The Sims 3 is the entry that let the series breathe. For the first time the whole neighborhood is one seamless, living place: your Sim can jog from the front door to the park, the theatre or a friend's kitchen without a loading screen, while everyone else in Sunset Valley carries on with their own lives, careers and romances in the background. Add a personality system built on real traits, a build mode that finally lets you place things where you want them, and a pattern tool that recolors nearly anything, and you have the most open-ended Sims game of its generation. This is the base game, the foundation everything else in The Sims 3 was built on.
Sims With Real Personality
Create a Sim starts with the face and body, but it is the traits that make a Sim feel like a person. You choose five from a long list, and combinations matter: a Good, Family-Oriented Sim with a Green Thumb wants a very different life from an Evil, Kleptomaniac Loner who never sleeps well after a quiet day. Traits decide which social options appear, how a Sim reacts to a burnt dinner or a stranger's compliment, and what they get up to when you are busy with someone else.
On top of the traits sits a Lifetime Wish, the long goal a Sim carries from young adulthood to the grave, and a stream of smaller wishes that pop up day to day. Fulfilling them builds Lifetime Happiness, which you can spend on rewards like a Steel Bladder or Fast Learner. Moodlets replace the old bars with readable, stackable feelings, so you always know why a Sim is thrilled or miserable and what to do about it.
A Neighborhood That Keeps Moving
Sunset Valley is a single open map. Send a Sim to work and you can follow their car across town in real time; leave the household at home and they keep cooking, chatting and arguing while you are away. The town's other families are not props either. Story Progression lets neighbors age, marry, have children, get promoted and move house on their own, so the town you return to after a few Sim weeks has genuinely changed.
- Every lot is a destination. The gym, library, beach, cemetery and city hall are all real places your Sim can visit, and many of them are where skills and careers actually advance.
- Opportunities arrive from bosses, friends and strangers, offering side jobs and small quests that reward money, skill gains or a bump up the career ladder when you see them through.
- Collectibles are scattered across the map: seeds, rocks, gems and insects for the curious Sim who would rather wander than clock in at the office.
Build, Decorate and Create a Style
- Free placement in Build and Buy mode
- Objects can be rotated to angles the earlier games never allowed, and furniture can be nudged off the grid and stacked in ways that finally let a cluttered study or a sloping roofline look the way you imagined it.
- Create a Style
- Almost any object, wall, floor or garment can be recolored and re-patterned. Pick a fabric, wood grain or tile, tint each channel, and apply the same look across an entire room so a home feels designed rather than assembled from catalog defaults.
- Sharing and community
- Sims, lots and patterns you make can be saved and packaged to keep or pass along, and the game includes a built-in tool for recording short movies of your household's dramas.
Careers, Skills and Whole Lifetimes
The base game ships with eleven careers, from Medical and Law Enforcement to Criminal and Professional Sports, most of which branch partway up so a Politician can become a mayor or a musician can choose between rock stardom and the symphony. Ten skills sit alongside them: Cooking, Painting, Writing, Guitar, Gardening, Fishing, Handiness, Charisma, Logic and Athletic, each with its own challenges and payoffs. Sims pass through every stage from baby to elder, and the choices you make at each one ripple into the next generation.
The Base Game, and What Comes After
This is The Sims 3 on its own, the way Maxis and The Sims Studio shipped it in 2009. The eleven expansion packs and the stuff packs are sold separately and are not part of this listing; the base game is what they all require. The Sims 3 Store is also still open, offering extra objects and worlds bought with SimPoints, an optional in-game currency for anyone who wants to extend the catalog later.
If you have ever wanted to see what a town does when nobody is steering it, or to give one Sim a quiet, unlikely life and see where it ends up, this is the game to start with. Move a family into Sunset Valley and find out who they become.
