Simport: New Showtime Expansion Pack Feature
Today I was cruising Youtube looking for something else, when I spied an official Sims 3 Showtime preview of how the Simport feature will work. In this four minute video, two Sims 3 producers walk you through the process of using Simport, and explaining how it's going to work.
Simport is the big breakthrough that the Showtime expansion pack has been teasing about for ages. As I suspected, you will not be able to personally go over to your friends' Sims' houses and play with their stuff (the way that you can with The Sims Social game on Facebook). Instead, you will be shipping your Sim off to your friends, who will have your Sim show up in their game.
However, it also has a huge social component which is a real breakthrough for the Sims franchise. (I mean, not counting The Sims Online, which most people have quietly reconciled to the trash bin of internet history. For the record, I was in the beta program for about five minutes before I realized I didn't want to talk to people, and dropped it.)
You won't need to use Simport in order to play the game effectively. Which is good news for many players, because using Simport will require a friends list (which is to say, friends). And once you have friends and a friends list, it looks like you will probably end up spending a lot of time managing other people's Sims and their performances. This will probably be as awesome as it will occasionally be annoying.
So why should you bother? Well, once your Sim stamps all the stamps in their passport page thingie, you get a special item. And you want special items, right? I know I do! Seriously, I do.
One nice feature of Simport is that it will strip custom content from Sims when they show up in your game. I had worried about this, because there have been several cases of custom content breaking games. Like the notorious "slut boots" problem, where the slut boots custom content hitchhikes its way into your game, and causes bizarre display problems when it does.
You can send images and reports back to your friends, snapshots of their Sims doing their performances. And any actions you perform on their Sim will be reported back to them. It's too bad you can't actually visit someone else's home in person, but I still think this looks pretty exciting!