http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/946/946029p1.html

I was about 10 minutes into playing The Sims 3 when I realized something quite astonishing: my sims hadn't gone to the bathroom yet. And despite still having virtual bladders, they didn't need to constantly heed the call of nature. Now if you played The Sims and The Sims 2, you will remember that you had to handhold your sims' lives; this includes each and every bathroom break, which seemingly occur every minute or two in game time. That's a lot of flushing. Yet, here I was, at EA, playing The Sims 3 and discovering that what the designers have been promising seems to be true: The Sims 3 is a much broader game than its predecessors, more concerned with telling stories than with focusing on the ordinary minutiae of everyday life.

Despite the fact that it's the latest chapter in the most successful PC franchise of all time (100 million copies sold in the franchise and counting), The Sims 3 almost feels a bit like a stealth project. EA has been working quietly on the game for four years; not even revealing its existence until last year. (Maxis, an EA studio and the original studio behind The Sims, handed off the franchise to the team at EA Redwood Shores a while ago.) I got a sneak peak at The Sims 3 back when it was announced, but that was it; I hadn't seen the game since March. Earlier this week I not only got a refresh on the game, but I had the chance to play it for the first time. I didn't get a lot of play time, mind you, but I did get enough to get a tantalizing glimpse of the brave new world, or, in The Sims 3's case, the brave new town.

Video Interview - Watch or download the video here (HD available).

The first thing of course is sim creation. The new create-a-sim has a cleaner look and has some nifty new options, but it should be familiar to series veterans. You again select gender and age, and then tinker with sliders to mold facial features, select hairstyles and colors, clothes, and so on. Without going into too much detail, there's a much greater amount of control here. This goes from being able to tweak hair colors to pretty much any color in the gradient, as well as tweaking highlights and other such things. You can adjust body weight as well as overall musculature, but height is still off limits. The sims' age ranges go from infant, toddler, child, teen young adult, adult, to elder. Sims still age, so an infant will grow up, grow old, and eventually die in the great circle of virtual life, but there's a slider that lets you adjust the sims' life spans. (The current maximum life span is about 1,000 days.)

Another nifty new feature is the ability to basically create cloth patterns and even textures on clothes, and then dragging-and-dropping those patterns onto other clothes. It's possible to create matching wardrobes, right down the shoes. Everything that you create can be saved and eventually shared with others. And, before I transition to the big game changer--personalities--one welcome change is the ability to match different hair styles to clothes. In the previous games, hair styles didn't change unless you went through a tedious process, so if you had a sim wearing a baseball cap, he or she wore that cap with everything, including formal clothes. Now you can associate different hair styles to different outfits, so you can have the nicely coifed hair for the formal wear, but the more shaggy or casual hair for everyday outfits.

It's the shades that make this outfit.

While these are all mostly cosmetic changes, the big change to create-a-sim is the removal of the old messy/neat sliders and the addition of personality traits. You can pick up to five personality traits per sim, and this will modify his or her behavior appropriately. There are a lot of traits, stuff like evil, brave, coach potato, hopeless, perfectionist, natural cook. (Executive Producer Ben Bell likes to mention that they got many of the traits by going over online personal ads and picking popular descriptions people like to use.) You can make people as deep or shallow as you'd like depending on the type and number of traits. The traits that you pick also play a big role in helping to determine your sims' wishes. Each sim has a lifelong wish to work towards, like becoming an astronaut or assembling the perfect aquarium.

Once you're done with creating your sim or a family of sims, it's time to drop down into the game. The Sims 3 will launch with a town called Sunrise Valley, a small, picturesque burg tucked in between mountains and ocean. Sunrise Valley has plenty of homes and a small downtown core; when your sims move in you can choose to purchase an existing home or build a new home in many of the expansion plots tucked away in the hills. In a nice, time-saving move, when you purchase a home you can choose to buy it empty or furnished; the furnished option costs more, of course. Sunrise Valley has plenty of recreational areas, like a big park and the beach and even a stadium. There are even fishing holes tucked up in the woods, as well as a cemetery to bury old sims and to provide a supernatural element, aka ghosts. It sounds like you won't be able to create a brand new town from scratch, but you can rearrange the buildings in Sunrise Valley.

