Things I Have Learned About The Sims 3
1. The release date on the Amazon page has been changed to February 16th although the original official release date was February 20th. No one is sure if this is a weird Amazon glitch, or an actual change in the release date, or just due to the discrepancy between “ship date” and “release date.”
2. It may not ship with SecureROM. In response to much consumer outrage, EA has started pulling SecureROM from many of their titles. After the SecureROM debacle with regards to Spore, I think it’s a safe bet that EA won’t ship The Sims 3 with SecureROM.
3. Several high profile bloggers have posted what they learned at the super secret Sims 3 “Creators Camp” conference. Snooty Sims probably has the best list, which features an extensive set of changes.
The most remarkable to me is that Sims will age even if you aren’t playing them. This means that you won’t be able to “warehouse” Sims by sticking them on a lot - they will still age. Hmm, I hope the “family bin” will hold a lot of Sims!
4. I desperately wish I had been invited to that conference.
5. The #1 question being asked on Sims 3 forums across the internet is, “Will my computer play it?” The short version of the official recommendation is a 2.0 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 128MB video card.
This is a big step up from The Sims 2, which requires an 800 MHz processor, and 256MB of RAM. However, it’s almost identical to the Spore system requirements. (Fun fact: I bought this very computer specifically to play Spore. I then decided that I didn’t really care for Spore. But it’s come in handy in other ways.) My computer has a pair of 1.6GHz Pentium Dual processers, I wonder if that will be good enough?
6. You do NOT want to download the game directly from EA’s download service. Here is what I learned about EA’s download service: it doesn’t allow you to keep your downloaded game. You download it, install it, and then a month later the game files go away.
This is a problem in at least two scenarios: your installation of The Sims 3 blows up and you need to reinstall, or you buy a new computer and want to play The Sims 3 on it. In either case, you will NOT be able to do this if you originally bought it through the EA online store.
Sure, you can pay an extra fee in order to have the game files available for a while longer. But this is just paying more for something that (in my opinion) you ought to have anyway.
Hold the line, people! I know it is going to be hard for some of you, but I STRONGLY advise that you wait until you can get your hands on a physical copy of the game. Whether that means pre-ordering from an online retailer, or haunting the nearest physical retailer on the release date. Trust me, you’ll thank me later!