The Sims 3 Has Gone Gold!
EA recently announced that The Sims 3 has "gone gold," which means that a finalized version of the game has been sent off to be manufactured. This is reassuring news for those of us who have endured endless delays with other Will Wright games (like Spore, which won Wired's Vaporware of the Year award for 2008).
All signs point to June 2nd as being the day when The Sims 3 will finally drop in stores. Personally, I'm astonished that the game's release date was only pushed back once. (It was originally scheduled to be released last November.)
Word on the street is that the wise Sims buyer will purchase the core package, and not the "Collector's Edition." For an extra $20, the Collector's Edition includes a plumbob USB thumb drive. Which sounds spiffy (the plumbob is the twirling color-coded status gem that hovers above your Sim's head). But not exactly twenty dollars worth of "spiffy."
Expect the core game to ship as a stripped down version, with many expansion packs planned for the years ahead. If you ever played The Sims or The Sims 2 without any expansion packs installed, then you know what this is going to look like!
I curse the person who first figured out that you can sell a core game with virtually nothing in it, then charge people an extra thirty bucks for collections of clothing, furniture, neighborhoods, and so forth. On the up side, the model of "release the core game, then sell expansion packs" gets the game out the door a lot faster. And it keeps the game evolving over time, which helps keep your interest high month after month.
There's no official word yet on what is going to be in the core game, versus what is being set aside for the expansion packs. Rumor has it that the first expansion pack will be about "work and jobs," which has lead most Sims fanatics to speculate that it will be a version of the Sims 2 expansion pack "Open For Business."
I'm on the seventh generation of my Sims 2 alphabet challenge (one generation for each letter of the alphabet - Aaron, Bob, Connor, and so forth). Since you will not be able to port your Sims directly from The Sism 2 to The Sims 3, the first thing I am planning to do with The Sims 3 is to create Sims 3 versions of my existing Sims 2 family line. This isn't a perfect solution, but I can't bring myself to start over, nor can I bear the thought of ending the alphabet challenge early. (Generation H was just born - twins, a boy and a girl, named Harlow and Helvetica.)
It won't be a very good mapping, due to the wildly expanded personality trait system being introduced in Sims 3. I'll have to ad lib a lot of the characteristics - instead of a "messy to sloppy" gradient, you will get a collection of personality traits like "greedy," "nerdy," "kleptomaniac," and so forth.