I was talking about the shoes!!! What self respecting person would wear sandals with that outfit?!

since we are talking about self-respect and clothing choices
so you seem to be a huge fan of that randomizing failure (erm feature) and combinations that turn out of that .. are you going to get Ambitions? dont want to say too much just some catchwords:
Stylists + flag: Makeover "tagged" for most clothings = moments assured. just play for some while and your townies look worse than that.

nevertheless its one of the EPs i really like. next to Pets and Generations. having bars to get sim-drunk is prerequisite for my playstyle - so no need to mention how much i enjoy LateNite further

I have the TS3 complete collection with all expansions and SPs...i hate to admit but i am really loving it so far!! People are right...once you have experienced CAST, there is no going back.

It's worth playing but I would not use all the EPS because some just look so lame. I think maybe 3 or 4 seem worth it. There are some real clunkers out there. I also suggest you use a few mods to make the game more playable.

Yeah--have you looked at the NRAAS suite of mods yet? I'd recommend Story Progression (SP), Error Trap, Overwatch, and maaaaaybe Woohooer to start with, then get more once you're confident you know what you're doing. Pescado's AwesomeMod has a lot of the same features as NRaas SP and Master Controller, but I've never used it and couldn't tell you anything about it.

I don't know anything about TS3 and just learning as i go along. I am a total noob at the moment. I don't even know where to start when it comes to custom content. I have a lot of googling to do! I have no CCs but right now my main priority first and foremost is hunting down default replacements....i cannot STAND the look of vanilla sims in this sequel.

PS...does anyone know where your mood bars are? In TS2 there are mood bars to tell when your sims need to go pee or is getting tired etc. i am assuming ts3 doesnt have it?

TS3 has mood bars--they're in the far right tab, if memory serves? You have to expand the display at the bottom by clicking the arrow, and there's tabs that show different stats.

Thanks!

I think The Sims 3 a very good game if it do not crash... It happens to me frequently...

@NabucodonosorII
thats not good to hear. did you check Game Help:Sims 3 Crashing Checklist if thats no help after reading Before posting in Sims 3 Help... you can also post in the Game Help Forum
if you proceed to post your problem dont forget to give as much information as possible (computer specs, when do crashes appear, mod user e.p.which mods).

I think vanilla sims can look good if you really play with the sliders. Slider extender mods help too. There is a vanilla sims picture thread where you can see others' vanilla sims. I posted a few of mine (mostly women, because I prefer making sim women over men). Most of the recent posts are by me since I guess everyone else gave up on vanilla a long time ago, but I really didn't think they looked bad. Well, maybe they are still ugly and I just got used to how they look?

As for the premades and computer-generated townies/NPCs, yeah, I guess you're stuck needing default replacements if you want to improve their looks, unless you want to take them all into CAS and tweak sliders.

Sometimes I spend most of the time I'm playing coloring stuff. After 5 years I'm still not tired of it.

I like the CAST but, honestly its okay gamewise. =/

There is not much I can add to the previous responses except to say it sure is worth playing. Now more than ever. No more EP's no more Patches and with the Mods available out there you can now play the game the way YOU want to and "almost" bug free. The Custom Content, Mods and help in here is WONDERFUL. I'll also suggest checking out game fixing and enhancing Mods over at NRaas . If you're not sure where to start over there you'll find some suggestions here in Getting Started Using NRaas Mods . Happy Simming.

Like Labella I'm going to start ts3 soon(thank god for wal-mart carrying a $800 alienware gaming rig) as well coming from sims 2 with no interest in sims 4 so i've been taking a hard look around the threads for major stuff to add first to make it playable. Thanks for mentioning that WA is needed for custom worlds as it was one i was going to skip while buying but now that i want custom hoods i'll get it. I see alot of people bitch about the genetic system being alot worse then sims 2 but for me that's a quirk that i think i'm gonna like to see in my gamestyle. It adds a new challenge to layering storytelling that will suit me creatively.

Story progression though is one facet that does worry me. How well can you fine tune the mods for those? One one hand i'm interested in how it plays out when i don't have control, yet if i'm doing a legacy town sort of thing I do want control over the characters and such but not to such an extent as they aren't living like in sims 2 until played.

