I was a staunch TS3 supporter for a while, but with the announcement of the latest EP idea I just can't defend it anymore. As it is I haven't played the game in weeks. My xbox 360 which got neglected big time in the TS2 days is getting a lot of attention now



So do I

Eh, not really.

The thing about New Coke (other than it tasted like a warm Pepsi passed through the kidney of a skunk) was that no one wanted it. Coca-Cola replaced a product that a lot of people liked with a product that, at best, had marginal appeal to people who were already committed to a competing product.

TS3, on the other hand, is still Amazon.com's 4th ranked PC game. This long after its release, that's hardly a failure. By and large, people seem to still be fairly attached to the franchise.


I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the TS3 cycle is considerably shorter than that of TS2. But if so, not because it's a step back from TS2, but because it issn't enough of a step forward. But a lot of that will really depend on how they balance EP additions with system requirements (I suspect they'll get a longer lifespan out of the game if newer EPs add enough shiny to the game that it pushes people with lower-end systems out of the picture).

They'd have no reason to go back to TS2, though. Amazon's sales rank alone would seem to suggest that most people have moved on.

Yeah, what a marvelous idea. I'm sure a lot of fans would be thrilled even after upgrading for the base game alone...lol

I do agree that that the chances of getting a new TS2 EP are slim, though.

I suppose, in part, it depends on which aspects of the game one is interested in. But it seems to me that there is a lot more variety available to TS3 sims than there was to pre-NightLife TS2 sims. The trait system and the expanded social menus alone are a huge improvement over TS2 (and particularly pre-NightLife TS2).


There were plenty of people expressing boredom and frustration at this point in TS2's life as well (or with many game franchises that have any longevity, it's all part of the whole "if people like something, they'll share it with three friends, if they hate something, they'll share it with 10,000 strangers" thing). There was also a lot of "TS2 is sooo boring compared to TS1. University sucks, its just a different setting for the same old stuff, ZOMG!!! the next EP has cars!!!!1111eleven11 Finally something new!"

Some of this is just a result of the fact that, at least for us old-fogeys, we're never going to recapture the experience of playing TS1 for the first time. As long as the game remains recognizably the Sims, it'll have to compete with our warm fuzzy memories of its early iterations. But I would be surprised if there were many players who could begin the franchise with TS3, move on to TS2 or TS1, and consider either a step forward.

Well, I'd think anyone who upgraded for the base game would be fine, as its system requirements weren't particularly demanding at its time of release (I'm running the game, with WA and HELS, on a system from the stone age and still getting acceptable performance out of it).

I think part of the problem is that The Sims has such large armies of wildly devoted fans that it can sell on brand loyalty alone. Many people will buy every single expansion pack even if it looks like total crap.

This is not to say that EA has altogether stopped trying to improve the series. There are, in all fairness, many good things about S3. But it is undeniably disappointing considering how great an improvement sims 2 was from the sims 1. Sims 3 doesn't even begin to measure up to all the hype and expectations.

Sorry, but I have to disagree.

Visually TS3 sims have less of a reaction to everything and no reaction to many things. I'm not interested in reading the game by scanning boxes for moodlets, traits, and menus. When I want to read I pick up a book not play a video game.

In TS2 I can remember the first time an adult sim missed work because there was no nanny that day. (Sim wife had just gotten off maternity leave and I didn't even think to have them call for one). The daddy sim walked up to the car hunched his shoulders and sighed before shaking his head and waving to me--then I got that pop up message "I know I have other responsibilities but I can't bring myself to leave the little ones home alone" (or something like that) then he walked back into the house and tossed the toddler in the air before feeding it in the highchair. In TS3, when I forgot to have them call a babysitter, both parent sims went to work and when the first one came home from work they immediately went for a jog, leaving baby alone again. I don't know what delayed the other one. The toddler was taken away as they both returned home later on. The social worker went to scold the mother, who proceeded to ignore the social worker and jump in the shower. ("Oh, taking my kid away? Hold onto that thought. I'll be with you in a minute. I'm just not feeling fresh.") The father was too busy making an autumn salad to talk to the social worker. Kid's gone -- the two sim parents get a useless moodlet and go about their business like nothing happened. No, not an improvement--not by a long shot. Nothing was visually played out --all the TS3 personality and emotional dynamics were in boxes, menus and moodlets. Video games are a visual medium--like films--and so things need to play out visually to be interesting.

