Josh at E3 Josh reveals that: "The game has evolved into five different categories or themes: Family, Fame, Fortune, Knowledge and Romance. Each of the older screenshots you have see depict this one of these categories. Each sim you have will fall under one of these categories. This leads to various objectives and goals defined by your sims aspiration." I'm not sure how excited I am by this news. I did not invest in Superstar because it looked to me as if there was too much old-fashioned gaming (goals and objectives). Likewise I ignored MM ... then weakened and bought it anyway when TS2's release wandered off into the future. Frankly, I hate MM. I have hardly played it at all since I bought 5 months ago. I haven't touched it at all in the lastt 3 months. I hated chasing all the place touching mushrooms. I couldn't be bothered to clutter up my memory with magic spells. It took about a week of moderately intensive play to see all the cool new objects and characters in action -- best charcater was the skeleton maid who liked to help herself to the drinks bar after a session of chores ... the drink, of course, goes straight thru her ... After that the constraints of tedious old-fashioned gaming (do this before you can do that ... ya-di-ya-di-ya-di-yawwwnnnnnnnn ) ... well it all just sent me running to the bathroom to shine up some chrome and to buff up some porcelain .... I hope Maxis remembers to have a regard for those of us who chose the Sims franchise in the first place precisely because it was a game that wasn't a game.
I believe that the aspirations will be similar to the "motives" in Sims2. I don't get the feeling from most of the posts, articles and interviews that it is like the minigames. But then, I didn't mind the "minigames" in Superstar or Makin' Magic. They were something you *could* do but you didn't have to. There was much more for me in that than doing the games. The objects and some of the handy things (like the butler in SS and teleport in MM) are what I liked out of those EPs. I suspect it will be the same in Sims2. There will be some minigames (for the people who like that sort of thing) but there is also open ended play, just like we've enjoyed in Sims2. In some ways we had "goals" even in the original Sims or Delux. You had the goal of trying to get your Sim to the top of the career ladder. You had the goal of trying to keep your Sims happy. You had the goal of trying to be able to afford the biggest house on the block or have the most objects. You had the goal of seeing how fast you could get your Sims skills up. You had the goal of trying to give your Sims a nice family. Or you could have a goal to see how miserable you could make your Sim. These roughly translate to things similar to the aspirations in Sims2. However, I think that no matter what we *hear* about the game, we won't know how we *feel* about it until we actually have a chance to play it for ourselves and see if it is open ended enough to make it fun for us (in the way that the "goal oriented" console games cannot for many people.)
I voted that I don't know... because I really don't know if these motive tracks or whatever they are will be restrictive of what we want to do with our sims, or just bring it into focus more? I love just puttering around and change my "goals" for each family as I make up their lives by playing the game... and I don't understand enough of what the new features MEAN to guess how I feel about them yet. But I *DO* care!!!
