A Review of the Sims 3: An Empty Experience

On June 2, 2009, EA Games released the highly anticipated new entry into The Sims series, The Sims 3. Immediately after its release, the game was marred by criticism from its longtime-player fan base. The main accusations from fans are that the game is poorly programmed, with very little planning or attention to detail.

The graphics in The Sims 3 have definitely been taken a step beyond its predecessor; however, many fans feel as though the developers didn’t push the boundaries enough.

Lighting is one of the key improvements as far as graphics go. The look is definitely more realistic, with shadowing and details being clearly a key factor when the lighting concept was designed. The downside of the lighting is that, while it is an improvement, characters somehow still look very waxy and fake in the otherwise brilliant scenery surrounding them.

Arguably the most looked-forward-to addition in the new game was the updated Create-a-Sim feature (commonly known as CAS). Players were promised the ultimate CAS experience, being able to literally create a million unique Sims. However, many fans feel as though the new CAS is, perhaps, the ultimate disappointment.

One of the first steps after giving your character a name, is to select a skin tone. In the Sims 2, there were only four default options, which were very basic and had no variance whatsoever. But in the Sims 3 CAS, players can scale the skin tone on a spectrum from very light to very dark.

The good news is that the skin tone slider is definitely more versatile than what was seen in the Sims 2 base game. However, the bad news is, even though there’s a wider range of colors, it’s still hard to get certain skin tones right. For now, forget creating a Sim with a markedly yellow or rosy undertone in their skin. Those options are not available, meaning that all of the Sims’ skin tones are variations of brown with a very pale Caucasian coloring being the palest variant.

One of the most appealing features about the new CAS is the body shape slider. The slider was designed to give Sims a more accurate range of body types. Thinness and fatness can be scaled, as can muscle definition. So, you can create a fat Sim with bulging muscles or a thin Sim with no muscle tone whatsoever. However, many fans were hoping for more to be done with the body slider. Height adjustment would’ve been an excellent additional feature, as well as giving Sims different body shapes (such as apple, pear, hourglass, etc). After all, both male and female Sims are relatively straight, regardless of how fat or thin they were, however the straightness of the bodies is most markedly noticed in the female Sims, where their weight is essentially put on in the stomach and hips, paying no attention to the shoulders or bust – which naturally grow larger with weight.

The facial sliders were very hyped by developers and reviewers alike to be the ultimate way to give Sims unique looks. But this was not to be so.

The sliders for adjusting facial features are far more primitive than the Sims 2 and with far less options for adjusting certain parts of the face.

Though there is a slider for tweaking parts of the eyebrow, such as the amount of arching, the eyebrow tool is a disaster. The arching slider is far less sophisticated than the arching slider of the Sims 2, CAS. Essentially, eyebrows can only be flat or have a rounded, arch shape to them. The arch is completely undistinguishable from the rest of the brow. Furthermore, players can not set their character’s eyebrow thickness. There are only a few set eyebrows to work with, so the end result is usually a character whose eyebrows just don’t look right.

Eye ball sliders have just as little effect upon the look of the Sims and have almost no function whatsoever. The same can be said about the lip sliders. Players can forget creating a Sim with thick, luscious lips. At the thickest setting, most lips are still quite thin upon the character’s face, adding to the fan’s sense of lack of variety in facial structuring amongst the Sims in this release.

The lack of tweaking options for all facial features leads to very cartoonish looking Sims. And this is the main complaint about the Sims appearance in The Sims 3. Most players describe the characters to look “bubble-faced” or “ugly”. While ugliness is subjective, one does feel like they’re looking at bubbly-faced cartoons when looking at Sims from the Sims 3, starkly contrasting their more realistic-looking Sims 2 counterparts.

The Sims now have more options to work with as far as hair goes, however. In the Sims 2, there were only four default colors: black, brown, blonde, and red. Now, with the help of the new Create-a-Style tool, players can change their characters hair color to any they imagine; also, the hair can have highlights, roots, and tips applied to it to create variance between Sims.

The downside of the hair in this release is that, for the most part, the hair cuts are unimaginative and unattractive. Hair with accessories is a major theme and that’s really where the player can get the most variety when it comes to their character’s coifs, using the Create-a-Style feature to add their own unique flourishes.

The clothing in the Sims 3 is boring, simply put. The styles are dated or else extremely tacky, to the point where players opting to create a tacky, dated character still don’t want to use them. The clothing relies heavily on the Create-a-Style feature to give it depth and variety.

