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The Sims 3

The Online Side

The Sims 3 is not a multiplayer game and a network connection is not needed for anything but EA does offer a number of things to get you online. First off, the game disc contains only one town to play in. The second town (Riverview) is available as a download to registered owners of the game. Same goes for the blog space, video editor and The Sims 3 Exchange. All this requires you to sign up for EA.com account and to register your game key with your account. You also need the account to use The Sims 3 Store.

Registration and internet connection required for a second town to play in.

The Sims 3 Store - trading real money for imaginary objects

Yes, that means microtransactions - new hairstyles, clothes, furnitures and objects... expensive and on top of being expensive, Europeans have to pay about 1.5 times as much due to the usual 1$ = 1 Euro exchange rate combined with the 22% VAT added on top of that. Just like with the beta version of The Sims 2 store that was obviously created as a test to prepare for The Sims 3 launch.

Player created objects on the free exchange limited to recolorings of existing objects and as I mentioned earlier, the number of different meshes included with the base game is very limited. Items bought from the Store can also be put into the player-to-player item exchange with new color schemes but if you download them without owning the store version, you won't see it in game. Downloaded player houses that include microtransaction objects get a similar "base" item in place of the purchased one if you don't have it.

Individual items are priced between 25 and 100 points per item. There is little logic to pricing and some of it is just odd. Hairstyles, for example, cost 100 points for female styles, yet only 75 points for male styles - for no obvious reason. Pricing in general feels random - sometimes small items are cheaper (down to 25 points for some small additions) and while most of the items seem to be priced at between 50 and 75 points, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason with the pricing. It looks like EA may be testing the waters by randomly pricing items all over the range, trying to determine the optimal amount they can ask.

Buy a new hairstyle. Only 75 SimPoints.

...unless you happen to fancy a new female hairstyle. In that case it is 100 points.

The per-item price of furniture packs is closer to sane levels (averaging at about 40 points per item), but the one-time purchase price of a pack goes beyond my "sticker shock" level for digital furniture. 2000 points ($20/EUR 24) for a 47-piece downloadable matching set of new furniture? Are you out of your mind? You can get complete games for that!

The store sells points in three different packages - $5/EUR 6 (500), $10/EUR 12 (1000) and $20/EUR 24 (2000). No bulk discounts, this is EA. Paypal and all major credit cards accepted.

Yarr! Here Be Pirates

With the highly publicized early leak of a pirate copy of the game to torrent sites, EA even made a trailer that emphasizes the upside of buying "The official The Sims 3 game". Naturally the Riverview add-on was also pirated in very short order but EA is on the right track - by offering goodies available only to those who tie their game key to a EA account, EA tries to offer a superior product to those who actually pay for the game. Better idea than trying to tie down a game with anti-consumer DRM that gets cracked anyway.

For the record, retail version of The Sims 3 has only a disc-in-drive check while the digital download from EA store or Direct2Drive is riddled with limited number of activations which can be revoked by uninstalling the game.

Unfortunately EA didn't go all the way and actually tie the online-only content to a login/game key. The end result is that everything available only online - including all the furniture being sold for rip-off prices - is already pirated as well. It remains to be seen how the community accepts EA's overall deal - the fact that EA dropped a bunch of content from the game and put them to their online store on launch day with a total price tag of approximately $275 to buy everything available so far points towards inability to understand one bit about the consumers, but I guess we'll see. A lot is riding on the pricing and value of the inevitable expansion packs.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Online FunctionalityPage 5: Performance, VisualsPage 6: Summary, Scores

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