The Sims 2 Designer Diary #5
In the fifth edition of our designer diaries for The Sims 2, the team at Maxis discusses what makes a good neighborhood.
The Sims is reportedly the best-selling computer game of all time. The game and its many expansion packs presumably owe this incredible success to a combination of engaging house design and intriguing gameplay, which features autonomous little computer people, or "sims," getting into all sorts of unusual situations. These sims interact with each other, and with their environments, based on their personalities, moods, and personal needs. Now, developer Maxis is hard at work on the sequel--The Sims 2--in which sims will not only live, work, and interact, but they'll also learn, remember, grow old, and even die. In this edition of our designer diaries for this highly anticipated sequel, the Maxis team discusses neighborhoods and their role in the next game. You can also watch a new trailer that shows neighborhoods in action.
It's All in the Neighborhood!
By Lucy Bradshaw and Tim LeTourneauVP PC Development/Senior Producer
In The Sims 2, it all begins in the neighborhood. It's the entry point for every house and every story in the game. In the original version of The Sims, the neighborhood was a simplistic place comprised of a mere 10 lots that you could move your families into. Way back then, it seemed like 10 lots were more than enough. But our players quickly told us differently, and through expansion packs, we increased both the size and scope of the neighborhoods. For The Sims 2, we knew we had to not only learn from our previous experience and provide substantial and diverse neighborhoods, but we had to go beyond just giving "more of the same." We knew that the neighborhood in The Sims 2 had to make a bold statement about how the game had grown and evolved. Not only did we make the neighborhood bigger, but we made it more dynamic and let players change it in a variety of ways.
In The Sims 2, when you come into the neighborhood for the first time, you're amazed by the level of realistic details and the magnificence of the landscape. There are sailboats floating on the water, rainbows decorating the sky, birds darting in and out of the clouds, school buses and cars bustling on the streets. The scene feels as if it is teeming with life. It was extremely important to us that The Sims 2 neighborhood be inviting and that it be a place that players would feel compelled to inhabit. We wanted to compel players to create families, build houses, and populate these new, realistic and vibrant 3D settings.
In The Sims 2, the neighborhood evolves as you play through your sims' lifetimes and as you go through various generations of households. You'll experience your families growing up, and [you'll witness] the kids moving out to start households of their own. Since players need to feel that building and maintaining multiple families and homes is both strategic and rewarding, we created a variety of neighborhood features to deliver that.
Let's start with something as simple as placing a lot. In the original game, you had to build your house in a predetermined lot. In The Sims 2, we wanted you to feel like you could build a house wherever you wanted to in the neighborhood. So, as long as there's a road next to your lot, you can build there. You can now select from a variety of preset lot templates and can place them in any configuration you choose. In The Sims 2, if you want to make densely packed tract homes in one part of the neighborhood and sprawling estates in another, you can. When it comes to relationships between sims, proximity matters. Sims who live near each other are more likely to visit one another. A really cool new feature is that after you've built a house, you can pick it up and move it to another lot. If you want to fix up your lonely bachelor with the cute girl (who's a few blocks away) more quickly, well, now you can just pick up his house and make them next-door neighbors.
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