Hello Simmers!

You’ve had some questions regarding story progression and the population
controller in The Sims 3 and how they work, so we’re here to shed some light
on some of the inner workings of these features.

SP and Pop.Con has two main goals in The Sims 3.

· Maintain town stability.(primary goal)

· Make the neighboring Sims feel as if they have their own stories and
are growing in the your world. (secondary goal)

What does “maintain town stability” actually mean? One of the new features
in The Sims 3 is the open neighborhood.

Instead of having multiple “save games”in roughly the same neighborhood, the entire neighborhood is the game, and everything progresses at the same time.

However, there are many new challenges that we needed to overcome if those
stories were to be believable. All of your Sims neighbors would die without
reproducing, causing an empty world, or there wouldn’t be enough children or
single adults for your Sims to interact with. These are gameplay reasons for
the game attempting to manage the other Sims in the neighborhood. Another
challenge we took into consideration was game performance. Our team has
standards for what the average player would experience in this open
neighborhood. If there are too many Sims in the world, overall performance
of the game would decline for several game machines. Therefore, the game
attempts to manage the population in such a way to provide both a good
performance for you as well as have enough interesting Sims for your Sims to
interact with.

After all of that is taken care of, the game then tries to make the Sims more
realistic. It gives Sims interesting jobs, moves them around based on
relationships (or randomly sometimes to stir things up), make them gain weight
or become thinner. These types of actions and the concept of story making
always takes a backseat to providing your Sim family with the ideal backdrop
for gameplay.

A couple of common questions:

1) Why did some Sims disappear completely from my game?

If you move your created families of additional Sims into your neighborhoods
the population increase may start to cause an overload. When overpopulation
starts to become a challenge, some households may completely leave a world
and some sims may sadly meet with an untimely accident. Currently the game
preserves Households that your Active Household knows (i.e. has relationships
with).

2) Why when I change households do some Sims get moved around in career levels?

Story progression does occasionally have Sims get jobs, promoted/demoted, fired,
quit, and retire, but this should be done in a more normal and slow fashion.
The larger corrections you see are due to career fixing. Careers are more robust in The Sims 3 and require a boss and sometimes co-workers, so when your Sim gets a job it tries to find real living Sims in the world to promote or it might assign a neighbor Sim living in the world to be that Sim’s boss. The game will try to find a Sim in the career and promote them, but if there aren’t any available, it will pick a random Sim to assign to that career.

Thanks