The Sims 3 Generations Expansion Pack
There's a new Sims 3 expansion pack coming soon, The Sims 3 Generations. World Adventures added world travel, Ambitions added new careers and Night Life opened up a world of parties and vampires. So what will Generations do? Well, Generations is an expansion pack designed to add depth to the entire life experience. In other words Generations is an effort to make the toddler, childhood and teen stages of a sim's life cycle actually worth playing. (Great news for those of us who always enable testing cheats to speed through the boring youth stages of life.)
So what does this
mean in practise? Well it means a bunch of new items and more
importantly, options for sims who haven't reached the age of maturity
just yet. Child sims will now have imaginary friends and their play
will comprise more than just climbing up a slide and slipping down it
over and over again until they're tired of life. With a bunch of new games and toys to play with, not to mention new interactions, they stand a chance of being potentially halfway interesting.
Teen sims aren't going to be left out either, they will be able to prank their friends and other sims unfortunate enough to live nearby. They'll also be able to throw their very own special teen parties, with the necessary adult supervision, one assumes.
Several new party types are being added to the game, including Teen Parties, Graduation Parties, Bachelor Parties, and new Weddings. These new parties aren't just new names slapped over old party types, each type of party comes with a whole range of new interactions.
Perhaps most excitingly in the Generations pack, sims will now have memories of specific exciting events in their lives. Their first kiss, for instance, can be recorded forever and even uploaded to share with other sims players online. Legacy players are going to enjoy this functionality especially I would imagine.
It's not just fun for the kids though, having children is now much more of a fulfiling experience for adult sims. Sims will also be able to record their sim kids as they grow up, with the introduction of video cameras that really record what your sim sees. The technology is so advanced that sims will be able to remove data disks for playback on television sets. Family movie night, here we come!
There's speculation that a new town will be included, though that is yet to be confirmed. What has been confirmed are two new traits, 'Nurturing' and 'Rebellious'. Finally sims will be better parents (most sim parents seem curiously indifferent to their kids if you give them high free will and let them get on with it) and teens and kids will actually have a spark of personality.
All in all, this sounds like quite an interesting pack. It is certain that 'family life' has been pretty lacklustre so far in The Sims 3, this focus on celebrating and expanding the basics of gameplay is much needed and from what this blogger sees, highly anticipated!
- The Sims Generations: Interview with Ryan Vaughan, Sims 3 Producer
The Sims Generations expansion pack has been officially announced today, so we put a few questions to an excited Ryan Vaughan, Producer for the insanely popular series.