Will Wright On The Return Of The Sims

Thanks to GameSpot for their interview with Maxis/EA's Will Wright regarding The Sims 2, the March 2004-due sequel to the multi-million selling people-prodding simulation. Wright talks about the difficulties in creating a follow-up ("Especially with a successful [game] like The Sims, you have to balance your fear of not dropping the ball with the danger of being overly conservative"), and discusses some of the evolutions due to debut in the sequel, primary among them "camera freedom... something that we've resisted for a long time and feels like probably the biggest stretch... but... some huge benefits", as well as "the idea that The Sims smoothly age and have different concerns and motivations and needs at different age ranges. It becomes more of an epic, almost Michener-like multigenerational thing...the story that you're playing through."

Comments

Contention Issues and other basic features

[fm6]

The inability of of The Sims to do anything reasonable when two sims content for the same resource (both go through the same door, or even the same spot in a room; both want to grab a plate from the same counter, etc) is pretty dumb. Which makes me wonder if the programmers really understand real-time programming -- resource contention is a fundamental issue for real-time work, after all. Judging from how often the game locks up, or accidentally generate objects with non-unique IDs (try killing off all the Sims in a house, then moving a new family in) makes me suspect that they don't.

I also can't believe that it didn't occur to anybody that bathroom doors need locks!

But the biggest disappointment of the game is that autonmous Sim behavior is a joke. In order to have any real progress in your Sims' lives, you have to micromanage them like a dysfunctional parent. Which makes the whole concept of personality parameters more or less pointless.

If I hear that The Sims 2 deals with some of these issues and that they've opened up their object creation API so we don't have to make do with the few lame objects they provide, then I'll give the game a look. Without this stuff, it's not a game, or a simulation. It's just a dollhouse for grownups.

Re:Contention Issues and other basic features

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading an interview with Will Wright where he mentioned the Sims themselves are very stupid, with very little AI. The intelligence in the game comes from the environment and the objects the Sims interact with rather than the Sims themselves. This should be evident to anyone that has played the game and I think is a bit of a departure from traditional AI in games where the characters get the most AI attention (usually NPCs or enemies).