It’s not everyday when you ask a question about an upcoming expansion and actually have it answered by a SimGuru! In this case, Evil_One posted a question over at the official Sims 3 Forums asking how do Sims manage their ‘workable careers’ when we are away controlling another Sim. SimGuruLyndsay was kind enough to drop by and give an answer:
Several of the active jobs have been designed to allow your Sim to still progress while you’re busy with a different Sim elsewhere. For example, a Private Investigator can do low level police work or stakeouts while he isn’t working on an active case. The Firefighter is not always fighting fires so there are times where you can let him hang out and socialize at the Fire Station or work out when you aren’t controlling him. Both the Stylist and Architectural Design jobs will take you into a mode that will pause the game, but if you don’t want to do that you can still have your Sim research their field on the drafting table. Every career has responsibilities and its own active jobs. Each active job will require your full attention, but there are still options that allow your Sim to progress and level up while not controlling them. The most efficient progression will be with you controlling them but the balance is up to you. Similar to how World Adventures worked, it will be a challenge to control more than one Sim with multiple active jobs but we’ve offered many other avenues to help make it easier, and it can be done.
Thanks to Greg for passing along this link!
I figured as much. It makes sense. I still hope that we get a revamped story progression feature in that there are sub-options to choose from, such as enable families moving in/out, enable marriages, enable job promotions, enable baby spawning, etc. That way we can play with story progression the way we want to rather than have an all-or-nothing deal. I am sure I’m not alone in this since many simmers would appreciate such a feature. I always have it turned off only because I know I’m not going to like most of the automatic results. Yeah, surprises are fun, but it’s not fun when you’ve spent a lot of time having your Sim live the perfect life and story progression screws that up just because you happen to switch families for two seconds. Actually, I also want a Sims 2 aging option where you can enable it whenever you like. I love the idea of everyone aging together but sometimes I really want to play with all the families in the same game rather than have multiple saves. Oh well. I know awesome mod has this but I don’t mess with .package files anymore after the hassle they became (I used to have them in my game before the hassle).