“Ambitions” does provide a bit more content than just the new professions, but it doesn’t make up for the $40 price tag. The two new skills are sculpting and inventing. Both initially work like painting in the original game in that you don’t get to decide what your creations become. However as your sim invents or sculpts certain items they are added to a list and you can rebuild them whenever you’d like. Inventors need scrap metal and can either buy it or scrounge for it over at the junkyard. Sculptors have to buy their materials, but they to can go scrounging for metal if they want to start welding.
Most inventions are items that just sit there and do nothing, but a few are actually useful. The floor hygienator sprays sims with perfume when they pass by it, cleaning them a little, while the miner drills away at your lawn and pulls up precious gems and metals. My favorite part of the skill was the detonate ability. Inventors can basically blow stuff up in order to make more scrap metal, and the items don’t have to belong to your sim. The city threatened to fine the heck out of me for it, but that didn’t stop me from blowing up half of my neighbor’s house (adulterous creep). My only regret is that the ability powers up slowly and sims have time to run away before items explode.
The rest of what “Ambitions” adds feels like content that should have been free with a patch. Sims now need to do laundry and every time they change clothes (to go to sleep or to the bathroom) they leave a pile of dirty laundry. To solve this problem you can buy your sims a washer and dryer or they can go to a laundromat to do the cleaning. The new real estate option gives you a bit more control over the venues you can buy. In “Sims 3” you could buy the local bookstore and it would provide you with some cash every now and then. Now you can fire workers, buy all sorts of properties like parks and book stores and upgrade what you own. For example, by adding new chairs to the community pool you just bought, you increase its value and its popularity. However, you can only upgrade buildings you can normally interact with (parks can be upgraded while hospitals cannot).
Jud, off-topic comment, but you might want to advise your viewing base on this site to not download or upload to the exchange. There’s some sort of psycho virus that has taken control.
Whats up with that? I’ve been out of the loop taking care of real life things for the past 2 days, care to fill me in?
Oh, is that why the Sims team have warned people not upload or download on FB.
Good thing I never use the exchange! It’s more dangerous than downloading from TheSimsResource! Total lack of quality control and safety mechanisms.
I was going to say, though, that this is probably the most accurate review of Ambitions I’ve seen. I do like Ambitions a lot, and because I’m creator I feel like I’ve got value for my money in the new CAW content (when CAW comes back online), but as far as gameplay goes it seems very poorly designed. The outcomes of gameplay are almost non-existent, except for decorative awards. The doctor career additions are terribly under-developed, and the description texts for the Sims in Twinbrook at very badly written and have lots of typos. The ghost hunter career is incredibly under-developed at well, simply because once you reach the top of the career there’s no reward in gameplay terms. Actually, that’s the problem with almost all the new profession: There’s no reason to advance except to make more money – and it’s already incredibly easy to make money in The Sims 3. In the base game careers there are tangible rewards to reaching the top of the career track: Autograph sessions, Mad Science experiments, etc. In the professions, you get a trophy, and the stylist gets a moodlet.
It just seems like fundamentally poor game design, and somewhat demotivating for players.
They need, now, to introduce more mechanisms that take money, and lots of it. Travel is one. Investment is theoretically another, but it justs gives more and more money in return. They need lots more money sinks like that so that players can feel like simoleons aren’t just something that piles and piles up forever and ever into massive sums beyond all imagination.
I’m sure there’s an internet law, somewhere, that states that any sentence criticising grammar is more likely than average to carry a typo.
Some creator from TSR messed up her creation using S3PE while trying to add new interactions, she accidentally uploaded the messed up version (and quickly fixed the file) however the damaged doll got out and it sticks to most (I know for sure lots and tattoos) sims 3 packs, so stay away from the exchange if you actually use it…
I feel terrible for the creator, Sure I loathe TSR but it was just a simple mistake, the poor lady has gotten a ton of grief over it, everyones been going crazy over it even though it isn’t that huge a deal (easily dealt with)
Whoa, that sucks. Thanks for the info Rob. If you have the source link handy, please pass it my way (credit will be sourced as you)
Hmmm I don’t think that there’s any main link, the story was just sort of pieced together from various forum posts, Magician has a good thread on how to remove it http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/215866.page
I don’t think that it’s very dangerous but if you download a lot from the exchange than I guess it can cause some serious lag, I rarely download from the exchange
Thank you Rob, this clears things up a lot for me. Will make a post about this shortly.
I KNOW it is Ambitions. How do i know. i loaded up Sims3 no problems. I loaded up World Adventures. No lag problems. Then i loaded up High End Loft. it was actually a tiny bit slower by only 5% slower from my estimation from gameplay. But in no way would i call that lag. Considering i had 2.29Gigs of packages loaded up in there and over 8Gigs of Simspacks loaded up in there. I was still moving at 158 frames per second on a Quad Pross Computer with a GeForce 9800 GT. No problems. that many frames per second on normal game play. Mind you some times 550 FPS but thats not the point. Even in the possible slow conditions i got 158 FPS. BUT! When i loaded Ambitions The frame rate dropped down to 60Fps. I could not go past that. I tried to go from one area to another in town and the frame rate droped even further! Down to 10 to 1Fps. That was from Fps down to Fps. Thats how bad the lag is. That combined with adding in the patch. Which makes the 1Fps more frequent than before. My game has actually crashed. Even with NO MODS OR SIMPACKS. yes that is how bad it is. This doesnt even include the extreamly long loading time it takes to load the game. Then they said OH! hey look out for the Girl Doll. Dude the Girl Doll wasnt even loaded in there. THAT is how bad it is.