Sims 3 learns from MySims
MySims was originally a Wii game, so even though when it first came out I thought it looked pretty cool, I wasn’t able to play it till this past Fall, when it finally came out for PC. It’s not a deep game, but I’m not always a deep person, and I enjoyed it for about a week. MySims has straightforward gameplay: you collect objects called “essences”, take them to the woodshop, and use them to craft furniture, which you use to lure gullible visitors into making your town their home. OK that sounds weird, and it is ;)
The weirdest part is the essences, which can be used as 3D objects (in which case they function as building blocks, and can be combined in the shop with boards of various shapes) or as paint (in which case each essence gives you a choice of two patterns and two solid colors that can be used to texture your furniture).
There are dozens of essences that have to be grown, mined or fished up at specific locations. For instance, in the Japanese forest there’s a grassy area where you can dig up, um, two kinds of cake, and bacon. (A fridge made out of bacon would surely attract that visiting glutton!) Ravens, textbooks and chess pieces grow on trees. Happy essences fly into the air after a cheerful conversation. Odd? Definitely! When I told my hardcore gamer friends about this, they told me it sounded “disturbing” (while they were killing ambulatory trees and skinning them for herbs in their “serious” game ;-) ).
MySims is a “kids” game, though, while the Sims series is played by all ages, so I was a bit surprised to read in the latest developer blog entry posted on the Sims 3 site about some very MySims-like features. [Update: apparently that blog has been taken off the public part of the Sims 3 site, but it can be read here.]
There are a number of different kinds of items you can collect or grow in the Sims 3, and several of them are just as surreal as anything you’d find in MySims.
Living off the land
This aspect of the game is not entirely new, mind you. Fishing and gardening for fruits and vegetables came with the Sims 2 Seasons expansion, and while the plants and seafood were mundane, the effects of juicing the produce weren’t (who knew drinking eggplant juice made you more skilled?) Bon Voyage let you dig for treasure (you could find rocks, random small sculptures, or maps to secret locations), and collect souvenirs which could have beneficial effects if shelved together. Free Time introduced bug collecting.
In Sims 3, this gameplay trend comes with the base game and is far more developed. There is fishing again, but the variety of fish you can catch is wider — including some oddball items like “the experimental robot fish” — and you can put them in an aquarium as well as eating them or mounting them on the wall. Sims 2 had exactly 6 vegetables and 3 fruits to grow, but in Sims 3 apparently there are many more, including plants that grow non-food items. The money tree was an aspiration reward object in Sims 2 but now it takes its rightful place in your garden, and the possibility of growing eggs or steak on a plant is right out of MySims.
And apparently (not mentioned in the blog entry linked above, but in several other sources): you now have to earn your garden seeds by collecting them from plants around town, rather than simply buying them from thin air. Since Sims 3 also has a much more elaborate cooking system than the previous PC games (oddly, some of the console versions fleshed this out much further), these should form the basis for some interesting dishes.
Pet bugs and rocks!
A lot of Sims players were disappointed that the Sims 3 base game would not include pets, but now we learn that the bugs you catch can be named and kept in terraria … call your cockroach “Spot” and you won’t miss your dog ;) One hopes you can take them out and pet them! And the prospect of mining for minerals and even smelting the ore will make a lot of WoW players happy. (But can you craft a longsword of doom?)
There are two aspects of this system that I’m curious about: randomization and respawning. One presumes that fish are at least somewhat random (conditioned by your skill level), since, well, they are in all games with fishing. Will that precious gem or that rare bug always appear in the same spot, though? If so, it will be a delightful find the first time, but after that, each subsequent sim you play will simply go collect it. If not, the first family you play could well scoop up all the stuff, leaving the rest of the town with nothing.
I presume some thought has gone into spawn timers and randomization, and that a happy balance has been found.
Anyway… my guess is that realism-oriented Sims players may not be too happy with this set of features; but the young, young-at-heart and just plain immature will love it :) I’ve always liked collecting, harvesting and crafting in games, so count me in… one of those categories.
Now if we could just build our own furniture with this stuff, Sims 3 would be perfect ;)
