EA Redwood Shores, the Halloween sprit is well and truly in the air as staff arrive in full costume for the annual parade, while Sims fans are sat busying themselves, tearing into the first Expansion Pack to come out of the studio for The Sims 3. Exciting times, what with the release of Create A World as well. But what will this pack offer the game players, builders, storytellers and custom content creators of our community? Let's find out...

But haven't our Sims travelled before?

OK I admit, I came here expecting to see the Sims 3 version of Vacation or Bon Voyage, based on the first snippets of info to come out about World Adventures. One reason being that because I have known for some weeks that I would be here previewing the EP, I tried to avoid reading most of the earlier sneak peeks posted by the big gaming sites because I wanted to write an article based on my own experience of the game without thinking about those other comments and comparisons.

As it turns out, I now see that you can't really compare World Adventures to the earlier Vacation based EP's as rest and relaxations is certainly not what Adventuring is about. I'm over that comparison now and I see World Adventures as more of a mini-game within the game, like the old, original role playing games seen on the PC. And that's not a bad thing. You could totally loose yourself as an adventure. In fact, by collecting relics and treasure and building your skills as you go, it's entirely possible (and tempting to me) for a Sim to make a career out of Adventuring!

So what about all those earlier previews of the game? I found it really strange that EA released so much information about this EP before the fan event. These get-togethers of players are usually the first source of juicy info about the games for our communities but this time was different, maybe due to Create A World, I never did quite get to the bottom of it. But as it makes it a bit harder for us to write fresh articles that aren't full of things you already know, I'm going to try and focus on the smaller things about the game, and areas that haven't yet been explored (excuse the pun) in such detail by the big gaming sites, but I will gloss over the big stuff for those of you that live in TSR land :-)

If you see a picture you like in this preview, click it for a larger version.

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