The Sims 3: Into the Future is the eleventh and final expansion pack for The Sims 3, and it closes the series with its boldest idea: a Time Portal that drops your Sims into Oasis Landing, a world hundreds of years ahead of their own. Hoverboards, jetpacks, monorails and holographic furniture are the surface. Underneath is a legacy system where what your Sims do today decides the world their descendants live in tomorrow. It requires The Sims 3 base game to play.
Step Through the Time Portal
Shortly after the expansion is installed, a Time Portal appears in your Sims' neighborhood. Walk through it and the present gives way to Oasis Landing, a full future world with its own residents, venues and rhythms. Sims can zip across town on the monorail, ride between floors in tube elevators, strap on a jetpack to fly around with friends, or cruise the streets on a hoverboard. The shopping plaza sells gadgets and apparel from interactive pedestals, the outdoor café serves synthesized meals, and the Stellar Observatory opens a career in astronomy. Beyond the city limits lies the wasteland, a stretch of scarred terrain where curious Sims can dig up rare relics and piece together clues about what happened to the ocean.
Time in Oasis Landing is a real trip, not a permanent move. Your Sims jump between present and future at will, and every visit adds to their Advanced Technology Skill. Bring that skill home and the futuristic objects your Sims carry back with them work far better in the present.
Create A Bot and the Plumbots
Plumbots are the expansion's signature addition and the most flexible household members The Sims 3 ever offered. Create A Bot works alongside Create A Sim: choose a chassis, style the finish, and then decide who this machine actually is.
- Trait chips
- A Plumbot can hold up to seven trait chips, and each one alters its behavior in a distinct way. Chips are crafted at the Bot Building station using components gathered in the future, so a well-equipped Plumbot is a project in itself.
- Unexpected combinations
- Because chips stack, personalities emerge that the designers never scripted. A Robonanny chip makes a Plumbot a devoted caregiver; add Sinister Circuits and the same machine starts looking at the family in a very different light.
- Part of the household
- Plumbots live in the house, take on chores, build relationships with your Sims and can even pursue careers of their own. In Oasis Landing they are everywhere, from café staff to the bots your Sims trade as a Plumbot dealer.
Your Sims' Legacy, Written Forward
This is where Into the Future stops being a theme pack and becomes a storytelling tool. Your Sims' actions in the present lay the groundwork for their own legacy. Travel forward and you can meet their descendants, learn how the family line played out, and then return to the present to change it. A Sim who marries differently, earns a fortune or ruins a reputation rewrites the people waiting on the other side of the portal.
The same is true of the world itself. Oasis Landing can drift toward an ultra-utopian society of clean skies and contented citizens, or slide into a chaotic dystopia of storms and decay, depending on what your Sims set in motion. Both states change the look of the city, the mood of its residents and what your Sims can do there. Watching a single present-day decision reshape an entire future is a feeling no other Sims 3 expansion delivers.
Build and Furnish the Home of the Future
- Holographic televisions, easels, plants and computers replace their present-day equivalents with objects that fold away, float and respond to your Sims in new ways, freeing up floor space and changing how a room is used.
- Glass floors and walls, automatic sliding doors and rooftop gardens give Build Mode a clean, open feel. Tube elevators connect floors without a staircase and suit the tall, airy lots the future favors.
- A wardrobe of futuristic hairstyles and clothing, from sleek utility wear to bright, sculpted silhouettes, lets Sims dress for Oasis Landing or bring a little of the future back to their home neighborhood.
A Fitting Finale for The Sims 3
Into the Future arrived as the last word on The Sims 3, and it plays like a studio putting every idea it had left onto the table. It rewards long-running families most of all, because the further your Sims' story has already traveled, the more there is waiting for them beyond the portal. Fire up the Time Portal, meet the Sims who will carry your family name, and decide whether the future you leave them is one worth inheriting.
