Meet the new simulation, exponentially more complicated than the old one -- mainly because the scope has shifted from household microcosm to community macrocosm.
"While you're playing in one home [in The Sims 2]," says Sims 3 executive producer Ben Bell, "nothing else changes in the other homes in the neighborhood." Unless you were pretending your family lived in The Twilight Zone, the selective march of time screwed up stories and kept your familial snow globe disconnected from the rest of civilization. Says Smith, "If you had a little boy next door you were fond of, but you kept playing your family on your lot and didn't move the other family along, you'd be 30 years old and he'd still be a little boy."
And so in The Sims 3, the den becomes a warren, and "everything you would expect to be happening is happening, whatever the time of day," says Bell. "All of the characters in the town are changing together. You can zoom in on your Sims. You can go next door to visit your neighbors. You can knock on the door or peek in the window. You can go downtown, and the people you meet are people in your Sims' lives. What would happen if you ran into your boss on the weekend in town? Would you ruin your Sim's life by doing something embarrassing?"
That time-lost little boy next door from The Sims 2 now ages and changes alongside your own child. "They can become high school sweethearts," says Bell. "They can grow up together, get married, have a family of their own -- and those characters will advance along with your family. These Sims will act out their lives in an intelligent way depending on the personality traits they have."
With an expensive backlog of DLC that it struggles to run on modern hardware, The Sims 3 deserves revisiting.
They all deserve a remaster, alongside the Sims City games. Sims 3 in particular should be looked at more only cause of how hot it makes PC's.
A voice actor for The Sims spoke about his experiences doing voice work for the game's fictional Simlish language, and how there was no dictionary for them
The Sims franchise has been a part of my life ever since the first game came out. It was one of two games I camped outside of a store for, the other one being Black & White.