I will admit WA has visually interesting tombs and locales and quests are fun the first time around.



Yes, that's probably true but I was barely ever on the forums during TS2 because I was too busy playing the game to be online talking about it. Now, I'm on forums talking about it because TS3 is too dull to play much and since I'm a simaholic I have to get my sims fix somehow.



I considered that maybe it was a nostalgia thing until I recently put TS1 back on my computer and played it. When was the last time you played TS1? The graphics are funky bad but the game play is great! It's actually a more difficult game than TS2 or TS3 because creating and sustaining relationships is much harder. There seems to be more randomness and TS1 sims react in large fashion to things. Also, in TS1 a sim will seek out sims they favor. In TS3 sims favor whoever is standing closest to them. If TS1 (windows 95) didn't play havoc on my current OS (Vista) I'd keep playing it.

Its not even a question of prefering one over an other--because I actually do want TS3 to be good. It's just not, IMHO. Maybe it is for other people but not for me. I like TS3's pretty appearance but it seriously needs more heart and soul.

People that keep thinking and/or hoping that Sims3 is a bomb and EA will soon be forced to go back to making Sims2 EPs are either blind or are willfully closing their eyes. Even on this site which obviously has a lot of people on it that don't like the Sims3, the Sims3 part of the forum has tons more people browsing it at any given time than the Sims2 part does. There are a lot of people that love the Sims3 and see it as a definite improvement over the Sims2. EA is never going back to the Sims2 and thank God, because as much as I liked the Sims2, the Sims3 is a definite improvement.

I have been reading this thread as it developed and now that a certain person has been banned I feel like I can post in it without getting my head bitten off if I dare voice an opinion of the game that isn't all gushy and sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. Also, it's 19 pages long so I apologise if anything I say here is just a repeat of stuff that everyone else has said.

IMO TS3 isn't a step backwards; it is a step forwards but in many ways it's also a step sideways. A step forwards in that the main features of the game are improved, IMO, for the better. A step sideways in that it doesn't feel like a Sims game.

There are many features that I feel are a huge improvement over what we had in TS2: careers, skills, seamless neighbourhood (including the whole NH aging together). For these reasons I can't go back to TS2 because I miss them too much. There are also, though, some features that I don't really care about and am not entirely sure why they have been included. All the collecting and mission completing, for example. For me, whilst it may be fun to do it once or twice, it gets boring quick, which is why I lost interest in WA quickly. Previous games have never put much emphasis on collecting/missions, and I do agree with other people who have said that it seems like EA are trying to entice gamers who might never have played sims before by making it more RPG-like. Don't get me wrong, I love RPGs, but not when the game is supposed to be a life-simulator.

I also agree with kiwi_tea about the stability. A big problem for me with TS3 is that my NHs become completely unplayable after about 4/5 generations (error 12s and 13s), the game crashes without warning and I also have had to reinstall twice - things that never happened, and I never had to do (with the exception of the occasional crash), with TS2 in the five years I've been playing it. As I play legacy style this really ruins the game for me. It is possible that it's my fault my NHs bork and that my game crashes and goes wrong, however these problems are certainly not rare amongst the community, so if it is a PEBCAK then it's something that happens to a hell of a lot of players who can't all be doing the same things wrong.

Not that this is a problem as such: I think it's been quite a shock going from TS2 with all EPs and SPs and tons of CC to make the game exactly what I want, to bare-bones TS3 base game. I don't mean that I think the game is lacking in content, just that going from a game with six years worth of stuff to a brand new game is weird and it can feel a little empty. As far as EPs go, the ones I am interested in are ones that add and improve things to my sims everyday lives, like Seasons, AL, OFB (etc) did for TS2. EPs like BV/WA for me are fun for a while but because they don't really add anything except for when you go on vacation, I can live without them.

