OH COOL!! I didn't know that...okay excuse me while I go back to playing the game. I stopped playing cause I was tired of being on all these quests. But I think I'll just keep sticking to it, until I unlock free play! YAY!

LOL!! That's the sad thing is that I did watch all the videos they had on it. I guess I was still expecting the free play mode and all the benefits of TS3 such as having generations of sims and so forth.

I am loving the game so far. It is refreshing enough to not be TS3, but still has the same cozy feel. The more I think about it, the more I want to say that TS:M is just a big World Adventures in standalone form with pretty everything that satisfies my ridiculous urge to take part in tales of yore.

I had really low expectations and it was still worse than I hoped for. It could be the tutorial that made it terrible, but I turned it off as soon as it was over. The castle seem more like theatrical scenery than a home. It's annoying to not be able to turn the camera all the way around there. CAS is nice, my queen looked like a guy at first, but she turned out ok.

I believe that in fact commoners WERE allowed to waltz into the castle... at least in Medieval England. How else could they pester the King with petitions?! And a lot would come to gawp at the court life and the new Queen(s). Anyway, this is what I have gathered from my reading of Medieval fiction and watching The Tudors

Hmm, after having played the tutorial...

Pros:
- The game looks really, really nice (Sims look different too, but I like the Sims 3 Sims better)
- FUNNY and great introductory film (which then has nothing to do whatsoever with the game itself)
- WIZARDS OMG!
- Yep, the game looks really, really, really nice

Cons:
- Half your Kingdom is a frickin' rabbit hole, no really. Even the forest. Even your VILLAGE is a rabbit hole, which you can only gaze at from a distance!
- (this is a con for me, not necessarily for other people) The game is severely limited in how you play. All the buildings have fixed places. The insides are fixed as well. The only thing that can be changed are the furnishings. You can only control the Sim that is on a quest, no switching to build a story.
- Is this the only kingdom we get? EDIT: yes, apparently this is the only kingdom we get... this I cannot fathom. We restart the kingdom from scratch for a new ambition, in the exact same place? ... Every. Single. Time. Other real time strategy games (which evidently Sims Medieval took huge inspiration from) often have several levels to play through and even an editor to make your own. Yep, EA has cut content.
- Where's the "story"? (They flaunted that a lot, write your own story of your own kingdom) I'm just running around between Quest markers. I can go play Dragon Age 2 for that, and have voiced dialogue to boot.

Oh, I don't know, the game is quirky, certainly. It does have that funny humour. It does charm you, but at the end of the day I do feel like I'm playing a mash-up of two genres (RTS and simulation), where the best features of both genres have been cut, and the ones that remain have been limited and downsized.

LOL! Okay cool! I didn't know that!! I'm glad someone answered my question. When my Queen wasn't doing anything special and she was roaming around in her castle, I was making her kick all those extra sims out. It was driving me bonkers. But I guess I'll just welcome them in and just deal with their presence.

Ooooh I feel so pleased! I'm in the uk so I SHOULD have it tomorrow but I pre-ordered from game and it came TODAY! I'm intalling it now so we'll see what I think after a little play : )

I think the need to be "smarter" or more "informed" than other people on this issue is a little strange.

There is no flaw in seeing a product advertised as the Sims gone Medieval, and assuming it plays like Sims. The Sims is a brand based around free-play and non-directed interactions. While the TSM is very fun, it is not a Sims game.

There is no need to act like those who are upset that it is not The Sim in Medieval drag are somehow ignorant or shallow.

I never liked building in the Sims 2 or 3, so i like the aspect that you don't have to with the Sims Medieval. I just got the game last night and i love it already. There's so much to do, i'm not even half way through it all. I just found some cheats so hopefully that will make it a bit easier, if they work! lol. I remember hearing about this game and first though, i don't care for this crap... but a few days ago i thought, i want this now!

I'm not one of the ones that confused TSM with another kind of TS3, but I don't think drawing a comparison between the two is a sign of ignorance or failure to research one's purchase. My disappointment with TSM isn't that it's not TS3 in medieval times. My disappointment is that instead of taking the brilliant ideas that they had for TSM and putting them into an expansion that would have satisfied a huge portion of the community, Humble had to get back to his roots with an RPG shoe-horned into a "The Sims" experience. In doing so, he really ruined both genres. The fun parts of RPGs (leveling up, loot, grand adventures) are missing, while the essential parts of any The Sims experience (building, breeding, and free run) are also absent.

That said, I'm enjoying TSM for what it is. It's not a great game. It's not terrible. It's a fun little sidenote and a reminder of what we might have had if EA paid attention to its community.

Personally, if I am going to spend however much on something, I do my research. If you don't do your research and then you end up unhappy with what you buy, well then it was kind of your own fault. The information was there, available, and easy to find. Disappointed because it doesn't play how you wanted it to is understandable, but when some people expected children to grow up and were sad when they didn't... well, I thought everyone knew that.

I'm just not the kind of person who will spend money on something I'm not completely certain I will like.

I would consider it more of a catastrophe, going down one road into shops my wizard got mugged 4 times in 2mins, my priests get mugged every 10-23s if I have them up and walking around.
I want nothing more to catch them on my monarch but they always hide when she's around so it ticks me off. The mug rate needs to SERIOUSLY be dropped.

