The Sims 3

Unsavoury characters

In a sense, The Sims 3 is now simulating towns like Sim City, but it has gotten here by constructing upwards from people and relationships rather than building downwards from city-planning and zoning. What's less obvious but more eye-catching is that there are no more personality sliders. When you created someone in The Sims 2 you built a personality by sliding five bars - plotting points between sloppy and neat, or lazy and active. In The Sims 3, that's gone. Instead you choose five "character traits" for your new Sim - picked from a list of about eighty. The idea is to replicate how people describe themselves and one another. The team looked at personal ads for inspiration, and realised that choosing adjectives was what people did to sum themselves up.

The resulting system ranges from sublime to ridiculous. Perfectionist, paranoid, genius, schmoozer, daredevil, brave, clumsy, artistic, loner and outdoorsman are options, and there are more extraordinary alternatives. "Inappropriate" is in there; so are "insensitive" and "rude". So too, for that matter, is "kleptomaniac" - not to mention "hydrophobic", which can't bode well for personal hygiene. The point - aside from the fact that the ability to create an inappropriate, rude, insensitive kleptomaniac who doesn't like showers will finally allow Sims players to recreate their student flat-shares - is that most of us can probably describe our friends to a decent degree of accuracy with five adjectives. If The Sims 3's system works, recreating your friends in the game should be more effective than ever. Once they're in there, they should act realistically.

Also binned is the concept of the "mood bar" (applause?). Instead, the game now recognises that people's moods and feelings don't exist on a simple axis between happy and sad. Each character now collects moodlets, little icons triggered by events in their lives that influence mood in various ways. So, for example, a teenage Sim who experiences his first kiss will get a happy but somewhat dreamy moodlet, which lasts for several days. Being fired could render a Sim gloomy and listless for ages, but they might be ecstatic about a payrise for just one evening. The classic example is a Sim going to a party and experiencing that distressingly common Sim ailment - the public pant-wetting. Previously that just notched your mood-bar downwards. Now you'll get a moodlet that not only depresses Sim for some time but also makes them embarrassed, so they'll actively shun company until they get over it.

Come play my game

So, the simulation side is intriguing, but so's the game bit, and Rod Humble lays down "a bit more gamerness" as one of his objectives, having lost gamers' attention with the last one. This time EA wants to play to both sides of the crowd. To accomplish that, it's making your interactions with characters more high-level - and adding more goal-oriented gameplay, with a lot more challenge and depth. "No more hamster cage" was one of Humble's first directives when he took over the Sims studio - referring to the perception that The Sims was a game that emulated a cage with pets and dumb toys in it. Building the openworld model was one way of escaping that. Changing the player's role in the game was another.

Here, again, the moodlet system raises its head. Gone is the old mechanism where managing each Sim was an exercise in keeping tabs on status bars for hunger and the like. Now, Sims will acquire moodlets when things are going wrong (or indeed right) - and for the most part they'll look after their own basic needs unless you've told them to do otherwise. In fact, Humble reveals that the team created a prototype which consisted entirely of frantically clicking on household amenities to keep a Sim's various bodily function bars happy. It distilled everything they wanted to remove from The Sims 3 into a single experience - "putting all the evils of the world into a box," Humble jokes. (Ironically, the designers confide that it turned out to be fun, in a frantic Flash-game sort of way.)

Instead of leading Sims to the bathroom every time they need to go, then, you'll be focused on higher-level things. After all, you'll also have some oversight of the whole town, controlling who stays and goes and shaping the community. For your Sims' lives, you'll be focusing on challenges and goals along the way. Sims now have a host of skills they can learn as they advance through life - some are related to career paths, some are more generalised. Cooking and fishing are examples, and progressing those skills can impact your character and others' perceptions of him or her. Everything is optional; if you invite another Sim to dinner, you can serve microwaved slop out of a can, or you could buy ingredients and use the cooking skill to make something impressive. Your Sim could even catch the fish and prepare it for maximum impact.

How exactly these skills will interact with the career paths isn't entirely clear as yet, but professional advancement will be a more involved process than it was previously. Things your Sim needs to do will pop up as they work - and, with colleagues and bosses now fully realised Sims in their own right, personality and dialogue will play a big role in achieving success. Conversation, too, has changed. As you chat to people, you'll get an increasingly clear sense of what that character's traits are, and how they feel about you - and you'll also get to choose how you behave towards them, switching between options like flirty, friendly and adversarial. Combined with the moodlets system and the large number of interacting personality traits, the promise of more realistic human relationship simulation is certainly there - although whether that means more predictable or unpredictable is really a matter of personal opinion.