After discussing the temporary work around to turn the Story Progression option off, I’ve run across another issue in developing my Sims family – universal neighborhood aging.
What I mean by this is, there is a check box that allows you to turn aging on or off in the options menu (and it does work!). However, the moment you turn aging on, EVERYONE in your neighborhood starts to age. Even those families that you have created that you are not playing. Even with Story Progression turned off. I have tested and confirmed this last night.
So in essence, the moment I turn aging on for one family, the game plays all of the Sims in the neighborhood whether I like it or not. That would be fine for an on-the-fly game… if I were playing that way. But I’m not. I want to be able to raise a family with one set of Sims while my other families remain the same… I don’t want to come back to the previous families to find out the children are all grown up and no one has accomplished anything in their lives because I’ve opted to turn Story Progression off. It really does seem like the two options go hand in hand.
However, there is an easier work around for this issue already programed into the game.
You can choose to age only the Sims that you want by forcing them to have birthdays using the birthday cake:
- Turn aging off for the neighborhood
- Play your Sims as normal, and when you feel it’s time to let them grow up or age, buy a birthday cake
- Clicking on the cake and choose “Blow out Candles”
- You will get a pop up that asks which Sim is celebrating a birthday– choose the Sim you want to age
That Sim will then celebrate a birthday and age to the next life stage. Though this works most of the time (Read this for when the Cake is a Lie), it is not a very natural feeling progression. It doesn’t offer the same challenge of trying to get all the progression and skill building you can within the allotted time frame of that life stage. It is fairly much like playing easy mode — you spend as much time building the skills as you like with aging off and then without needing to wait for the days to pass, you can simply age a Sim up.
On the other hand, this can be seen as a good thing. It gives you complete control over the aging and skills of your Sim’s development. You don’t have to wait for a certain amount of days before you can age that Sim (something that was hacked for the Sims2 anyhow). And most of the time, I only want to see my Sim children grow up… and don’t want my adults to age to elder for story purposes (I do like how they have Young Adult and Adult as options now — it gives more variety).
However, though you have options to toggle aging and (with the work around) story progression on and off, it’s still a universal neighborhood setting. Which means, unless the devs choose to fix it, you can never age just one family naturally without all families aging. It seems like we either get to choose all or nothing in this game. Not much in between.
That isn’t stopping me from enjoying Sims 3. I honestly don’t mind using a cake to age Sims. Other players might, however.
What do you think of this, Simmers?
That “Awesome Than You” mod allows you to enable Sims 2 aging. So… once again, it continues to fix problems and issues that people have had with this game. I’ve also been using it without any crashing after playing for 2 – 3 hours straight.
Thanks for the suggestion, Link. I do know about the Awesome Mod and all the great things it can do. Glad it’s working good for you! However, I think it’s still being tweaked and finalized, so there might be some risk to installing it for other folks. I was going to eventually post about it when I heard that it was a bit more stable.
Also, there are some gamers out there that may not be willing to mod their base game or may not have the technical know-how to tweak files and mess with their game cache. So, these are options for those who may not use mods to their game.
Not a problem. It’s definitely a Work in Progress, but it seems to be stable at this point and they’re just continually adding new features. There’s also a VERY quick and easy installer monkey thing that pretty much sets everything right up for you.
I think the options for aging with the vanilla version are great though. It’s still unfortunate there wasn’t a built in “Sims 2 Aging” option.
What I’m REALLY looking forward to from a Mod is the ability to pick and choose which households are effected by aging or story progression (mostly Story Progression), instead of making it 100% global.
I’m right with you on that one! It’s a surprise that the devs didn’t foresee the desire to have the options to pick and choose the modes that each household ran under. As much fun as I’m having playing the game with all the wonderful interactions between my Sims, it’s sad that I have to disable half the game play as well as apply mods and cheats just to progress the game the way I want. But then, that’s been said and done on the Sims 3 forums time and again. So I won’t beat a dead horse.
If a patch doesn’t come out for the game soon, I’ll be looking into the Awesome mod myself. I’m a tad concerned seeing that I run Vista and sometimes it likes to choke on things as Vista does. The Sims 3 installed without an issue so far, so maybe I’d be safe.
I do like that you can age a Sim with a birthday cake even with aging off. I hated useing all of my aspiration points in the Sims2 just to keep my Sims alive. I just don’t like the thought off all my hard work dieing off in a few hours of gameplay. And I definately wouldn’t like to have a family I made, but never got around to playing age without my knowing it. I would still play with Story progression on, only because I get tired of playing one family at a time and replaying the same actions over again with a different family. Like what I’d have to do with University on the Sims2. I’d make a family, have them make a baby, grow it up and so on. It’s a little repetative.
I do have a question, if you start a project, like getting a sim pregnant, would she still have the baby in three days if you were playing a different family for the time being?
Yes, this is one thing I don’t like — if your SIM becomes pregnant, whether or not you play that family, she will have the baby in three days (if you don’t have a mod that extends this time). The game will also name the baby for you! So make sure you’re playing that family if you don’t want to have to take the poor child to the Town Hall to give them the name you want.
Just thought I’d say that I think it’s funny how much commentary your Sims articles have drawn.
If I create a new game and play the new game, will my sims in the 1st game/neighborhood keep aging while I’m playing game 2?
What would happen if you didn’t blow out your candles on your real sims birthday?