Finally, I also think that TS3 has lost some of the Sims 'charm'. There is something I get when playing the older versions that I just don't feel with TS3. In many ways it feels like quite a different game than the others have been. With TS2 I could play for hours and hours and hours. I can't do that with TS3. I am not a person to bash something an instalment in a series that I enjoy if it's not as good as the rest, and whilst I do find the game enjoyable, I don't find it as enjoyable as TS2. Personally I look forward to new EPs to see what they will add and whether it will improve the game.

I don't care if TS3 is a bomb or not and in my opinion the only thing EA will do with TS2 is putting it together in various collections.

For the forums I would imagine that there are more people browsing here who don't play or like TS3 like me. The discussions about the pros and cons (especially the fights ) are far more entertaining than thread No. thirtysomething about what happened to Brandi Broke.

Huh. That's certainly not my experience. The sims in TS3 express themselves in a wider variety of ways than they did in TS2 (particularly if we limit ourselves to pre-NightLife TS2). TS2 sims had, essentially, five mutually exclusive pair of traits that could shape their behavior. TS3 sims have considerably more and, even when taking in to consideration the behavioral overlaps in some of the traits, there's still a much wider pool the sims are drawing on when it comes to reacting to their world.

And their social menu is deeper, and the commodity system means that their negative reactions tend to be a little more nuanced (in TS2, unless they were on really good terms, and sometimes even then, negative responses were mostly just expressed as anger).


I'll give you that one. In both TS1 and TS2, the sims had that disappointed sigh that I always found amusing (and in some situations a bit touching).


Yeah, but sims have always been crackheads. In TS2 I had a pregnant sim drop dead (she'd gotten caught up in the must sleep/must eat cycle) and when Grimmie showed up, her husband dropped to his knees and begged for her life. Grimmie let her come back, and as soon as she had rezzed, hubby stood up, changed in to his work clothes and sauntered off to work .



I haven't played TS1 in ages, but I have no doubt that there are aspects of it I would consider superior to TS2 and TS3. I always loved the difficulty of TS1, even if it did mean your sim led a pretty depressing life for a while. I also miss some of the charm of TS1. It had a lot of the quirkiness and humor of the original SimCity and SimEarth games that is absent from TS2 and more so from TS3 (aside from ongoing references to llamas).

Still, shortly after installing TS2, I found myself unable to play TS1 anymore and finally uninstalled it. Similarly, shortly after installing TS3, I found myself with no desire to go back to TS2. While I miss things from the earlier Sims games, I generally find TS3 to be an improvement.

But, yeah, the game has evolved enough, I can understand it's maybe gone in a direction some people don't particularly like.

Who cares really if it bombs or it doesnt? It's just a game. I'm sure most people don't lose sleep worrying if it will succeed or not. Or living in a state of despair.
To those that enjoy Sims 3, have at it. I have no interest in it and am very content to play my Sims 2. It never gets old, or boring. They all look different. They have personality. People that love and play the Sims 3 really don't need to be defensive or to take it to heart. Just enjoy the game. But this was a thread called Sims 3 going backwards, wasnt it?

I think that a lot of people like the Sims, which is an obvious statement because hell, we're on a Sims based website. But the thing is people keep saying they might just go back and make expansion packs for The Sims 2. That would be very unlikely, or I think so anyway.

And if they were to go back and do something like that I'd wonder why in the hell they're wasting their time doing that instead of just making new expansions for The Sims 3 and fixing all the issues that it has.

At the moment I've stopped playing Sims 3, until they find a work around for Mac users with custom hair (.package format) that doesn't make your people bald x_x, and I even went back to the point of re-purchasing Sims 2, I didn't have the Mac version, and the University expansion and doing that.

But nonetheless, I think EA should get their butts moving fixing the problems Sims has, adding more features, and just making it all around a better game. Wouldn't it be great if they made an expansion that was just all of the features we loved from The Sims 1 & 2 and NEW features we wanted all in one expansion? Now that my friends, would be something I'd pay for.

