes, right down the shoes. Everything that you create can be saved and eventually shared with others.

Personalities seem to be the big feature in creating your sims.

While these are all mostly cosmetic changes, the big change to create-a-sim is the removal of the old messy/neat sliders and the addition of personality traits. You can pick up to five personality traits per sim, and this will modify his or her behavior appropriately. There are a lot of traits, stuff like evil, brave, coach potato, hopeless, perfectionist, natural cook. (Executive Producer Ben Bell likes to mention that they got many of the traits by going over online personal ads and picking popular descriptions people like to use.) You can make people as deep or shallow as you'd like depending on the type and number of traits. The traits that you pick also play a big role in helping to determine your sims' wishes.

Jason writes that the main feature for The Sims 3 is that it simulates an entire community instead of just one household.

As you may know, the big new feature in The Sims 3 is that it busts out of the single-lot-at-a-time gameplay of its predecessors. In The Sims and The Sims 2, whenever your sims left their homes or a downtown lot, you encountered a load screen. In The Sims 3, the entire town is simulated simultaneously; there are no loads. This opens up a lot more gameplay, as life is no longer fixed in one location. I had one sim get a job in the army; he could have simply picked up the newspaper and looked for a job that way, but I simply told him to hail a cab (he could also jump in a car, if he owned one), and I followed the cab as it drove through the town and up to the army base in the hills, where he jumped out and got an introductory job cleaning latrines.

The preview also includes a video interview with the developer of The Sims 3


Read the entire preview here