The next big change in The Sims: it has an inventory system.
Matt is horny, and wants to impress his missus with a special Valentine’s Day meal. She loves spaghetti bolognaise. He could buy a frozen meal from the shops, but that’s not going to impress her. He’d do well to buy the ingredients from the local greengrocer. Or he could grow them fresh.
Behind the restaurant, Matt has a tomato patch. He’s been growing these tomatoes for days now. They’re ripe, juicy, and full of vim. A bit like Matt. He picks the tomatoes, takes them home, and starts preparing his meal.
Suddenly this is starting to feel closer to a traditional, un-Sims, PC game. Clear objectives. Inventories. Then, an icon appears at the bottom of the screen. It is a ‘moodlet’. Matt has just snogged his hot wife. And he’s in a great mood. For the next five days, he’s going to be as happy as Larry. He’ll be more alert. He’ll learn faster, get to work quicker, and make more friends. It looks like… Wait. We’ve seen this in MMORPGs. Is that a… buff?
Rod laughs. “We’ve got a design pickle. We need infinitely large metaphysical aspects to your Sim. That sounds crazy, but if you look at The Sims 2, it had the environment score, the bladder score… six bars in total. But human beings aren’t like that. You don’t say ‘I’m 75% ready to pee’. You just say ‘I really need to pee’. Instead of having to choose six things that define a person’s mood, we wanted an infinite number of ways to say how a sim was feeling. We looked around for design mechanisms that we could use, and sure enough, we were like ‘hey, buffs! that really works’. Now there are buffs for everything. You can be in a bad mood because you just pissed yourself. You could be in a good mood because you like sitting in sofas. You could be sad because your lover just died. Or you could be happy because you’re pregnant.”
Other ideas have been pinched from our nerd world. Character creation is far more rich than in The Sims 2. Rather than assigning numerical values to a sim—say, three points to neatness, five to intelligence—the team has come up with a system of traits. You can pick up to six in the current version. Traits are brief descriptions of your Sim. Words like evil. Or playful. Or genius. Or perfectionist. Or paranoid. Of schmoozer. Matt is rude, a daredevil, and shy. His neighbor Chad is grumpy, frugal, insensitive, and inappropriate. When Matt goes over to his neighbor’s house to chat, Chad turns away. Then he pisses himself. And laughs.
Rod explains that the inspiration for traits came “from looking at how people best describe themselves. We ended up looking at personal ads. Developing your characters is now about picking how you’d describe them, rather than arbitrarily moving sliders.” Traits dramatically feed back into the game world. Derek is a kleptomaniac. As we watch the early prototype, he picks up a park bench, and starts running away with it. As we carry on into town, we meet Teresa, out jogging. She has the trait ‘Outdoorsman’. Every time she leaves the house, this lady’s mood lifts.
The traits aren’t the only improvement to Sim creation. The Sims themselves look better. On immediate viewing, the improvements aren’t apparent—it’s only once you place screenshots of The Sims 3 next to The Sims 2, the difference is more clear. Their skin is more natural, more real. Their faces move in every so slightly more real ways. Their hair is different. There are now sliders for weight and musculature, meaning a near-infinite range of body types. Obese Sims are easy to create. So too are muscle men or skinny size zero body types. If you find creating Sims to be a bore, and want pre-made characters to torture/treat, the developers have got you covered: a range of personality types and models built in. On the menu screen we saw a would-be rock star with a bright purple Mohawk, wearing tartan, and with the ‘genius’ trait. There was also a modern-day mother character, a pert and prim yummy mummy with the ‘family-oriented’ trait. The more she sprogs, the happier she gets. Sex her. Sex her good. These presets also tie into the improved functionality of the Sims 3 website. Players will be able to upload their Sims to their own homepage, where they can be stored for other players to download and introduce into their own neighborhoods.
The question is, how hard will the Sims developers push connectivity? First: there’s no multiplayer. You can’t invite a friend to join your neighborhood. According to EA’s research, their players don’t want that. They say the “Sims players want complete ownership of their neighborhoods”—they don’t want anyone else to mess up their creations. But there will be some form of improved social networking.
“We tend to follow our players a lot, and they tend to tell us what they’ve been doing in The Sims,” says Rod. “They tell us they love social networking (sites like Facebook and MySpace). That feeds well into The Sims 2. We have four million people come back to The Sims Exchange (home to EA’s official Sims downloaders) every month. All they’re doing is sharing their creations. Obviously Spore (the incredible life, the universe and everything sim from Sims creator Will Wright—Ed) is coming from EA, and we’re learning a lot from them. But we’ll talk about the community features of The Sims 3 later.”
What they’re also not talking about: the potential for expansions. Despite their ubiquity, expansions to The Sims have rarely sat well within their host game—they’re almost always too self-contained. That’s partly to do with the lod model that the game uses: if a Sim is off at University, the evening action of Nightlife is paused. Similarly, if a Sims goes on holiday in FreeTime, his coffee shop in Open for Business is left abandoned.
The open world nature of The Sims 3 has enormous possibility for expansion. But that doesn’t mean Rod has a plan for what those expansions would be. He just knows they’re coming. “The fact that it’s a seamless world means that eventually—not to give away too much of our expansion pack strategy, but in theory—The Sims 3 could expand into an entire seamless world. You can imagine a Sims country which you could just live your life in.”
Does that mean that The Sims 3 won’t be a complete game without buying more packs? Are future expansions mapped out during the original development? “When we’re making the game, during the development process, we don’t leave anything out deliberately,” he explains, “We try and get as much into the game as possible. Absolutely everything we can. Then at some point, it’s like, OK, it’s been five years in development, we really should ship this.”
Fair enough—but can we learn anything more about the direction of The Sims 3 from their previous work? What, to Rod, was their most successful expansion pack?
He laughs. “The most successful financially was Pets. The one I got most out of from a design perspective was Open for Business. What we did was make a business simulator in an expansion pack. You could make any kind of business you wanted. We didn’t have specific code for running a bakery, or running a coffee shop. We found a real elegant solution. We separated the world into places where you get paid to get in and out of, places where you pick things off shelves, and places where you could pay to have a go on an item. One of my businesses was playing as kids in a house when the parents were away. I have a rave business—letting kids come and party. It was really key for The Sims 3: it showed us how open we can make our systems, to let players goof around with them.”
Does Rod find the success of The Sims limiting? As a gamer, with development experience in MMORGPs, does he ever want to return to his fantasy roots?
“It occasionally comes up as an idea: doing a fantasy version of The Sims. That was actually one of the first jokes I played when I arrived at Electronic Arts. I drove up to meet Will Wright, and the first thing I said was ‘As the first expansion pack, I’m really pleased that we’ve got the Lord of the Rings license. And we’re going to do it.’” Will Wright’s reactions is, sadly, lost to history.
Rod thinks for a moment. “We may even get around to it.”