E3 2002The Sims Online impressions

Electronic Arts is celebrating the unprecedented success of The Sims--which is now the most successful PC game ever made--by creating an open-ended online version that will dwarf the scope of the original. When it's finished, The Sims Online may qualify as one of the most addictive games ever made.

According to EA, these days, half of The Sims' audience is female and the other half is in its teens. Thus, it makes sense that the company has squarely targeted the teen female market with The Sims Online. Players of The Sims Online start out with a single character, who is given a piece of land, much like in the original single-player game. Your character can build a home or other structure by himself or herself on this land, or you can find one or more roommates to pool your money with so that you can afford a nicer house or more toys. Your options for these toys are enormous--more than 1,000 objects are included in the game, more than The Sims and all of its expansions combined (and those objects are in there too).

The variety of "homes" that you can create in The Sims Online is pretty big. As we toured the demo room that EA and Maxis have set up here at E3, we saw several players toying with their houses, which ranged from a dance club and a western saloon and even to some sort of bizarre alien laboratory. One of The Sims Online's possible objectives is to have your house become one of the most visited by other players. The more visitors you have, the more money you'll get. And the more money you get, the better you can make your character's house.

Maxis is including all kinds of features in The Sims Online to make the experience a bit chattier. For instance, you can send instant messages to other players while they're online, just like you can with a real IM client. If players are offline, your message will be sent as a sort of in-game e-mail that will appear in their inbox when they next log in. Further, the friendship web lets you keep track of everyone you've made friends or enemies with, along with all the people they've made friends or enemies with, and so on. Eventually, your network of Sims friends could exceed your network of real friends.

The Sims Online seems on track to ship as scheduled in November. The version of the game we saw today was already up and running on the Internet, and we saw players logged on from a variety of locales. Sims junkies will have a lot to occupy them come the end of the year. Stay tuned for more details on The Sims Online as its release date approaches.