A question about skintones. Since I do own the base game but only played it once on this crappy thing to test it out i remember there being the skintone range slider. Are custom skins able to use any range(like the EA) or just the preset range that the skintone comes with? I'm fleshing out an idea for an asia theme world, yet I do like my darker exotic sims so I was hoping to be able to do that if possible

What surprises me though is the disdain for certain SP's. While I find the Katy Perry one distasteful, I do admit that if i were to get it because of CAST i'm sure i can make some of those items fit into the decor of my town. Is it because of the excess volume of them or something else I'm overlooking?

AwesomeStory in Awesomemod didn't really have any fine-tuning options that I can recall.

Nraas StoryProgression on the other hand, is extensively fine-tunable. Full list of options here: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/StoryPr...on+Interactions
There are even several plugins for it if those aren't enough! Once you've got it tuned to your preference, you can save your settings and load them for every new neighborhood so you don't have to redo them. Or alternately you can create an XML tuning file for it so it defaults to your preferences for every new game.

Skintones come with their own preset range and hue.

I do like a couple of the outfits in the Katy Perry SP. One of them I use quite a bit.

I have all the expansions and my graphics are on maxed settings...it is not horribly taxing on my computer but the graphics are slower to load on neighborhood view. Are there mods that help with improving performance? I cannot find on google. =[

I loved my Sims 2, and recently I downloaded TS2 Ultimate Collection. I never had all the EP's and SP's for that series so I'm kinda enjoying an "new" old game. I never had Pets or Uni but had all the other EP's and just the H&M SP so I'm having fun. However, I still get frustrated because there is no CASt. When I play I don't miss it, when I go shopping for clothes or redecorate or build a house, that's when I get frustrated because I haven't downloaded all the recolours and meshes and a ton of CC that I got used to when I was playing TS2 originally.

As for TS3, they had me at open world, CASt and universal aging. Haven't looked back. As with TS2, I chose the EP's that made sense to my game and to date, I have World Adventures, Ambitions, Late Night, Generations, Seasons and now Island Paradise. I'm going to be getting University Life in a couple of months then I'm set. I don't have any SP's for this game but you know, there's so much CC out there that all you need is the original mesh and you can recolour and retexture with CASt a kajillion times and give it a whole new look every single time. That's what I love about CASt. If you never download and use any CC but patterns, all the stuff that's in the game can be recoloured and retextured and you'd never have the same look twice

ETA: If you're like me and have or plan on getting a ton of patterns along with meshes of tons of items (I have 12GB of Store and 3rd party CC and growing), when you first get in the game, open CASt, load all the categories - Wood, Fabric, Metals, etc., Once you've done that, get out and play or build, decorate.. whatever. You'll find (at least in my experience) that once you load all your CASt patterns, when you go back in to use it - if you're still in the same game - CASt will load a lot faster.

Nice! If I had all the expansions, though, I'd probably enjoy them more if I installed them one at a time and played it for a while before installing the next one. With all of them at once, the gameplay choices can get overwhelming (as does lag). Instead you could explore each expansion more in depth and also have something new to look forward to

In response to the original question: TS3 is worth playing even without all the expansion packs!

This is a great idea, I am finding that pets is really quite annoying with random horses running around. I am thinking of uninstalling World Adventures but i heard it is a mandatory expansion pack? What about showtime?

I've lived without Showtime and Supernatural until about a month ago. I didn't miss them. I still haven't played any of the Showtime careers but I do want to have a Werewolf toddler soon. Maybe he or she will become a magician. I like Showtime's karaoke machine and choices of venues but yeah, not exactly the richest of expansions.

ATM, I'm contemplating uninstalling Into the Future, I never travel into the future, I hate the simbots, so as far as I remember, the only reason I bought it was for the hover board. I'm starting to think that's not a good enough reason.
World Adventures is almost necessary if you think of getting Custom Worlds in the Future and I can only say: Do! There are some amazing worlds out there and mostly better than the EA worlds.

You can reduce the amounts of horses running around with NRAAS register mod.

