Leaving home behind

So those things will affect your Sims in their every day life at home and away, so lets focus now on travel. Your Sims start out their great adventures by picking up the phone or using a computer to book their trip away. Doing so pulls up the Trip Planner which allows you to set your destination, choose the Sims that will be accompanying you (if any) and the duration of your adventure. This can be 3, 5, 8, 10 or 12 days but is dependant on your Visa level, which allows you to take longer trips and increases through travel and by completing adventure challenges. Finally, you are presented with the bill, the total cost of your trip which is immediately withdrawn from your family funds when you confirm. There is no forward planning needed, your transport will arrive immediately to whisk you off on your adventure (which by the way, must be at least 2 full days since returning from any previous trip).

3 New Regions

You have no doubt already heard that the new regions are Al Simhara in Egypt, Champs Les Sims in France and Shang Simla in China. Although real world countries have been used in the game it's really just a generalized interpretation of those regions so don't expect technically accurate replicas of stuff. Each of these 3 regions is a whole new world full of shops, commercial and recreational zones and also residential Lots. Your Sims can buy and own these Lots too. In fact, Sims can buy as many Vacation homes as they like in any area. You can do anything on these Lots that you can do on basegame Lots too.

Shopping

In the base game, Sims can go shopping but they disappear into 'rabbit holes' when they do. Each of the 3 new locations all have shops and your Sims will almost certainly need to visit them to stock up on supplies before going on their adventures, but there's no disappearing from view here! You will be able to see your Sims as they enter, browse and pay for their goods, things like the Shower in a Can, Dried Food, Cameras and Tents. Sims can also buy equipment and souvenirs to take back home like the Fortune Factory Fortune Cookie Maker, the Sheng Hai Training Dummy or fireworks and decorative ornaments. Here you can see a screenshot of the shopping basket where I stocked up on fireworks to put on a display when my Sim got home. Look for the screenshots at the end of the article to see them in action.

Adventure Journal

As your Sim embarks on their great adventures they will start a log of their experiences which you can view at any time. Grant bought this up comparing it to RPG games which gather similar statistics like GTA for example. In this case it records excavations, relics found and analyzed, days spent in each region, tomb actions as well as myriad other stats that boggle the mind.

The Shopping Window and Adventure Journal

Let the Adventure begin!

And then of course, there are Tombs. This is what World Adventures is all about, and is by far the largest feature of the game that I should try and cover here. But it's nearly impossible to give the adventure aspect of this game full justice in such an article. Its just.. huge! It took me almost an hour to play out one of the shorter adventure challenges in the game and I barely scratched the surface of the stuff we were shown in demos. So what are these Adventures? Well, they are stories that chain together between 5 and 15 steps so unlike the base game challenges, these are longer, more epic objectives to play along to.

If you like the TSR or Legacy Challenges then you probably feel that you need to have bigger goals than The Sims has expected of you in the past. In that case, these adventures have got your name on them. As I mentioned, you can loose yourself for hours exploring tombs which start out with another RTS element which you may know as a 'fog of war'. Once you are in the tombs you only see the area around you until you work out the puzzles needed to unlock doors and open up new rooms which will appear in front you, beckoning you in to explore further and engross yourself deeper into the story. There are keystones to find and use, rubble piles to dig through, hidden doors and passages, coins and treasures, gigantic boulders, triggers ands traps, floor switches, dive wells, pushable statues, hidden stairways, sarcophagus', mummies... it goes on and on. The atmosphere in these tombs is also exciting and thrilling with special effects to help identify triggers and environmental sounds and music which is all very immersive.

Once you eventually complete your challenges and make it out of the catacombs alive you will be rewarded with treasures, maybe some moodlet boosts and even lifetime rewards. But of course even if you make it out, it might not be in the form you went in! Mummies lurk in the tombs and if they get their hands on your Sims they too can be cursed. These Sims have up to 14 days to rid themselves of this evil by visiting the Sphinx and.. well, that's for you to work out, but suffice to say, if you don't fix your Sims' little predicament within 14 Sim days, death is inevitable!

Adventure Creator

One of the most powerful if not technically complicated features I have ever seen in a Sims game is the Adventure Creator aspect of this EP. To allow players to create and share their own adventures, every aspect of tomb building is unlocked for you. From the simplest of secret doors which you might use in your Sims homes to the most complex layout of dive pools which have you popping up on 10 different Lots in any given world, you can do it all, if you have the time, patience and understanding of the system. 'Activated Behaviours' and "Cause and Effect" are what its all about, linking one object to another in a long chain of actions required to progress through a story, building in alternate paths with differing consequences to make players feel they are free to explore rather than following a linear path. There will no doubt be people that fall head over heals into this aspect of World Adventures and become career adventure creators making some great new challenges to share with us, the game playing community.

To give us all a heads up, the dev team will publish "Tomb Creation 101" which will probably ship with the game, but which I was cheeky enough to obtain for you in advance. Included at the end of this preview, you will find this document a great way to learn about all the features of adventure creation without me fumbling my way through them all here.