Hello! I have never played Sims 3 before, I have been playing sims 2 for the last 10 years and I love it! Truthfully, I was looking forward to TS4 but seeing as how it was nothing but a major money making scheme...I was wondering if TS3 with its updated xpacs and CCs...if it is worth playing?

I think so--see if you can't get it at a steep discount, though. Especially now that the sequel's out, I wouldn't pay more than $10 for any individual expansion pack or the base game itself.

Thanks for the advice! I was hoping the TS3 is a little bit more fleshed out now with full expacs, i refused to buy it before because of the pudding faces and the missing features, i am hopeful that it is a bit more complete.

absolutely. i didn't like all of the expansions (such as ITTF) but there are a lot to play with.

With all 11 EPs, I feel like TS3 has a greater depth of content than TS2 does. Of course, I'd be embarrassed to say how much TS2 I've played, so I might be slanted due to personally seeing everything TS2 has to offer.

Totally recommend TS3, though! If you're not sure which EPs to get, I would recommend starting with the EPs that flesh out core gameplay (in order from my favorite to least): Late Night, Seasons, Ambitions, Pets, Generations, and maybe Showtime. Once you've gotten your fill of those, the rest of the EPs make fun distractions.

Does anyone know if you can see rain through the windows on the seasons expax? One of the most annoying things in ts2 was when you look out the window from inside a room you can't see rain or snow...

You can definitely see rain through the windows. What seems like in the house, too, if you zoom out too far.

Yes, you can. I would recommend starting with a few expansions, IMO not all are for everyone. Also, the more expansions, the more strain on your computer. So, check if your computer can handle it well. The help section should be useful.

In my personal opinion, World Adventures (mostly because most Custom Worlds require it), Late Night, Generations, Seasons, and Ambitions are essential.
Pets if you like them (they are controllable ion TS3), Supernatural for more supernaturals although there are vampires in Late Night and Island Paradise for house boats, resorts and the like. I personally don't play much with Showtime and barely with Into the Future.

Overall, I prefer TS3 over TS2 but I play them both.

Yeah I've been thinking about maybe getting new expansions but I'm not sure about it for that reason. It seems like you need a gaming rig to be able to play more than a few.

Only if you consider this a "gaming rig".



The only thing I had trouble with before installing the NVIDA card (which ran me $30) was Pets. It ran fine but the cats, dogs, and horses looked all glitchy. I can run the graphics pretty close to mass specs now that I have the graphics card and I have a ton of mods including Nrass storyprogression and all the addons for it. Aside from pretty long load times it runs at about 30-60 fps with out a hitch.

Running all the expansions and a bunch of the stuff packs as well.

If you are going to get TS3, here are my favourite expansions:

1. Late Night (Bars, apartments, a new life stage)
2. Pets (Pets. Although I never really play with it, I can't imagine my game without it.)
3. Ambitions (I'm in it for the gameplay)
4. Generations (Gameplay.)
5. Seasons (Seasons, Weather and Gameplay)

The rest you can gather eventually. Supernatural is fun, but I never really use it in everyday gameplay. University is also amazing, but it's not the first that I'll recommend. World Adventures is very fun, too, and you'll need it for custom worlds, but I can't say that I use it much. Showtime is okay, but I'd leave that until last. Island Paradise is laggy (If you use Islo Paradislo) but it's fun. Finally, Into the Future is good, if you like Sci-fi, but like Supernatural I never really use it for everyday gameplay.

Hope that helped!

TS3 is definitely a fun game. I've been one of those who criticized it for the lacking Sims' AI. (Maybe all those TS2 vs. TS3 threads were the reason they went with these "emotions" now, I don't know. I shudder to think that it was the case...)
But, onto the topic: TS3 is definitely worth playing. I'm playing it now.

It is buggy; routing is a bitch in most worlds (especially Bridgeport), etc. But there are also fixes around and a ton of mods that lets you deal with many issues.

