If you are a friend of mine or know me personally in any way you would know that The Sims Medieval (EA Games) has been my most anticipated game of the year. I was excited, I preordered it, I counted the days, and finally it arrived!
With the preorder you got a few goodies. In the case came some codes for fancy armor and a new throne room. I had a terrible time trying to figure out how to redeem the code due to vague instructions but with the help of the internet at large I figured out I was trying to use the wrong main menu. So I get the game started and I am greeted with an awesome intro by none other then Patrick Stewart! That man can sell anything.
I decide since the game is not really like any other from the Sim's franchise I should play though the tutorial. I get about an hour in and the game pauses to tell me a tip. And then won't come unpaused. Nothing I did would get the game to acknowledge that I had done what it wanted and that I could now continue on. So I save and quit to the desktop, curse a bit, and boot it back up. Problem solved I suppose and this makes me excited!
I continue on with my lovely Monarch (I picked the woman) and spend the next few hours learning how different the game really is! Its more of a point and click hero adventure then a Sims game. There is no building construction right off the bat. This makes me a little sad as I was looking forward to building the most bad ass castle I could think of before even letting the game unpause for the first time. After maybe 5 hours of game play I have yet to construct anything other then a barracks which was a pre-generated building I got to place for leveling up.
Yes your Sim Hero levels up. There are several classes you can play but you start as the Monarch which is still the only one I have unlocked. You receive experience points by completing daily tasks (like aspirations in Sims 3) and by finishing quests. You also get some random points here and there for certain tasks and discoveries (for instance if you feed the pit monster you get experience and a mood booster bonus). So you set out to level up and become a better ruler and hopefully unlock enough that you get to play with new Heros.
You receive a quest task which you can (apparently) take as long as you want to complete. As I said I was a few hours in and I decided to start one about a Warlock in my land that I needed to get rid of. I only had the Monarch unlocked so my only option for the story line was "make the Warlock love you" and I figured I would woo him and then kick him off a bridge or something. So I begin the quest and first its find out whats going on, then kiss him, then woo him, then "woo woo" with the Warlock. At this point I'm thinking "SERIOUSLY!". I had no other option if I wanted to continue on with this quest. So I "woo woo" with the Warlock and guess what? They made my Sim get pregnant. I was furious! Not only did I have NO option but now they threw this in there! As a female Sim I had NO CHOICE in the fact that I HAD to have sex with this dude but then I got pregnant! I imagine if you picked to play as the male Sim this would be a non-issue.
I was so pissed (as it also effected the fact that I had to wait to continue on with the quest to duel another guy, but now there is a baby basket in the castle kitchen that I can't move and a baby that doesn't stop crying) that I turned off the game and left. I just couldn't believe they would throw that in there. Now my only option is to continue on with the quest and marry the Warlock OR start the whole game over again.
I feel like I must have seriously missed something in the tutorial when I started the game. Maybe I did? I have no idea if I should have other adventurers to play with by now so I could have taken a different game path. Its hard to say though as The Sims is generally a pretty open game world. At this point I feel like the attempt to blend the sandbox and quest based didn't work quite as well as they were hoping.
All I know is I have to restart and see if I got lost somewhere. Maybe I can find a "how to" online. Either way, I hope the game redeems itself because I sure have loved The Sims up to this point and I would hate to have that change.