The good thing about Create-a-Style is that you can recolor any clothing, hair, accessory, or even household items any way you want. The downside is that the game relies too heavily upon this and expects users to do the same, if they want options in how everything looks. There are a lot of patterns in Create-a-Style – still not enough to make truly original clothing, which is a great source of disappointment amongst fans.

A new feature of Sim creation is being able to give them five unique traits, which determine their social behavior and their aptitude for certain skills and tasks. For instance, you can make a Sim who is a kleptomaniac, hopelessly romantic, inappropriate, loser, and athletic. This is neat, because you can really give them a wide range of personalities, which unlock special interactions in the pie menus in-game.

It’s better than the old system of astrological signs, because it allows for more dynamic and interesting qualities to be presented in the Sims and unexpected combinations are possible – however, you can’t give a Sim traits that contradict each other (unfortunately, because that would be funny if you could).

The favorites section of personality is also a new addition to the Sims franchise. Now, you can choose your Sim’s favorite food, color, and music. Granted, this is a bit boring because there’s only a set amount of options to choose from. The music aspect is particularly dull, because there’s only a few genres: electronica, pop, Latin, kid’s, classical, indie, and custom. The developers left out the two most popular genres today: rock and rap. Rock has been the corner stone of contemporary music since its inception. To leave it out of such as basic list as that comes off as careless and is somewhat annoying to the rock fans out there (especially since Sims can choose to be a rock star as one of their career goals).

The game runs good on most computers above the minimum requirements listing; however, it’s not without bugs. As of now, the story progression toggle doesn’t work. Also, “ultra speed” (supposedly the fastest speed setting) runs just the same as normal speed, meaning it can take several real-time minutes for Sims to do tasks as simple as taking a bath. This has angered many previous Sims 2 players, who could breeze by a whole Sim day in less than fifteen minutes. However, EA is definitely working on a way to solve the story progression problem and fans are hopeful that the ultra speed issue will be resolved in due course.

The seamless neighborhood feature is arguably one of the best experiences in Sims 3. Players of the previous Sims games are used to exhaustingly long loading times. Now, with the seamless neighborhood and convenient “rabbit holes”, sending your Sim to the library is far from an ordeal and can be done very quickly.

As mentioned above, there is a new feature in the Sims 3 called “story progression”. The gist is that the neighborhood is now a living mechanism, just like your player family. The game families grow old and die with your own Sims, without the user controlling them. While this adds variety, excitement, and interest to the game, it also comes with consequences.

One of the draw backs in a Sims 3 neighborhood is that you can only have one active family at a time. Without the option to turn story progression off, users with multiple families will find the families who are not “active” are growing old, moving, and dying. And this is frustrating to many users, who take pride in growing their many families. After all, they’ve spent hours (sometimes days and months) building up these Sims – having them move away at the drop of the hat is frustrating, to say the least.

One plus is that the user now has more control over a Sim’s job. While they still cannot view the Sim while they’re working, they do have a small amount of input in how the Sim works. Users can encourage their Sims to work hard, and hopefully reap a reward, or else slack off (possibly with consequences). This serves as another means of adding realism and texture to the game playing experience and is a nifty feature – hopefully it’ll be expanded upon.

Also, jobs now require more focuses skill-building. This is definitely an improvement to the Sims 2 interface, where skills would just seemingly be randomly thrown into the requirements for a promotion.

Social interactions are lackluster in the Sims 3 – at best. Gone are the days of the comical, cheeky Woohoo in favor of a calmer more tender experience. Other social interactions have suffered as well. There are fewer options across the board as far as social interactions go. The interactions, as they appear in sequence, make little sense and don’t vary as much as they did in the previous Sims game. It’s also exceedingly hard to propose marriage.

And you can forget a glitzy Sims 2 style wedding. Users now have the option to have a private wedding (where the Sims marry on the spot in whatever they’re wearing) or a party wedding, where the Sims dress in their tacky formal wear. There are no bridal accessories and party supplies and there is no wedding dress. Alas, the magic is gone.

The “special” section of the Sim-to-Sim interactions pie menu is the only saving grace of sociality in the Sims 3. The special section allows the Sims to give comments based on their special traits as selected during CAS. This is really the only way interactions between Sims are different or expanded from the previous installment.

The Sims 3 seems as though it was given a hasty programming and development, even though we know it wasn’t. Furthermore, it gives off the vibe that it was targeted at a younger audience than previous entries. Everything is toned down and, if possible, more cartoony. It would behoove EA to sit down and listen to what their audience really wants to see. It’s the players who will be playing the game, after all.

That said, the Sims 3 is a fun play and has its merit; though the prospective player should be warned it’s nothing like the Sims 2.