Open world management and story progression do take some time to get used to, in the sense of learning how to properly set up your population and com lots so that they are populated and do not lag. It takes patience and practice. Sims themselves are charming, even if at times I'm not exactly certain why they do specific things (like be mean when they have no mean trait, etc. - the same old failing of the trait system I always pointed at). They definitely feel more alive to me now then few years back. I abandoned the game back then not because it was boring but because it was buggy, mostly. And the Sims need to get used to, if you loved how the personalities of TS2 Sims were. And once you get used to the open world you'll want nothing less. I certainly love it.

Still, you'll have a lot to learn to be able to play it comfortably. Many, many bugs - a lot more than TS2 had. My main piece of advice: arm yourself with mods and fixes, a story progression mod and a lot of patience. And don't panic when the bugs start to bite! There's usually a solution out there. Some of Twallan's mods are essential for smooth gameplay, like Error Trap, Master Controller, Traveler (fixes the borked traveling system of WA), Overwatch (deletes excess cars, fixes broken situations and a whole host of other things - don't ask... you'll see, if you decide to play this game). And Ellacharmed's routing fixes for individual worlds.

Good luck and have fun, whatever you decide.

Goodbye to Sims4 and welcome back to Sims3: that's what i did after 40 hours of gameplay with two families in the two "cities"
And when i used CaSt again i said, almost crying, "I missed you SOOO MUCH!" (among all the other features sims4 is lacking)
So, yes, trust me: Sims3 is worth, sooo worth

Along with all those beautiful Nraas mods too, and tons of custom content.

Yeah, I played TS3 very briefly (like, for less than a week) when it first came out and felt no pull towards it at all. Decided to stick with TS2 and got a good few years more out of that game with no regrets. But then less than a year ago I spent a few hours playing TS3 on a friend's computer and found myself hooked. Since then I've reinstalled my TS3, gradually picked up all the expansions (got a couple every time Origin had a sale, refused to buy them at full price because compared to TS2, the prices are quite high) and now I can't imagine going back to TS2. There's so much to do, there's still so many features I haven't even got near to yet and most of the ones I have played with, I haven't gotten to explore fully. Switching to TS3 has completely revitalised my enthusiasm for the sims, after a couple of years of mostly low interest with an occasional resurgence for a week or two once every few months.

This is my opinion as a huge fan of The Sims 3, and someone who started with the Sims 3 and never really played Sims 2. It gave me so many hours of entertainment that I couldn't honestly not recommend giving it a try!

That said, if you are an impatient person, you will find the game frustrating. Lag and long loading between worlds is a big deal if you have all the expansions, stuff packs, and a good amount of the store items. The routing is ridiculous on some worlds, and I personally can't play it without mods to fix things like cars piling up in inventory or automatically finding and resetting stuck sims. Bridgeport is a town I have to constantly use teleport cheats in, because I hate how much time it takes to do anything if an elevator is involved. Isla Paradiso can be the same way. Pets and its wild horses are also notoriously bad for routing.

There are a lot of wonderful CC and many great mods out there to enrich the game for you, though. The open world is amazing, if your computer is up to handling it. Treat the "recommended specs" as the "bare minimum" and ignore their "bare minimum" and it will function better.

Save often and use the "Save As" feature to do it, so you can easily go back to a different save without saving over the same one over and over again. It prevents corruption and, if a bad bug shows up, losing days of progress. (Been there, done that, cursed a lot when it happened.) Always "Save As" right before you travel to another world.

Create-A-Style is addictive. I'd recommend not going too crazy with saving presets. I did, and my user preset file is like 4.5 MB, so CAS has a horribly long load time for me. I could fix it with a factory reset, but I don't like to give up what stuff I have in there that I like.

After 6-7 years of TS2 experience, the idea of TS3 loading times being frustrating is hilarious! In my experience, they're about the same length as the TS2 ones, except there's far far less of them! Once you've loaded your save file you're good, unless your sims take a vacation, which can only happen once every few sims days anyway! The only other loading screen you come across during gameplay is when planning outfits, because the game has to load a mini-CAS, and the load time there isn't awful. Compared to TS2, when my sims would leave the house maybe once a sim week because switching lots meant a loading screen, TS3 is incredibly light on load screens. And that's with all EPs, a few SPs, a small bit of store content, and plenty of CC. My sims actually get out into the world now! They interact with their neighbours!