There's a few things I miss from TS2. I tend to like large houses, and the fixed lots in TS3 irritate me to no end. Yes, we now have CAW, but that's still an annoyingly large amount of work that would have been easily simplified if the neighbourhoods were set up like TS2.

The fact that you can only control one household per game is rather annoying, as well, since in the past I usually had a half a dozen different families on the go. True, you can switch families on TS3, but there are repercussions for doing so.

And, it's not really a backwards thing, but I do hope they bring out a pet expansion soon, since that was one of my favourite parts. Preferably with an assortment of different pets, instead of just cats and dogs. People have pet rabbits and other creatures as well. And on that point, I'd love to see them add in some living farm animals. Admittedly, I live in small town Canada, but even Toronto has farms outside it, with farm animals.

Talking of showing reaction when kids are taken away I thought sims 1 was the best like that. Such a fuss was made of a kid going to military school. There was tragic music played, and the kid walked off really reluctantly with shoulders drooping. Out of all the games, Sims 1 had the most emotional depth for me. Betty Newbie seemed permanently depressed, even after Bob died (!) and you could really feel it.

Not to mention the fact that when kids left for military school...they never came back! We couldn't call the social worker or have another family adopt them.

I think the reason TS3 lacks emotional depth, other than their obvious indifference to bad things happening, is that everything seems way too easy now. If a child gets taken away by social services, you can have another family make a phone call and adopt them just like that. If a sim dies, other sims can still interact with them (not to mention reproduce) even as ghosts and with the Science Lab in the hood, they can be resurrected.

I know the developers said in interviews that they wanted to move past peeing and focus on the "important stuff", but if they make death and loss and breakups trivial as well, then what else have we got to focus on?

Please don't say quests.

Aren't you describing TS2 behavior? I thought TS3 children taken by ss were essentially lost in the system (randomly placed in the neighborhood, with the very real possibility that they could be swept away via story progression).

The talk of Sims not reacting badly to terrible situations is interesting to me. I find my Sims have many more nuanced ways of reacting that I don't have to control in 3 than they ever did in 1 and 2, both facially, with body language and even in the little things they say. On the flip side, there are many more ways in which *I* can control the situation, unlike in 1 where things were pretty cut and dried and 2 where, until Nightlife, there just wasn't that much for Sims to do together. I don't want to have to work for five Sim days just to make people fall in love. I want that to happen like...right now so I can move forward with their story.

Also, I think that a lot of the changes in Sim behavior come from the very changes people asked for or modded for in Sims 2. Leaving children at home instead of calling for a babysitter or refusing to leave is something I remember people talking about in Sims 2 days. "It's limiting, we want to control what our Sims do!" That's the main example that comes to mind but always remember that to gain something, you usually have to lose something, particularly in a game world that is bound by the rules of its engine.

I agree with the poster who mentioned "sideways" rather than backward. The game is different, just as Sims 2 was different from Sims 1.

Overall, these threads amuse me. I remember people who *hated* Sims 2 and went right back to Sims 1 with the same fervor and disgust at EA that people are declaring now over Sims 3.

It doesn't matter what you call it. If it's contagious, I refer to it as "The Plague".

I didn't build in any kind of immunity system in the test because I was examining the effects of how a plague, ala TS2, as implemented by EA, would function. If the infrastructure existed, *I* could do better, of course, but I intentionally produced a system emulating TS2, the way EA would have made it.

Like I said, quasi-implementation of TS2. In TS2, none of these factors mattered, and so I intentionally omitted them.

If it were up to *ME*, I would have implemented a whole raft of things and you'd have an entire genetics system playing around this, so you could actually intentionally selectively breed ubermenschen with genetic immunity to all diseases, but obviously, that is not the route EA would have taken. An EA-implementation would have all sims susceptible to the same set of generic diseases with no particular immunity system, because the diseases are generic, and all sims behaving identically. If it were up to ME, we'd have traits like "Hypochondriac". But none of these things would be how EA would have done it, and doing things the way EA would have done it reveals why EA did not do it.

