So I've managed to spend the entire day playing the sims, actually playing the sims. I had my household pre-made and ready to pop in there (though I did have to find out how to get them from the CAS demo to the full game) so I spent no time in CAS. I put them on an existing lot, so I haven't explored build mode yet. I was going to, but whoa, the entire day just disappeared.
No screenshots I'm afraid, but they're sims, they look sim-like, nothing particularly groundbreaking here. The sims themselves look great, but they're still just sims.
I moved my Shepard, the one from my most recent posts, and a downloaded Kaidan into a lot, I set them to 'married' in CAS to speed things up, but I don't think I really needed to do that. Anyway, Kaidan got a job as an astronaut, and they adopted a baby girl. She's a teenager now.
I spent a good deal of time controlling the daughter, but Shepard and Kaidan managed to keep themselves alive (and were constantly flirting with one another, aww) and not start any fires, so that's awesome. The daughter on the other hand, she started several fires. Heh.
So, they have these aspirations, it's basically a lifetime wish/goal as in Sims 2 or 3. Sort of a quest-structure like in Sims 3, but with the Sims 2 feature of 'once you complete one, you can choose another', which I personally LOVE. Advancing in jobs and school has a similar Sims 3 quest-structure to it.
The camera controls were a pain, but maybe that's more of a game-whiplash issue, the post before this one was about finally adjusting to Mass Effect controls after Dragon Age controls, so, that's likely. Anyway, I clicked the 'Sims 3 camera' checkbox, and it's all good now.
I picked up the game at 9am, it's now 6pm and I've forgotten to eat all day, whoops. But the game didn't crash or overheat my graphics card once, so that's getting a huge thumbs up from me!
I am a little disappointed I couldn't set the ages to 'very long', I had sims going for hundreds of sim days in 3, but the longest in 4 seems to be about double the lifespan. Still, it's better than no option at all, I guess.
I don't really know where anything is yet, but I'm finding my way around. I'll try and get a build mode review up tomorrow, or maybe over the weekend. If anything else occurs to me, I'll toss it in there.
It's not a perfect game, there are things I'd prefer to be done differently, but it's fun, and that's really all I was hoping for.
Very cool, thanks for giving us your impressions, I was wondering if you had tried it, and what you thought. If memory serves, longer lifespans were something that was introduced with the Generations expansion pack? Maybe they are saving that part for later.
ReplyDeleteI love that Kaidan got a job as an astronaut.
The individual age sliders were (take days from toddler, add to adult, whatever you liked) but there was a drop down box for lifespan length from the start, not customisable. Went from 25 days to 960 days, 90 being default. And the individual sliders were added in Generations, but were also included in the base game patch just after Generations. See: http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Lifespan
DeleteBut probably the first expansion will have toddlers and maybe individual age sliders. What I miss is the 'epic' lifespan length, it only goes up to long now.
I would have put them in military (Shepard was also in the astronaut career until they adopted the kid) but there is no military career any more.
I'm sorta imagining it as their retirement on a quiet and oddly suburban colony world, after defeating the reapers in an unspecified manner. Happily ever after. They have a certain set of skills, and it'd be a shame not to put those to use, so, astronaut.
But that doesn't really explain my Warden and Alistair who moved into the neighbourhood just after I posted this, plopped right into a downloaded castle lot down the road. Heh. And I still have Sassmaster Hawke and Anders to put in somewhere. (Sassmaster will join the entertainment career, as a comedian. There is an actual comedy skill. I have Alistair training it.)