On Friday may 21st I was very fortunate to tag along with Angela to the Dutch preview of Sims 3 Ambitions (much love to her and of course the Dutch EA for inviting her in the first place).

We played with a dutch version of the game so the English translation may be wrong, tell me so that I can fix that :) Also this was not the final version of the game, so there were bugs (fog inside the house?).

I have a feeling EA is going a new route with The Sims 3 expansion packs, with Sims 1 and 2 they expanded onto the game but the original game was still the main way of playing. With Sims 3 they add completely new angles of playing. This was shown in world adventures and has happened again with ambitions.

The new occupations are just a tip of the iceberg that they added, Blackgarden has a very good preview of these in her blog. As we only had a 2.5 hour preview, I did not have time to play with everything, so I will only discuss the things that I played with myself or either amused me severely that the other people played with.

Professions

The first notable difference with professions is how the career menu is shown, work progress bar has changed, you cannot go into the negative! Technically, you build up work experience now, instead of performing well or not. And instead of smileys for each thing that influences your performance, you now get simple icons explaining things that improve your work experience.

By far, very FAAAAAAR and maybe even further the most amusing thing I saw was from the private investigator profession. Your sim can go on a stake out, this in every detective tv show I have seen means you sit in a car hidden and just watch a building. In the humorous world of EA this ‘stake out’ means your sim stands in the middle of a lot, displaying all the subtlety of an elephant in ballet shoes, gets a branch with leaves in each hand and holds it in front of him-/herself and voilà covertly hidden sim! So hidden that other sims do not even notice your sim when her phone rings. I was laughing for like 5 minutes about that, it is so funny.

Side information from Blackgarden:  Grant told them at UK preview how they came up with the stake out, apparently there is a guy who dresses up as a bush and stands in an empty park in SF. And it's like a TOTALLY empty park, no foliage anywhere.

The rest of the private investigation profession is similar to an adventure in WA, but in your home hood.  You can also increase your work experience by building up skills.

I also played with the fire-fighter profession, for a lot of the working ‘day’ you sit around and just lounge at the firestation. Chat with co-workers, bounce on the trampoline (more on that later), maintain the fire truck (I wonder what happens if you don’t maintain it, does it breaks down on the way to a fire.. and the house burns down? Something to try later...). ALARM!!!! Seriously, it is super loud, do not get deaf from the fire alarm. EA should add warning signs about that in the game.

You jump onto the big fire truck and go to the house that is on fire, when my sim arrived there she was a good girl and put out the fire. AnoeskaB’s sim was not such a good guy, he started stealing from the poor sim!  Can be even worse, instead of using a fire extinguisher you can also destroy the object to put out the fire... effective I suppose, not very nice.

Dumdi dum GHOSTBUSTERS! Something strange in the neighbourhood.. Who you gonna call? GHOST BUSTERS! If you think I am a fool here spraying nonsense, be ashamed of yourself, it means you have not seen the brilliant ghost busters movies. So yes, there is ghost hunting in this game! And it is very similar to how it is done in the ghost busters movie. Your sim gets called by the owner of a haunted house, sim goes there and finds the ghosts (who look more like the green colored ‘bad’ ghosts in Casper), your sim zaps it with a cool looking zapping gun (I am sure it has a more proper name, but I did not check) and then has 1 ghost in his inventory bag. You can then give it a name or release it.

Then we come to the inventor, I did not play with this much myself, but my neighbour at the preview did. He got his sim to such a high level he could blow things up to get some scrap. This blowing up of things is not a small thing, blowing up car is BOOM! This neighbour was a guy (cheetah)  who thought blowing things up was so much fun, he went around the neighbourhood and destroyed everyone’s car!! He got caught once and was asked to leave for misbehaving... just a minor behaviour problem. Then moved onto a community lot and started blowing up tables, at least he got some punishment for this, a fine. His sim did not even get in touch with law enforcement.

Then another person at the preview made a time machine and created a baby that started at teen years. I wish I had more time to play with the inventor myself... it sounds very funny.

For the other professions I refer you to Blackgardens preview, I did not play with them. There is also a confusing bit about how much your sim gets paid, they get paid for each job but.. also get a weekly salary? Something to check.

Other new things

I did play with some objects, like the trampoline. Warning for all the parents who have a trampoline at home, do not let your children play with the trampolines in game, it will give them the wrong idea. The sim regular jumping action on the trampoline is already hilarious! But they can also fall off (I think I saw that once, it went fast), somersault and it looks just hilarious. But I noticed the sim jumps near the side of a trampoline instead of in the middle.. very safe....

Laundry is a cute touch that they added to the game, there is an even a laundromat where you can wash your clothes if you don’t own a laundry machine yourself.  You can also sculpt and make money that way, I did not play with this so much. I did find it funny how enormous the block of clay is that your sim starts with and the eventual object can be tiny... very typical Sims humour.

I did look around the new neighbourhood a bit, it is called TwinBrooks and has a more darky/dirty bit to it (aka, swamps – cyclonesue is going to like them). This darky mood is also created with a fog object, from the buydebug menu. In total there are 5 new community lot types:

Laundromat

Firestation

Junkjard

Beauty salon

Meeting point? Dutch translation was hang plek (literally 'hanging about spot') in game it was like  a cafe but in Dutch hang plek means a place where (bad) kids hang about do nothing/skip school... they should change that name I think.

Last community lot is the Consignment Store.The Consignment Store allows your inventor/sculptor/painter to sell their goods, they give it to the store and when another sim buys it, your sim gets money. It’s not an automatic sell, which I personally found cute. It’s a small detail that EA did keep in mind.

If you load sunset valley or riverview, you will get the option to add these community lots, so the neighbourhoods are still compatible.

In CAS I found new hairs! Very cute hair for females, not so much cute clothes – but blackgarden has told me they may be in the salon in game not in CAS. And I found something I wanted but forgot to ask EA! You got influence on your sims makeup with the use of transparency! No more fighting with the colors to make the makeup not THAT bold.. just use the transparency slider.

Something for the builders that I found: columns can be 1, 2 or 3 stories high, just by changing a slider. I also saw new terrain paints and trees and possibly plants. You can adjust the height of each roof individually, allowing more freedom with them. You can also add ceilings now and that was all the build stuff I found, there could be more.

Your sim can also buy community lots, there was something similar before, you could own a rabit hole. Now you own the entire lot, this means you can change the name of the lot, and build/buy on it. Also, a community lot has 3 levels. The higher the level the higher the more profit from that lot your sim gets. I do not know how this works exactly, cause in my mind – a park is free to use so no profit from that. This is something we will have to see when we got the game.  

So we got the wonderful create a world tool, but it is tricky to use and some real effort needs to be put into it to learn it. Now you can also edit the neighbourhood, add trees everywhere and new lots of different sizes with the in-town editing tools, very useful if you just want a little change.

And last there is a new education career, did not play with this but I am glad they added it.

Fantastic

They gave things for builders, players, decorators and did it all with humour. I am glad to see they know on how many different ways people play the game and catered for all of them. We all can be very happy with this EP ^_^ EA went all out yet again, fantastic.

Ps. You can put a hole on your property from the buydebug menu and then your sim can fill it up ... I am not sure how useful this is.

Pps. EA please give us back collections, pretty please, I miss collections.