I can't say sims are really more "indifferent", although they no longer engage in universal emo whine fits over encountering a bug, so that's a plus. I actually got so sick of the CONSTANT WHINING that I had to CRUSH IT AND STOMP IT AND BURN IT.

Get on with it then - we're waiting!

I'm sorry, I didn't realize that they'd changed the adoption system in TS3.



Well, why are you doing what EA would have done? Aren't they "non-awesome". Potential to sell an EP that features diseases is enough of a reason for them to not have done it. Do it your way and we'll see if the town manages to survive diseases. I'm confident that most sims would be just fine.

And, Ranissa, I'd have to disagree with sims having more to do together. I'll admit that they seem to have more to do by themselves (exploring the town, options at work, collecting, fishing, etc.) but with other sims they just talk. They talk, they joke, they flirt and I see couples kissing every once in a while but that's about it.

They rarely engage in group activities because there aren't that many things they could do together. How can they hang out in a hot tub when there isn't one? Or play the "Myshuno" game instead of the foosball table? How about the pool table? A bubble blower maybe? And they can't even shop together anymore or hang out properly because even when you invite someone out, they wander off unlike in Hot Date and Nightlife when you could create groups and go on dates.

There are so many activities that could involve more than one sim but mostly we just get objects that involve skilling and crafting. And from what I've been reading about the Ambitions EP, more skilling and crafting. These are great but they are solitary activities. I'd like to see sims doing things together. After all, not every sim has the Loner trait.

In TS2 they can have yoga classes cause you get to invite others to join. The career rewards can be used by not just one but multiple sims who can train each other (punching bag, lie detector, biotech station, etc). If you place a hot tub in a community lot, sims would surely use it and interact with each other.

And having more tabs like "Ask About Day" and "Brighten Day" don't really do much from what I've seen so far. They're just like "Chat" since they may improve one's sim relationship with another, but do nothing else. Their facial expressions can mostly be seen on the UI and not on the actual sim that you're playing. Moodlets inform the player what the sim is feeling, but if you looked at the sim in action, you wouldn't be able to tell if they had just had sex or lost a loved one.

I have to agree. While the player may receive more information about the TS3 sim via traits, menus, and moodlets (some of which is superfluous) there is less being conveyed visually via facial features, body language -- an overall less animated reaction. I like to see the sims in action either through activities or reactions. Rather than see a sim get a bunch of red minus signs and then talk about fruit parfait--I would find it more satisfying entertainment (and better storytelling) to see my sim clench their fists then storm off and go eat a fruit parfait. LOL.

I doubt EA will fix anything that doesnt work in TS3. They didnt with 1 or 2. Usually some brilliant modder came along and created a workaround or a solution. Since 3 is harder to mod, I'm reluctant to even give it a try seeing some of the issues people are dealing with.

This was from pages and pages ago, before people started KILLING EACH OTHER WITH FIRE in the comments, but I remember the violin that was modded for Sims 1. It was on Bairaro ne Jensei/La Vie en Rose (BNJ/LVR), and he also made a working saxophone. That site's creator made some of the most gorgeous objects and skins available for Sims 1 (especially many Japanese-themed objects), but eventually gave up making CC altogether. I always thought it was a shame that he never created for TS2 when it came out, but he apparently got a lot of hate mail for some of his more "adult" skins, and just quit out of disgust and lack of time.

What I do is this:

I play The Sims 2 for The Sims 2-style content.

I play The Sims 3 for The Sims 3-style content.

This way I can get the best of both worlds! I feel The Sims 2 is a complete package with all of the EPs and SPs and TONS of CC! So I'm content with that.

I'm REALLY enjoying the fresh-approach that EA is taking with the Sims 3. If we had a clone of the Sims 2 I'd be highly disappointed and feel that EA was just trying to soak us for more money! This way it's all new territory to explore.

I feel the franchise is definitely moving forward.