A few months ago (admittedly, right on the release date), I went swiftly to GameStop and purchased The Sims 3 at full price.
Typically, I prefer to buy EA stuff secondhand, to ensure that none of my money goes to the executives' pocketbooks. However, for one reason or another, I bought the game retail -- completely new, it was.
Anyway, I got it home and, after three hours of meandering about my computer, deleting stuff, defragmenting, and finally updating my (albeit, worthless) video chipset, I got the game to actually run. Graphical artifacts associated with my unsupported chipset notwithstanding, the game is a complete waste of time. Things that were introduced to players at the outset of the series in 2000 were either forgotten or disregarded. Community lots were nigh-uncustomisable. Sims faces became more difficult to edit than they were in The Sims 2. Everything that one builds or buys is so substandardly textured that one spends three-quarters of one's time in Create-a-Style Mode. In-game music customisation took a step backward, inasmuch as all of the building modes and Create-a-Sim Mode's background music cannot be customised. Any individual songs that the player doesn't particularly care for cannot be disabled. Plus, Steve Jablonsky's score isn't that good in the first place. Half of it is re-arrangements of Mutato Muzika songs from the previous game, the other half is interchangeable with Desperate Housewives.
So, that's The Sims 3 in general, unexpanded. Providing little, lacking much.
Now, presented with such a worthless game as The Sims 3, one must step back and ask oneself, "Is this worth expanding?" Whilst it is very true that expansion packs are, by their very nature, optional pieces of software intended to supplement the base game with new objects, characters, and areas, I cannot see my way to expanding this game.
"But, Spiny," you say, "If there's something you wanted in the base game that wasn't there, maybe it's in the expansion pack!"
That's the key right there... maybe. You don't know until you've spent your money, gotten it home and installed it. Game developers (EA in particular) are not typically forthcoming as to exactly what is contained in their expansion pack. They provide you with a title, some screenshots, and a paragraph or two to summarise, but I've never seen an itemised list of the exact contents of the expansion pack given before release.
Fortunately, in cases such as that, one has the Internet and thus gaming websites, whose contributors spend their money so you don't necessarily have to. If one waits a while, one will eventually find a complete list of new features to show up on a website such as GameFAQs.com.
Getting back to the root of the problem: the main issue is, is this game worth expanding? Allow me to explain by referencing The Sims 2. There were certain expectations of what should be in The Sims 2 after The Sims had been thoroughly played through and all of the creation modes had been totally explored. These expectations were the basis for what was released with The Sims 2.
Now, The Sims original did have expansion packs. Not everything found in these expansion packs could be found in The Sims 2 and supplementary software was released to combat this problem. Eventually, The Sims 2, when fully expanded, did contain about 95% of what The Sims original had.
But, what made The Sims 2 worth expanding and The Sims 3 worthy of total ignorance?
Answer: nearly all expectations of what the unexpanded Sims 2 should have in it were met. Whilst the unexpanded Sims 3 fell short of that mark and then some. Not only did The Sims 3 fail to include things that were introduced in the unexpanded Sims 2, it also failed to include things that were introduced in the unexpanded Sims original.
The real reason, I guess, all comes back down to money. Personally, I feel insulted that I paid fifty quid for something that, in terms of furnishing items, is inferior to The Sims original. Additional insult comes in the form of the thought that Electronic Arts feels compelled to make me pay even more money across a longer expanse of time to get The Sims 3 up to the point when it becomes equal to its predecessor's predecessor.
It's like buying a Wii console and finding out that it's actually a case-mod of a Super NES.
To put it another way, it's like buying a 2010 model automobile and finding out that it only gets four miles per gallon of petrol.
So, it appears that the answer to the question posed in the title of this entry is, "No, The Sims 3 is not worth expanding."
