The Sims 3: Ambitions

The Sims 3: Ambitions (Also known as The Sims 3: Hobbies and Professions before the official announcement), is an expansion pack for The Sims 3 and is tentatively set to be released on June 1st, 2010. It allows players to become "fearless heroes and ace entrepreneurs". In other words, it's a career oriented expansion pack, a spiritual remake of The Sims 2: Open for Business, but with added activities. Ambitions also appears to be somewhat related to The Sims 2: FreeTime, as well.

EA Games confirmed Ambitions on March 4th, 2010.

The Sims 3: Ambitions will also be available for feature phones, iPhone and iPod touch in late 2010.

Description
"'Imagine a world where you can make your Sim anything they want to be. Widen your Sim's horizons with a bunch of killer career opportunities. With The Sims 3: Ambitions, decide whether your Sim will be the brave town hero, cause loads of mischief among their neighbors,or give some style advice. Make your Sim save the day as a brave firefighter, change your town as a leading architect, or live on the edge as a tattoo artist. Will your Sim find success as a billionaire high-tech inventor or eke out a living as a bumbling mad scientist? Will they uncover secrets as a private investigator by dusting for prints or roughing up a suspect for information? Will they walk the runways as a fashion diva with exhilarating and swanky style? Their future is entirely in your hands!'"

The Sims 3: Ambitions allows players to pursue a variety of exciting paths and careers in their Sims’ lives that in turn affect their overall gameplay experience and neighbourhood. While on the job, the player has direct control over their Sims’ work and can choose how to spend their days. Players can opt to make house calls and save lives as a doctor or choose the devious route and test experimental medicine on patients. Be the heroic firefighter tackling raging infernos or smashing everything in sight at the victim’s home with an axe; take a shot at solving cases as an investigator, nicely convincing sources to divulge secrets or roughing up perpetrators in a dark alley to get information.

Players can now experience some of the most exciting and varied jobs. In The Sims 3: Ambitions, players can choose to hunt down vengeful spirits as the ghost hunter, invent brilliant and potentially destructive gadgets as an inventor, craft glorious masterpieces as a sculptor, and solve riveting cases by any means necessary as an investigator with dozens of cases to solve and numerous clues to find. Additionally, players will be able to change the look and feel of their town by becoming an architect and directly affecting the neighbourhood around them leveraging Build and Buy mode. The stylist career and new tattoo system allow players to make over their Sim neighbours in fashionable or catastrophic ways. For the first time, players will be in charge of how their Sims’ career progresses and decide if they will work for good or evil, pursue creative endeavours or technical affairs, climb to the top quickly, or be a slacker. The future of a Sims’ success or failure is entirely in the hands of the player.

Features

 * New town: Twinbrook


 * Returning creature: Servo. Servos are built by Sims who have inventing skills.


 * New mode: Renovation Mode is a variation of Build and Buy Modes and used by the architect to remodel for clients


 * New Build mode abilities: modify the pitch of individual roof sections and add multistory columns.


 * 3 new skills:
 * Sculpting: Sims can create sculptures out of ice, metal, clay and wood whilst another Sim poses for them. (Previously seen in The Sims: Bustin' Out)
 * Inventing: There seems to be a wide variety of inventions. Servos are back, along with a time machine. Sims get scraps for inventions from scrapyards, a new type of lot, or by blowing things up.
 * Tattooing: Players are taken to the tattoo editor where they can choose tattoos with up to five layers, modify their colors, change the size, modify the opacity, and select where to place it: upper, lower, or full back, neck, ankle, chest, stomach, wrist, shoulder, bicep, or forearm. (Previously seen in The Sims 2 for PS2).
 * Control Sim’s actions and interactions while they’re on the job.
 * According to a member of The Sims 3 staff, Sims will even be able to manage their careers to an extent while the player is not controlling them. "Every career has responsibilities and its own active jobs. Each active job will require [the player's] full attention, but there are still options that allow [the player's] Sim to progress and level up while not controlling them."


 * On-the-job choices now change the town and affect other Sims as well. Players modify the town’s structure as an architect or set neighborhood fashions as a stylist.


 * 6 new jobs (not counting skill careers): architect, doctor, firefighter, ghosthunter, private investigator, and stylist. Contrary to popular belief, Sculpting, Inventing and Tattooing are new skills, not new jobs.


 * New lifetime wishes: Home Design Hotshot (earn a high number of great architecture reviews), Descendant of da Vinci (master painting, sculpting and inventing), Super Stylist (reach top of stylist career), Unknown (save a large number of Sims from death in a fire), Unknown (solve a large number of private investigator cases)


 * New Lifetime rewards: Fireproof your home, Career cash booster, Artisan crafter (boosts value of invented/sculpted items)


 * Earthquakes are set to appear in this game


 * New objects: fire engine vehicle, personal fire extinguisher, detonation packs, tattoo chair, lockpicking kit, trampoline.
 * Collect scrap from the junkyard, and broken objects for inventing


 * New upgrades
 * New traits: Savvy Sculptor, Eccentric, Dramatic, Environmentally Conscious, and Perceptive.


 * Addition of the consignment shop a place for Sim's to sell their own items (collectibles, sculptures, etc.)


 * Ability to register at City Hall to be self employed in a "Skill Career" for writers, fishermen, and gardeners.


 * Overhauled real-estate system that lets the player purchase and upgrade any community lot building.


 * In a French language interview it was stated that Sims would be able to do laundry and other chores to get Sims in an especially good mood. There will be washers and dryers available including one dryer that has a special "surprise."


 * Either satellites will return, or there will be new meteor showers. Balls of fire falling from the sky were depicted in the second trailer, and an IGN screenshot later confirmed the feature as in-game.


 * New vehicle type: Motorcycle
 * New forms of death could possibly appear; deaths by earthquake, illness, balls of fire, and choking are some of the theories, but are not confirmed.

Free Patch
A free patch for The Sims 3 will be released around the same time as Ambitions. It will introduce tattoos, self-employment, and a new Create a Pattern tool to the base game.

"EA is planning a huge free update to go along with the expansion's release. The first of the major new pieces of content is the ability for players to give their Sims tattoos. Without Ambitions players will only have access to a limited set of Tattoos, but they can still apply them to their characters and other Sims. Even with Ambitions the art seems fairly limited at first, but the range of what you can do with the images is impressive. Through resizing and layering players can create some fairly realistic and genuinely good-looking body art. Other new features free to all players with the release of Ambitions are self-employment, more options with customizing a neighborhood, and increased build/buy features. Sims who have the proper skills like photography or painting can register as self employed, making it so players who are aspiring to a life goal that links to the skill will no longer have to live with that pesky 'unemployed' title. The other neighborhood and build/buy features are pretty specific sounding to the uninitiated Sims player, but trust me when I say that players who love to customize the minutia of their town and buildings have a lot to look forward to with Ambitions whether they buy it or not."

Leaked images
In May 2010, leaked images of Ambitions surfaced, allegedly through a Russian journalist breaching disclosure policies. These images were distributed more widely by the Brazilian fan website, O Sim BR.net. The legal ramifications of republishing these images is currently unknown. The images show a clear overhead view of Twinbrook, confirming it as the town in the second trailer (Iron Man parody). They also show an explosion at a junkyard, the inside of a salon, a secret agent in 'disguise', a Sim at a drafting board, several new hair styles, applying tattoos, a clothes line, and a new motorbike.

Videos
Video:The Sims 3 Ambitions Trailer

Video:Iron Man 2 Parody