The Sims 3: Will it live up to the hype?

It dwarfs Warcraft, frags Halo and steals Grand Theft Auto's thunder. At over 100 million total copies sold,The Sims is the best-selling PC franchise ever.

A new beginning, or more of the same?

But with genes like that, a new entry has enormous pressure to keep the ball rolling -- which is exactly what The Sims 3 hopes to do when it storms store shelves next week. So, can the game really live up to its enormous hype? We took a nearly-finished copy for a test drive (literally, thanks to its wide selection of vehicles), and found out.

New for this version, the game's Create-A-Sim mode lets you customize the appearance of your Sim in a way that will probably be familiar to players of EA Sports titles, but with the addition of quirky personality traits. Want to create a kleptomaniac, child-hating, neurotic couch potato, and move him into a neighborhood full of rich families? Of course you do, and now you can.

But The Sims 3 also offers your creations a selection of larger life goals: simple, everyday dreams. Dreams like becoming the head of an international crime syndicate, or a master chef, or the leader of the free world. The ability to produce ever more unlikely Sims is a real draw for Sims fans, and it's looking like The Sims 3 will continue to feed this desire. Plus, we'd bet our monitors that the range of life goals and personality traits will increase dramatically thanks to the inevitable deluge of Sims 3 game expansions.

Once you're done dreaming up your Sim, you'll see game's most noticeable improvement: a fully dynamic town. This means that when one of your Sims wanders outside your house to go to work, visit the library, go shopping, or drop in on a neighbor, life doesn't stop for the others. And it all happens with none of the loading pauses that plagued fans of Sims past.

In fact, you can browse around the whole town, taking in sights like the park, the run-down criminal hideout, or the flashy, futuristic science lab up in the hills. Your town comes prepopulated with Sims, and there's a healthy selection of vehicles, from cheap jalopies to status-symbol sports cars, to help you get about to meet them. The new system genuinely works, too; you feel like a part of the town's ecosystem, and even exploring its various destinations will take hours. It's yet another logical avenue on which EA will undoubtedly expand.

One consequence of the new town system is that instead of just disappearing off to work for a day, your Sims now have workplaces that appear as regular buildings on the map. You don't get to see inside them, but you can still influence the way your Sim spends his or her work day. You can opt to suck up to the boss, for example, and hopefully gain a promotion, or pick up a side job to make a little extra cash. You can even coast through the work day stress-free, but don't expect to catch the boss's eye that way.

Thanks to imaginative efforts like this, The Sims 3's movie creation and editing tools are also getting plenty of press. They weren't functional in our pre-release version, but judging from the footage that's already out there, we'll be seeing an avalanche of fan-produced soap operas and sitcoms appearing on video-sharing sites within days of release.

So will it live up to the hype? Reactions from critics won't be in until early next week, but all indications are that EA's onto another best-seller, and our impressions certainly don't disagree. It's looking like the Sims are once again in safe hands.