The Sims 3 Today marks the 15th anniversary of The Sims. As someone who excitedly brought a brand new copy of the base game when I moved into my college dorm, let me take a break from scheduling hip replacement surgery to reflect on one of The Sims’ most acclaimed, yet controversial, titles.
As someone who genuinely enjoys every Sims game ever made, I was a staunch defender of The Sims 3 for most of its existence; that’s why it always bothered me when fans re-evaluated it as a serious contender for the best entry in the series–and, if we’re being honest, it made me something of a devil’s advocate on the issue.
If you think The Sims 4 is unpopular, rest assured that its predecessor received nearly identical criticism when it was popular. You could say that TS4’s shortcomings vindicated TS3 in hindsight, but it could equally be argued that once a new upstart emerges, good old nostalgia kicks in. In reality, like most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
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It’s a strange task to write an anniversary review for a game that hasn’t quite gone away. The Sims 3 officially ended in October 2013 with the release of its 11th and final expansion pack, Into the Future; but frequent micro-content additions via The Sims 3 Store continued until at least mid-2014. It’s surprisingly hard to tell exactly when the store stopped delivering new content, but the general consensus seems to be that the true final release of this generation of the series was the aptly named Last Place for Love, which was released in August 2014, less than a month before The Sims 4.
While EA/Maxis no longer specifically advertises their continued support for The Sims 3, it has not been abandoned like the first two games in the series. The Sims 3 store still offers daily deals and other regular offers, and all expansion packs and most expansion packs are still available for purchase through the EA app and Steam. The only content that can be legally purchased in The Sims 3 is certain branded ancillary products whose licenses have expired over the past decade, including a handful of store items, most notably the Katy Perry-endorsed expansion pack from 2012.
Likewise, it’s hard to pinpoint which Sims game is the best-selling, since paid add-ons are sometimes counted as separate sales (but usually aren’t), and the base game will be free in 2022, making actual player numbers hard to pin down. But it’s safe to say that The Sims 3 was never the best-selling game in the series—despite the roughly $75,000 total price tag for all its content in the store, it’s easily the most expensive game for completionists, no matter how many $5 packs The Sims 4 adds.
While you really have to stretch your imagination to call The Sims 4 a commercial failure, it’s hard to ignore that it didn’t quite live up to the standards of previous entries in the series in terms of garnering love from critics and players. Of course, The Sims 3’s popularity requires a hefty dose of hindsight: during its tenure as a current-generation game, The Sims forums would be flooded with unfavorable comparisons to The Sims 2 on a daily basis, because history always repeats itself.
But even if you can dismiss at least some of the anti-TS4 sentiment among the current fanbase as the product of optimistic retrospection, coupled with a hint of fatigue that may have built up as the game enters its 10th year (twice as long as the previous games have gone without a sequel), you can’t get away from the fact that The Sims 4 is, in many ways, a simpler game than its predecessor. The goal was to avoid the crippling performance issues that would have rendered late-stage TS3 nearly unplayable even if you had some sort of NASA supercomputer—not out of any consumer-oriented altruism, but because EA discovered that the average Sims player, with a fairly low-end laptop, simply couldn’t keep up with a game that was barely keeping up with itself.
However, in order to achieve a smoother run, The Sims 4 gave up popular features like the color wheel (which allowed players to customize almost all objects, clothing, and genetic traits) and the open world, which inevitably put The Sims 4 at a disadvantage when compared with The Sims 4.
So when we see upcoming The Sims competitors Life by You, Paralives, and inZOI all apparently use The Sims 3 as a major source of inspiration – promising open worlds, deep customization options, and high-end graphics – we have to assume it’s gamer nostalgia they’re banking on. Add in some public transparency about the eye-watering system specs required for these spiritual successors, and you can tell they’re hoping to attract an audience that looks back at the Sims games they were most excited about but may have never actually played.
And Project Rene (aka The Sims 5) seems eager to find the secret sauce that allowed Animal Crossing: New Horizons to upstage TS4 as the go-to lockdown social sim, rather than revisiting the mourned highlights of the third entry in the series, and you can see how that might work really well for newcomers to the space.
