The Sims 2 Designer Diary #8
Producer Jonathan Knight tells us about the game's new aspiration system, which makes your sims act more like real people.
Without a doubt, The Sims 2 will be one of the biggest gaming events of the year when it is released in September. The sequel to one of the most successful games of all time, The Sims 2 is more than just a graphical upgrade of the original game. In addition to a gorgeous 3D graphics engine, Maxis is introducing entirely new features and capabilities into the game, including the ability to oversee multiple generations of a single sim family. While the designers have been improving the gameplay, they've also been careful to maintain the fun and simplicity of the original game. And as producer Jonathan Knight explains in the latest edition of our designer diaries, Maxis is going to introduce a new behavioral system that will allow your sims to act more lifelike than ever before. Now your sims will want more out of life, and it'll be up to you to either give it to them or not.
Wants & Fears
By Jonathan KnightProducer
You might not think that potty training the sims sounds like a real job, but in a strange way, that's exactly what our team has been up to for the last several months as we put the finishing touches on the new gameplay innovation in The Sims 2. With a new interface, a new simulator, and the same old Maxis humor, we've had a blast taking "that people game" to the next level. Here's a sneak peek into how we arrived at our revolutionary new game design.
It's been four years since bladder failure was all the rage. In the original The Sims, your sims had eight basic needs--bladder, hygiene, social, etc.--and your job as the player was to take care of these needs by clicking on toilets, showers, and other sims. Now, in The Sims 2, your sims have dreams--romance, family, knowledge, fortune, or popularity--which you, as the player, help them achieve over the course of their lifetimes. You choose the aspirational goals for your sims when you create them, and as you play, they reveal their wants and their fears. Satisfy their wants to help them lead happy, long, and successful lives. On the flip side, indulge in their fears to find out what stress can do to sims.
Great concept, right? But what does an aspiration look like in the game? Arguably, the most important thing any game can do is communicate the user interface in a clear, concise, and compelling manner. The original interface for The Sims did all of these things (you saw the word "needs" plus eight red/green bars, each with a word next to it, be it "hunger," "bladder," etc.). The Sims 2 interface needed to boil down the concept of lifetime aspirations, as well as retain the inherent Will Wright humor of the original "needs" panel. (There's just something funny about seeing the word "bladder" with a red/green bar next to it!) So our designers put together a mock-up that showed the words "wants" and "fears" with a series of colorful icons beneath each word. As a team, we fell in love with the new game panel. The challenge then became to deliver this feature within the parameters of this simplistic new design.
We needed a visualization of everything a sim could possibly want or fear. "How are we going to draw a picture of a near-death experience? How do we make 'I want to flirt with Sarah.' into an icon?" We had moved beyond the hundred-or-so memory images. We now needed to iconify--i.e., represent with little images in the wants and fears panel--everything a sim could possibly want or fear in a lifetime. This meant developing a visual language for anything that could happen in the game. And The Sims 2 is a big game! So we came up with a two-icon "grammar" for each want or fear, where the primary icon (say, two wedding rings) does most of the work, and a secondary icon serves as a "modifier," if needed. For example, if a sim wants to "get married," we just use the wedding rings. If a sim wants to "marry Sarah," we use a primary icon of Sarah's face with a secondary icon of wedding rings.
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- GameSpot Score 8.9 great
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The Sims 2 Review
The Sims 2 is a great sequel and a great game in its own right, and it's recommendable to just about anyone.
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