O Sim BR has informed me that they have published their preview of their time with The Sims 3.  Excellent writeup, I have to say!  In fact, they even touched on some questions that I had, which I’ll list below:

What Is Not In The Game?

If you expect some things that were in expansions of The Sims 2, then I am sorry. Here is a list of things that is not in The Sims 3 (or can not be done yet):

* No weather.
* No animals (dogs, cats etc.).
* You cannot enter the sea.
* No trampoline in the pool.
* No aliens.
* There is no university.

References to Other Consoles and Games from The Sims

Some things really surprises you, when you are a trully fan of The Sims. I noticed several things similar to the consoles in The Sims 3:

* Choosing a voice and tone of it was already possible in the game MySims.
* In MySims there are already shortcuts in CAS (click on the clothes, go to the catalog of clothing, for example).
* The menus of the game reminds of The Sims 2 consoles.
* Add food recipes using ingredients and mixing was possible in The Sims 2 for consoles.
* The Sims 2 Pets from video-game also had fixed lots, which could not be moved. Moreover, houses already existed near to waterfalls.
* The water in lakes and the sea is very similar to water from The Sims Castaway Stories.

The performance of the PC Game / The Requirements

Will the game run on my PC? Well, I can not guarantee anything, since the game is still in development. But we’ve played The Sims 3 on a PC that had the following configurations:

* Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 3 GB of RAM and video card NVidia Geforce 8800 GS.

We were informed that if your computer can run Spore, then can run The Sims 3. But I repeat: this may change before the game’s release. Good news is that now the game uses all the processor cores, so you can see the improvement changing Dual Core to Quad Core.

And the game’s delayment? What happened?

As The Sims 3 is probably the hugest releasing ever from Electronic Arts, it’s quite ideal that the game came with no bugs on the final release. The developers were kind desperate with the release date (20th february). They even started to let some things of the game behind. And then, nothing better than delay the game some months, to fix everything and do the best for the fans.

What will we do until The Sims 3 is released? Is it possible to release an independent CAS?

The idea is that you enjoy the most your Sims 2, because we will eventually abandon the game when The Sims 3 releases. But something really mentioned on Creator’s Camp was the release of an independent CAS (like on Sims 2 and Spore). The Sims 3′ team is really thinking on releasing something like this to the players. Now we can only wait to see if this is really going to happen.