Is The Sims 3 Multiplayer? (& How to Play Together)
Even though it came out thirteen years ago, The Sims 3 is still played a lot despite The Sims 4 being a more recent game. The Sims 3 created a great and dedicated community that is spending time updating and developing great mods that make 2009 Maxis’s successful game relevant today. New players are still acquitting themselves to The Sims 3 and have relevant questions. In this article, we will look into one common question in the Sims community – is The Sims 3 multiplayer, and is there a way for players to play together?
Base The Sims 3 game does not have the multiplayer option, which means players cannot play together. However, there’s a way for your Sims to interact with your friends’ Sims – you’ll need to switch “active households” nonstop, which will cause a loss of Wishes that you establish after creating Sims. It will interrupt the whole story progression of the Sims and lead to unwanted interactions, marriages, and more.
We will discuss this topic more by looking into the reasoning behind the answer and if other ways of playing Sims with your friends are available. If you are interested in this topic, stay with us until the end!
The Sims 3 isn’t multiplayer
When it came out in 2009, Sims 3 provided the established fan base novelties that included a more detailed Create a Sim engine; it expanded on the already detailed building mode. Moreover, the interactions between Sims got diversified even more, and the new Create a Style feature allowed players to stylize clothing and objects by changing colors and patterns.
Sims 3 presented so many new features, so it’s unsurprising that the game has had over three dozen updates and bug fixes since its release. Sims 3 was huge despite Sims 4 being the franchise’s most recent open-world life simulator.
The modders did a great job keeping the game relevant and diversified, but there is one mod and mode that is still quite hard for Maxis and EA Games to develop – a multiplayer mode.
Once upon a time, after the great success of the first installment of the franchise, known as simply The Sims, EA Games decided to develop an online version of the game, where players will control everything from Sims City’s economy to the lives and families of their Sims.
Fans were interested; however, after some time, the game was just not interesting enough for fans to continue to play it, especially after the release of The Sims 2 in 2004. EA Games tried to rebrand the game to EA Land, but the game still suffered a commercial failure and was ultimately shut down in 2008.
Since then, EA Games have focused only on base Sims games that are being released and updated regularly. Unfortunately, The Sims 3 never had a multiplayer feature, and some fans still wonder why. EA Games learned the hard way that online games are not easy projects to work on, especially the ones that essentially revolve around simulating life, building homes, and whole communities.
It did not help that some players decided to build literal brothels in the game and exchanged virtual Simoleons for WooHoo.
Sims games were successful enough, and EA Games never bothered with multiplayer features after that. All in all, the Sims 3 is not a multiplayer game but still has co-op features where you and your friend can create Sims in the same City, but only if you exchange households every time you want to play together, and risking the loss of Wishes, or life goals, that set up the story for your Sim.
Are there The Sims 3 multiplayer mods available?
Even though the Sims mod community rarely disappoints, unfortunately, at the time of publishing this article, there are no available multiplayer mods for Sims 3. Modders and players tried to make it happen, but the way Maxis created the Sims 3 game, its files do not have a good field for modders to develop a good multiplayer mod.
Mods are hard to develop and create, and adapting them to the game is complicated. The Sims 4 does have a multiplayer mod developed by the fans, and it has been quite popular within the community.
The Sims 3 has a few beta multiplayer mods on the Internet, but they’re not credible and reliable enough to be installed on our computers.
It seems it will stay that way, especially with the rumors that Maxis and EA Games are finally considering adding multiplayer to their new The Sims 5 game that will come out sooner rather than later. Regardless, The Sims 3 is still a good game without the multiplayer mode or mod and a relevant Sims installment that is still cool today.
Until then, we will enjoy The Sims 3 for what it is, maybe download The Sims 3: Showtime expansion, interact with other Sims in other cities, and ultimately wait for new Sims multiplayer news.
