The Sims 3
Go outside and play.
Do my little turn on the catwalk
As previously mentioned, The Sims 3 doesn't opt for graphical beauty - instead choosing to focus on the twin objectives of simulating an entire town, and continuing to run nicely on your granny's laptop. That's not to say, though, that it doesn't look nice. One area into which a lot of work has clearly gone is character-creation, with Sims 3 characters vastly more detailed - and more customisable - than before. Faces can be tweaked almost infinitely, but the game doesn't fall into the trap of allowing feature combinations to downright ugly. Instead it works carefully around the sliders you move, creating a believable (if occasionally odd-looking) face from whatever proportions you pick. The version we saw was very much a work in progress, but still the developers were able to drag sliders around and create different but good-looking characters. Body sizes, too, are finally customisable. Right now it looks pretty simple, with sliders for things like weight and fitness, and no ability to customise things like hip-to-shoulder ratio, but it's still a major change and one that will definitely variety to your town. We're not sure whether eating loads of junk food will make your Sim fat, although obviously we hope so.
Characters, however, are only one part of the equation. The Sims 3 also offers customisation for clothes, furniture and homes, which goes beyond anything the series has done before. The game now allows you to create a "fabric" - combining a pattern with colours of your choice - and then apply it to just about anything in the world through a simple drag-and-drop interface. While that will allow players to customise their Sims fairly extensively, it's not quite the same as creating your own content for the game from scratch. On this front, we confess to a little cynicism. Given EA's lucrative trade in selling Sims expansion packs - some of which are really just collections of in-game objects - is the company really going to hand over the keys to modders once again and let them do as they please?
Rod Humble's response to that question is simple: "go for it!" The game will have modding tools built into it, to some extent; it's being designed from the ground up to be open, rather than having tools released as an afterthought. The team's view is that if the community is creating content that beats the content EA is trying to sell - well, EA needs to pull its socks up. It's a healthy attitude, matched by Humble's healthy attitude to previous upsets over nude patches for The Sims 2 and other moral panics. "It's not our job to police the Internet," he says simply, reaffirming that EA isn't going to be cracking down on user-created content or mods. Besides, he adds, the community polices itself remarkably well - mainstream Sims sites won't carry nude patches, and if you're going to scour the wilds of the Internet for naughty stuff you'll find plenty naughtier than Sims mods.
The third place
EA's encouragement of and excitement about user content is palpable. The company runs a "trading post" website for The Sims, allowing users to swap their favourite in-game items, encouraging machinima and so on. But while Sims players are a connected bunch, EA's research reveals that they're not too keen on playing together, so there's no online multiplayer - not even an Animal Crossing style "visit my town" mode. Humble, Bell and the rest of the team feel that this isn't what The Sims is about. Trading items, and even trading Sim characters or entire town layouts, is one thing, but the actual running Sim itself tends to be a very private experience, something that users by and large don't want to share. The lack of multiplayer will disappoint some, but EA seems confident of its decision.
To us, the magic of The Sims is that even a decade later, after countless expansion packs, and after years of PC gamers grumbling about the invasion of "casuals" it brought about, there's still something essentially fascinating about the concept. Even for the boys, the concept of this ultimate doll's house, the living world where you play the voyeur god, holds an innate delight. The Sims 3 promises to be the most elaborate doll's house of all - an entire town, filled with dolls whose physical and psychological features are more realistic than ever. It is a commercial phenomenon, it is a creative tool, it is a canvas for imagination, but most of all it's a great idea for a game, and you don't have to play with dolls to appreciate that.