Yes it’s shallow, yes it’s odd, but it’s my life, oh my SimGod.

Sims 3 Redux January 30, 2009

I was going to post in anger Monday, when the news broke that it appeared delays were imminent. Not because of the delays themselves (though that would be a major downer. I REALLY want to play with Sims 3), but because there was so much contradicting information.

What we know is that they removed the information from the official site saying the game is due out next month. We know that Eurogamer asked EA what was going on and they said they were evaluating the launch window. What we don’t know is… will they CHANGE the launch window?

There’s been alot of speculation why they may be reevaluating this now. One obvious possibility is that they’re trying to nail down bugs. During the Creators’ Camp early this month, the Creators had worked with a month-old version of the game that they (the Creators) noted was very buggy.  So it’s possible they’re just getting rid of those. The other possibility was that there were some more serious complaints voiced during the Creators Camp about how certain tools just weren’t as good as they should be or were missing.

What we know is, one way or the other, we’ll know soon. EA promises to discuss this soon and even if they don’t, the game has to go Gold before it gets on the shelves so we if it goes Gold soon, that means that the game will probably come out mostly on time.

I’m hoping it comes out in time. Barring that, I hope the delay isn’t too long. Mostly, I’d just like to know the score.

In my last post, I was describing how.. totally different playing Sims 3 will be, when compared to Sims 2. I’ve been doing alot of anticipated thinking about this. And then they posted another article yesterday to the site VIP section about the Collecting… I don’t think minigame is appropriate.. so let’s say portion of the game.

In short, it sounds like they took the gardening and fishing badges from Seasons and the Bug-Collecting part of Freetime and tried to give these gameplay elements a bit of real depth, as well as offering your Sims a reason to stay out of the house and explore the neighborhood. As anyone who’s played.. well.. a whole host of games.. from Animal Crossing to Diablo II (and other Dungeon Crawl Games)… collecting things can be a WHOLE lot of fun, especially the really rare stuff.

Plus, you can actually do something more with these things you collect, instead of trading them to Tom for Bells (Animal Crossing reference there. Please excuse. ). You can grow and collect fruits and vegetables and actually cook with them. From what I understand, the food system has been drastically redone and you can actually use fresh produce to cook (instead of adding “Fresh Points” or what not to your food.)

Fish can be displayed (wall mounted or put into a bowl) or, I will assume, eaten. Who knows what else (since some of the fish you can catch are not your everyday sort of fishy. The article mentions a jet black fishy with small white fangs. Vampire Fish?)

Other things you can collect are insects (no idea what you can do with them. Maybe nothing. I’m not eating them. You hear me, Maxis?!?! I’m not cooking my butterflies!!), minerals, gems and space rocks. (No Fossils, EA?)

This whole.. portion of the game is in addition to the rest of the base game.

The final picture I’m getting is that a game that, like life, makes you pick how you’ll spend your time. That there’s so much going on, so much you CAN do, that there’s simply no way that any one Sim CAN do it all. And that, in my opinion, is a positive thing. A good sort of realistic.