But my previous analysis of The Sims 3 Store content is more than just introductory, as it’s also an important part of The Sims 3’s legacy: one that had as much impact on the future of the life simulation genre as the open world and deep level of customization on offer. TS3 was the first game in the series to be released in both digital and physical form; it was also the first to require an internet connection to verify installation, rather than just suggesting it would be a good thing if you could.
Being always (or at least often) online means that The Sims 3 can introduce things like hotfixes to address known issues, whereas The Sims and The Sims 2 would often leave those issues to the next expansion release, which in hindsight is crazy, isn’t it? If you wanted to fix a bug in your last full-priced product, you had to buy a new full-priced add-on! Whatever your opinion of the increasing digital nature of modern gaming, you have to admit that at least you’re less likely to buy a game that’s broken… all the time, even if on the other hand there might be less incentive to release a thoroughly polished product on launch day.
But of course, this necessary connection also means that The Sims 3 can introduce impulse-buy microtransactions on a large scale, and we fully know that EA is always looking for new and aggressive monetization strategies, so it’s no surprise that it went all in. It’s not just the high cost of The Sims 3 Complete Collection, but the way it’s integrated into the game.
The Sims 4 has recently come under some criticism for upselling players on DLC content they don’t own in-game rather than keeping its sales pitch on the landing page, and this annoying issue comes straight from The Sims 3. Late in its lifecycle, TS3 even took advantage of its own slow loading times (even on a PC that technically met the system requirements, the fully expanded game could take up to an hour to load a save due to the large number of moving parts in the open world) to introduce a hidden item mini-game on the loading screen that unabashedly displayed items that could be purchased from the store.
Exactly what effect these choices will have on the future of the life sim genre remains to be seen. DLC add-ons are basically a given at this point, but the indie developers at Team Paralives have promised that all content updates will be free to players. There’s no official word on additional content for Life by You or inZOI yet; but Paradox is known for its DLC practices, sometimes better than EA’s, and Krafton’s history is tied to the development of the now-ubiquitous battle pass model, so it’s likely that both studios have realized that their familiar monetization strategies will translate well to the life sim market.
And, needless to say, EA has no intention of fixing what isn’t broken when it comes to Project Rene (at least from a revenue perspective), and The Sims 5 will most likely take the form of a free base game that will be regularly supplemented with paid and free updates.
While The Sims 3 wasn’t the first to introduce the idea of a massively expandable life simulation, it did provide the first test case for how life sim developers could successfully implement DLC practices on digital marketplaces. Just as it scaled back content to avoid its predecessor’s worst technical issues, The Sims 4 also moved away from The Sims 3 Store’s worst excesses, only to have most of them slowly reappear over time. And, whether fair or not, The Sims 4 seems destined to go down in history as an even more unforgivable cheater in the eyes of gamers than the game that originally introduced microtransactions to the series.
If there’s one thing The Sims 3 undeniably shines in, it’s nostalgia. I’m beginning to wonder if The Sims 4 will be as well-received in retrospect a few years from now as The Sims 3 was, a game that introduced some game-changing ideas before the hardware was ready, but in retrospect it’s at least beloved for pushing the entire series into bold new territory.
The Sims 4 has brought some interesting new ideas to the table over the past decade; it’s included many satisfying iterations of the core Sims that unify the entire series; and even if it’s far from perfect, as someone who has poured thousands of hours into the series over the past nearly a quarter century, I think it’s at least as good as it gets. better one Better than any game before it. But it has nothing equivalent to an open world: a big scenario that probably doesn’t work all that well in practice, but everyone loves the idea because it takes life simulation to the next level.
Thanks to The Sims 3, it feels like the next truly great life sim, the one that finally sets a new bar for the genre, will be a deeply customizable open-world experience. This seems obvious to everyone – but somehow, it wasn’t to the studio that laid all the foundations for the genre’s next big success.