I couldn't get that to work

I don’t know if I’d want to see TS3 Medieval because if I was playing Bridgeport, I don’t want to see a queen or peasant walking down the street. If they could limit it to certain worlds then that’d be fine.

I do understand what Brutuz is saying. On The Sims Medieval FaceBook page there are many people who just sound ignorant. They complain over the lack of cute clothing and makeup and one girl said “I wanted a cute toilet.” -_-

At first I was really enjoying it but I do like the general… family life that the Sims offers. I was hoping to be able to play as Queen who dies and her daughter takes over or a peasant mother with too many children…
I also wish there were some animals. Horses would have been a much better mode of transportation.

Whenever I go onto any of the Sims' FB pages I lose all hope for the human race. I am shocked that half of those people can even operate a computer. I'd love to see what would happen if any of them wandered over to MATY

I'm enjoying this game. Seems like they got the Monarch job done better then Fable 3. The quests are actually pretty decent (especially now that I know the free-mode cheat) and unlocking new buildings gives you something to look forward too and is fun.

However, I wish there was more outfits (top and bottom), more customization options, an improved inventory system, and individual sim SKILLS (ie. cooking, charisma, body...). I REALLY miss skilling my characters and that'd be a great RPG aspect.

I'm very charmed by this game; and can't really seem to stop playing.
Pretty much everything is something that I like and it is what I expected it to be as well.

But there were two flaws that really grinds me.

The first is that when you've drained you QP and the only quests left to do is the Freetime quest and the quest to build a new kingdom (Export one of your heroes.) you can't level your heroes anymore, so if one dies you can't level the replacement you get and that was very disappointing since for me; it was the blacksmith that died.
(Maybe it's a bug or an oversight?)
The second is when you've completed the quest for a new kingdom and hence have exported your chosen hero and then chosen to import that hero as the monarch in your new game; their items are all gone and also their legendary trait, all they seem to keep is their level. That was very disappointing seeing as I had the Doomarmor and the accompanying blade.

Other than that this game keeps me immensely entertained, as all Sims games have done in the past.

I thought this sounded cool when I saw it advertised but I've just played it at a friend's house and when I saw that there was no aging I was astonished. Wow, what a giant leap backwards.

Ha ha! I fall into the category of seeing 'Sims' and responding with 'must buy'. But hey, I see no problem with that, so scoff at the stuffy posts on here that denegrate that approach. [OMG! not everyone researches every purchase to the nth degree!!!! Lighten up, some.]

Yeah, TSM is different from TS3, but to be fair, I have never got as hooked on TS3 as I was on the original Sims or TS2. The people were just so ugly and whatever one did [without installing mods] they all look too similar.

And the first thing you have to do in TSM is create a person. And wow! What an improvement on any previous Sims game this turns out to be: they look like 'real' people. So thats a plus right at the start.

Must admit, I like to jump in and work things out for myself, so found the tutorial a bit of a bind, but it doesn't take long and allows the player to get into the flow of the game quite painlessly.

I like building more than controlling characters, so was disappointed by the absence of that aspect in this game. So that's a negative imo.

The initial quest is rather bland, consisting of simply moving the 'hero' through a series of simple and rather uneventful actions, the most potentially exciting being that of hunting a bear, which takes place behind a coppice so that all I could do was fast forward and watch a time-bar fill up while I waited for my hero to emerge from behind the shaking leaves. Hmmm. Not a patch on The Elder Scrolls! I fear future quests will prove to be similarly uninspiring, so that's a negative, also.

Okay, now I'm on a roll, I'll just mention the throne room / castle, whatever it is. Is anyone else frustrated that you can only look in the front, like at the theatre, and not move around to view from different angles? That aspect of the game seems like a retrograde step to me, and feels more like a game from the '90s!

Nevertheless, I will persevere and see what happens when I unlock free play.

I played three days straight without any muggings. I tried out the "kaching" cheat and the muggings started. I have a suspicion that the two are related.

If you code TCE to work, there's a cheat called showallquests where it gives you free play.

So I sat down with my friend and played a few hours because we were bored. We took turns at quests. It was... ...I mean the game is SO pretty, but the gameplay is so incredibly restrictive. I struggle to imagine how anyone is going to get a lot of game hours out of TSM, but it seems like it has its fans.

Pros:
- Great art direction.
- Much nicer looking Sims.
- The animations are wonderful!
- The variety of items is nice, and the item collection systems seem pretty polished.

Cons:
- The quests try to be amusing but fall pretty flat.
- The game shoves you round and gives you very little freedom to do anything creative.
- The duties + quests really drain time, and feel like chores.
- Sims spend a LOT of time in rabbit holes. Not that I have anything against rabbit holes themselves, just the amount Sims *need* to be in them in this game.
- The free play isn't very interesting even once it's unlocked (and why by cheats?).
- The quests aren't challenging at all, so it just feels like you're just... ...dabbling in a time sink.
- It really feels like the characters are pretty one dimensional, and their attitudes and properties are often dictated by the quest scripts more than their traits or the players' choices.

I'd give it a 3/10.

It. Is. Awesome. And I've said everything!!!

I'm anticipating the complaints when medieval has run out of material.