Well, I recently came back from a bit of a hiatus, figured now would be a good time with Sims 4 out meaning I don't have to worry about any new expansions or anything. My personal opinion, the expansions make the game worth playing. World Adventures, Ambitions, and Supernatural are my three absolute must have picks, I love the tomb raiding aspects of World Adventures and the martial arts skill, Ambitions has Simbots and the inventing skill, as well as the ability to play a Ghostbuster, and Supernatural has all sorts of fun new supernatural Sims to toy around with, which I always love.

The secondary expansions would be Into the Future and University Life, I haven't gotten around to actually fiddling with the former yet, but I like what I see of it, I grew up watching Back to the Future with my father almost as much as I watched the original Star Wars trilogy with him, so I have a soft spot for time travel. I am a little disappointed by the lack of interaction with Ambitions, though, as the inventing skill allows you to create a time machine, but it can't be used to travel to the new future world, and you can create Simbots, but there's no special interactions between them and their successors the Plumbots, or even a way to upgrade a Simbot to a Plumbot. University is okay, it adds Plantsims, and a way to get an extra two traits on your active Sims without installing a mod that adds more traits to all Sims and then randomly assigns new traits to all your inactive Sims.

In the if you've got any money left over tier for me are Seasons, Pets, and Showtime. Seasons adds weather and seasons, not much to say about that, honestly I often find it more annoying than anything with my plants going dormant in fall and winter, but on the other hand I do like sending my Sims on dates to the seasonal festivals and you haven't laughed until you've seen the Grim Reaper giddily clapping after making a cute little Snowgrim in your yard. Pets I'm sad to say underwhelmed me, it was one of my favourite Sims 2 expansions, but for Sims 3 it wasn't as good as I'd have hoped, I found earning LTR points for my cat to be painfully difficult as he hardly ever gets any wishes unless his motives are near rock bottom, and keeping his motives up is even more difficult than my Sims thanks to the lack of good LTR's to spend those hard earned points on, no dirt defiant equivalent to make the scratching motive drop slower, no hardly hungry, meh. After playing with both a cat and a horse I can't help feeling like the horses got all the attention from the devs. But hey, at least the pets are cute so there's that. Showtime adds some mildly interesting new careers, the biggest draw for me here is the genies.

And last we have Late Night, Island Paradise, and Generations. Late Night was a must have for me for a long time because I love vampires, and the big city feel of the neighbourhood was interesting, but Supernatural also includes vampires, and it expands upon them as well, and while Bridgeport is interesting, in my experience it's also one of the buggiest neighbourhoods of all, especially if you want to play an inventor because the Simbot opportunity doesn't work right in Bridgeport for some reason. It also had apartments, but they were nowhere near as much fun as they were in Apartment Life, it never felt like my Sims were living in a building with a bunch of other Sims, it just felt like a tiny starter home disguised as a giant building. Island Paradise offers some cool new features, boating, scuba diving, mermaids, houseboats, resorts, and island exploration, but only if you play in the neighbourhood that comes with it. Isla Paradiso would have been better as a world you could visit from other neighbourhoods ala the ones in World Adventures, University Life, and Into the Future. As for Generations, it adds some new interactions for kids, teens, and elders, the ability for old people to use canes, and not much else, like Seasons I actually find it more annoying than anything at times because my kids will often be late getting out the door to school because they were rushing to do their homework and then thanks to Generations my adult Sim will decide to drop what he's doing and rush straight to the kid like an animatronic, anthropomorphic, murderous pirate fox and queue stomp the kid to yell at them for skipping school with no way for me to stop him shy of removing all doors between him and the kid, or the way it kills my precious gnomes off, and unlike Seasons it doesn't add anything that makes it really worth the hassle for me, save maybe for the age freezing potion.

Now, that said there are mods to address many of those issues I have with the lower tier expansions, though I haven't found a mod to disable the whole gnomes aging and dying in Generations thing yet, so if you could find them cheap, very cheap for Generations, I'd say go for it, but I'm certainly glad I didn't buy them when they were brand spanking new.

None of the ex packs are mandatory...!

With CASt, it always takes me ages to do anything in build/buy and CAS. Because now everything has to match! It just makes my latent OCD act out!!!

Aye, that's what I did yesterday too. I bought the last 3 EPs I was still missing, and went back to TS3. So much more fun.