Catching up with The Sims 3

Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 1:25 pm. 4 comments
Posted in EA, Games, The Sims 3.

So in the past few weeks several fan sites were able to see a glimpse of The Sims 3. No EA didn’t ask me to attend. Anyway we’ll take a look at whats been announced since the last time we covered it, and summarize all the major details from the fan sites.

Seamless Neighborhood

All fansites pretty much agree there will be no loading times from place to place. Everything is done seamlessly so you can play inside your house, zoom the camera out and get a glimpse of whats going on in your town. By that, you select where you want to go and your sim will reach there by walking, cab, or car. The location of the neighborhood is alongside a rocky shore and mountains off in the distance.

There will be many places to visit in the neighborhood, including civic areas, the beach, the café, and more. Certain buildings will act as jobs which you can plop inside the neighborhood. One of the most requested additions to the Sims 3 is the abilities to place objects in any direction without grids. This will certainly add to the realism that fans want.

Seamless Lives

As you play the game, everyone around you no matter where they are will be doing something and aging alongside with you. Each action they do will have a purpose and their behaviors will be dictated by each traits they have. You will start out with a few traits and expect to gain some more as you play through. Social interaction will play a much larger role, and even “negative” actions might make someone more happier.

Screenshot Analysis

For more detailed information about The Sims 3, you can visit the fansites at the bottom of the article. Now we’ll take a look in some new screenshots to see whats been improved since the game was first announced.

Fat is in! The new body shape adds more variety to the people you’ll likely meet around the ‘hood. Talking on the cellphone is now a base game feature that everyone will have.

The trailer showed off some of the new seamless neighborhood transitions by zooming out. We do know that this may be a huge struggle for lower end PCs. Fan sites have said that developers will be able to solve this problem by making the neighborhood smaller for PCs that struggle. Still I would recommend buying a new graphic card to support this game. Nvidia 8800+ seems to be a surefire way to make this game run smoothly.

The whole neighborhood will transition into day and night at the same time. Some sims may come out at night to do some mischief.  This sunset along shows off some shadow mapping that is based on light from the sun.

Sims will be aware of others actions and may get irritated by them. This was in development for The Sims 2, but it wasn’t so apparent as they made it sound once the base game was released. So we hope they can enhance this even further in The Sims 3.

The Sims 3 will be released on February 20th 2009
  On PC then later on MAC

[ via Sims 3 Resource, Eyecandy for The Sims 3, and forum posts]