nerdalerts

That’s right everyone, there’s a new version to be released. And here’s some details.

The original version of The Sims, which launched in 2000, became the best-selling PC game of all time. In the years since, the franchise has surpassed 100 million total units sold, counting The Sims 2 and all of the expansions for both full iterations. That’s quite a lot of sales.

The scheduled release date: June 2, 2009. Now, it will be surprising if this release date remains unchanged with the recent announcement by EA to lay of 1100 people. Which is roughly 10% of their current staff.

Now, for the meat and potatoes of the article, CONTENT.

Aside from the graphical upgrades, there will be several new features. Such as the houses each sim lives in will all be part of one large area. No loading when travelling between homes/businesses anymore. The developers say that “What you do outside your home now matters as much as what you do within.” The game world doesn’t pause when the player is not interacting with them, meaning that AI families will age and procede with their lives as usual (before you could create an AI family for the neighborhood with no means to support life -food, and they wouldn’t die if you didn’t ever play as them).

Of the eight needs of The Sims 1 & 2, two have been removed (comfort and environment) leaving hunger, bladder, energy, social, hygiene, and fun. All those two removed needs did was make it that much harder when you first started because you could never afford nice chairs/beds so you were always unhappy because comfort was always low.

New features to a non-expansion release are that sims will now have personal inventories, mobile phones, private cars, go fishing, jewelry, hospitals, bicycles. Players will be able to buy into local businesses and buy out other partners and own the business later on.

The sims can still make paintings, however, the paintings will now be more unique and will be more based on the persons traits.

There will be 12 careers available to pursue (law enforcement, crime, military, science, politics, journalism, business, entertainment, culinary, medical, athletic, and gardening).  Each individual career has it’s own building in the neighborhood, which Sims travel to for their shifts. Sims can also apply for jobs within these buildings. Like previous Sims games, the job yields “opportunities”—tasks that could be finished for a reward.  There are also part-time jobs. Sims can also take actions to increase their productivity while not at work, such as bringing work home or working overtime. Each career has several rewards, instead of only one as in The Sims 2. Careers can also branch into several possible promotions.

Looks.  Sims are no longer limited to their body type at creation.  If you make a fat sim, through exercise, you can make them skinny eventually and vice versa.  Options when creating a character will be more akin to an MMO, where theres limitless attributes/color combinations.  Instead of a pre-determined set of hair colors, you get  acolor wheel that you can select any color/hue you wish. 

And finally, the “building” squares that are used when placing object on the floor are not 4x smaller allowing much better arrangement of items to maximize space, making it easier to move around in a small bathroom/living room.

Now, while there is no word yet, it will be nice if they implemented multiplayer aspects.  Or, if they made console versions of this.  Would be a nice kick in the face of “Home” if players on an Xbox or Wii could meet up in this in sort of an MMO-style and interact while playing their sims’ lives. 

If that were likely I would definitely play as a criminal and steal stuff from my nosy neighbors.

All in all, when I played the first few, i really like this game genre.  It takes a while (like Gran Turismo) to get things moving and get a steady routine, but it’s nice to build a mansio from a shack.

Would you buy this?