As you may know, the big new feature in The Sims 3 is that it busts out of the single-lot-at-a-time gameplay of its predecessors. In The Sims and The Sims 2, whenever your sims left their homes or a downtown lot, you encountered a load screen. In The Sims 3, the entire town is simulated simultaneously; there are no loads. This opens up a lot more gameplay, as life is no longer fixed in one location. I had one sim get a job in the army; he could have simply picked up the newspaper and looked for a job that way, but I simply told him to hail a cab (he could also jump in a car, if he owned one), and I followed the cab as it drove through the town and up to the army base in the hills, where he jumped out and got an introductory job cleaning latrines. That's Army strong, all right. Meanwhile, I told his female roommate to get a job in the music career, which meant having her go downtown and sign up at the local theater.

While all this is happening, the rest of the sims in town are leading their lives. For instance, while travelling past the park you might see a big birthday celebration going on for one of the town's inhabitants. You'll find interesting detours to explore, like maybe hunting for one of those fishing holes in the mountains. Suddenly, the whole town is your playground, and I found it easy to control both sims. It certainly helps that the AI is robust enough that if you're not controlling a sim directly, he or she will take care of themselves. So they may go to the bathroom if they need, or take a shower, or get some food, without you prompting them. Their personalities will also affect what they choose to do, and how they interact with other sims. So instead of getting just random actions, the goal is to have a town where people are actually trying to live their lives.

Ah, there's no love like sim love.

Oh, by the way, that old trick about getting a sim to be your friend by alternating between gossip and chat about 30 times is no more. EA wouldn't say exactly how, but that has been changed. Now you're going to have to work a bit more at actually making friends.

What I didn't get a good look at yet was the way you share items in the game. EA isn't showing that off yet, but it won't be some kind of Spore-like, in-game content browser. Part of the reason is, as Bell notes, people don't want to share literally everything they make in the game with others. So you can pick and choose what you want to share, whether it be your sims, clothes, furniture, and more. And the sharing mechanism will be a special Web page.

Meanwhile, this is the age of Internet video, and you can (like in The Sims 2) record gameplay. That same Web page will also allow you to edit your videos and create mashups that you can share with others or post on video sites such as YouTube. We'll get more details regarding all of this later on.

Wait a sec... is she cheating with the other dude?

The Sims 3 might not convert those who don't play The Sims, but then again, it probably doesn't need to. There are plenty of fans out there, voracious for new content judging by the sales success of the many expansions for The Sims 2. What The Sims 3 shows is a healthy growth in the direction of the gameplay. After all, the big leap from The Sims 2 from The Sims was basically going from 2D to 3D graphics; for the most part the gameplay was essentially the same. That formula has remained in place for almost a decade now, so it's time for an update. The Sims 3 looks to shake things up in a good way.

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Seriously I just CANNOT WAIT! I willl have a new laptop by then too!

tey seem to answer all the PROBLEMS I had with the old games.

Yeah well I've been following Sims news for a long time now (since they-EA-announced it) and, like you, I couldn't be happier about the changes they made. I'm so hyped about this!

It'll be much nicer to play since you won't need to take care of Sims as much and will be able to focus on doing other things. Plus there's so much customisation now. Odd clothes colours or unmatching furniture is no more! Also, from what I read, they're putting quite a lot of stuff in the base game... That leaves the opportunity to make fresh expansion packs (because I do buy them all XD).

Unfortunately, I won't be able to play it right away when it comes out. Will have to wait till June.

Looks very interesting, can't wait to play it. Though that about not letting you create new neighborhoods has me worried, I mean, I want to play the game and my brother will want to, but I don't want my Sims to age when my bro's playing...so I figured we'd play separate neighborhoods. Though maybe EA will implement different profiles, so maybe it won't be any problem

Other than that, it looks great, since Sims 2 was a great game (and a great time-waster), I'm sure that Sims 3 will follow suit

I love the sims. I have the original game plus most of the expansions. I haven't played the Sims 2, but I'm considering playing this one as it sounds less stressful to manage a Sim than in the first one. The first one is so much fun, so I'm assuming this one will be too.