But yeah, having Overwatch installed is pretty essential for keeping things running smoothly. And as for lag, yeah, if I'm playing a large family in a large house, I do get some lag sometimes. It's a bit annoying, but it's not a deal breaker. You lose far less time to lag than you would to TS2 loading screens. And in return for the lag, you get a massive amount of gameplay flexibility.

Thank you so much for all the responses! I am very tempted to try TS3 now after so many years of stubbornly refusing to embrace it, I am excited to see what it is about.

I think having TS2 for so many years and having a bulging downloads folder with 20 gigabytes of CC is just taxing at this point.

Is TS3 cc better to handle? Will it clog up my folders and create a giant mess?

Oh, I know there aren't a lot of load screens in TS3 compared to TS2. I never played TS2 beyond a brief dabbling when the Ultimate Collection came out, and I don't think I ever left the home lot, so I don't have experience with their loading screens and can't really offer an opinion on it. I do know that with tons of TS3 store content including every store world released, a bunch of mods, and all the EPs and SPs, though, my game takes a while to load, or switch worlds, and a trip into CAS to set outfits after aging up means I'd better block off a big chunk of time where I hope the game doesn't crash and force me to do it all over again, because you can't save in CAS.

I admit I'm far from the world's most patient person, though, so maybe it just feels like a bigger deal to me than it would to some. If do know that if I had to wait the same amount of time as my TS3 loading for every loading screen in TS2, I would not play it for long.

All that said, I still love TS3, though, and wouldn't give it up. I've had too much fun with it despite its frustrating aspects.

Well, for a start, thanks to CAST, you no longer need recolours! So that massively cuts down on the number of packages. For example, downloading a hairstyle means just one package, instead of five! (mesh, black recolour, red recolour, blonde recolour, brown recolour). And then that applies to every object in the game! I didn't even realise how much TS2 CC was recolours until I switched.

And getting your folder set up for package files is pretty easy, and you can use subfoldering to keep things organised, same as TS2. As for sims3packs, the process isn't terribly dissimilar to TS2, although sims3pack seems to be more popular with creators than sims2pack was, so more stuff has to be installed that way, which is a little irritating for me as I prefer package files.

TS3 has many catalog issues. Namely, they are slow to load, and whatever you do - change a tab or do a CAST action, they re-load each time anew, as if it is using no caches at all.

That said, in my experience a huge load of custom content would slow everything even more. However, there's so much stuff in game and CAST is amazing - as others have noted as well - and you most probably won't need as much CC for this one. I myself use only hacks, no furniture or clothes, or decor or whatnot.

In a word, be careful about how much you add to it. But on the flip side, you won't need as much.

ETA: on loading times. The game loads to main menu quickly, and the subsequent loads of saves really depend on the size of the saved world. I've had hoods load in seconds (Pharhond Island for example, a custom world), but also in excess of 5 minutes (Isla Paradiso - and since I'm already mentioning this town/these isles, get that one, it has houseboats! I'm in love with those, myself.).

I don't have a lot of patience myself (yay ADHD!), and while yeah, the loading screens are pretty frustrating, it's a massive improvement on TS2, which is what I have more experience with, so I guess I just have a very different perspective on the whole thing because of that!

I just use the same strategy that I did for TS2, and that makes it easier. Loading screen comes on, I switch to web browser until it's done. As long as I'm not sitting there waiting, I'm okay.

Interesting! Yeah with 20gbs on my hard drive, i usually let my sims 2 run while i do house chores like dishes or put an episode of House on. It takes my computer about 20 minutes to load.

I always had to find other things to do when Sims 3 game loads. 10-20 minutes isn't unusual for loading and about 10-minutes for saving. However, the nice thing is there's no other loading needed. Once the game is loaded, you can play continuously until you want to save. There was once a time when I would just leave the game loaded all the time and just hibernate the computer instead of shutting it down.

So i bought the sims 3 today and after installing it and playing with CAS...i found this..:



What the....

You mean men don't dress like that where you are?