The Sims 2: Open for Business Impressions - Running a Store, Managing the Wage Slaves

There's something about controlling your own family of little computer people as they live, love, and take bathroom breaks--something that has kept the Sims series consistently popular for more than six years. The 2004 sequel, The Sims 2, is still going strong, and it's about to be joined by a third expansion pack, Open for Business. In previous games, your "sims" characters would simply disappear for several in-game hours as they went off to work. The new game will finally let you follow your sims as they head out to their own businesses, which you can build out of their homes or downtown in a swanky new shopping area.

As we saw, the new expansion will offer sims the chance to start one of three different types of business: product retail (for which you produce individual goods and sell them, such as a bakery), pay-per-use (for which you offer services that other sims pay to use each time, like a beauty salon), and perhaps the most open-ended business type of all, pay-per-time (for which you open a business with ongoing services and charge other sims by the hour for the right to hang around and use the place). Pay-per-time means that you can build out your own lot full of fun stuff and charge people for the privilege of enjoying themselves.

If you have previous expansion packs, such as Nightlife, you'll be able to open your own bowling alley and charge for lane play by the hour or even use Nightlife's cars to build your own car dealership. As it turns out, once you establish your sim as a captain of industry, you can chase after an even bigger pot of gold: real estate. You'll be able to speculate by purchasing barren, fixer-upper lots, adding some furnishings, and selling at a higher price, though the development team at Maxis is taking several steps to prevent horrible abuse of the sales system.

Whether you wheel and deal in acreage or apple pies will depend on your talent for salesmanship. The game will also add an entirely new skill system known as the "talent" system. Through practice, your sims can improve in seven different talents, which include the ability to pitch sales to customers, to work a cash register, and to craft products like toys, robots, and floral arrangements. Your crafting ability will range from a "bronze" to a "gold" level, and that will affect the quality and quantity of the items that you can craft and sell. Fortunately, your sims' existing skills can also be used to help you with your talents; a better cook will be a better baker, for instance.

Business begins the moment you open your shop, which functions as an outside lot so that your at-home time basically pauses while you're at work. Your business can include service fixtures like hair salon chairs or retail furnishings like stock shelves, on which you can place finished goods for sale (you can actually use the cash register to automatically restock anything you're out of). All you need to do is place your item, set your price, and set it for sale, then have yourself, or one of your employees, attempt to push your wares onto unsuspecting customers.

If you're a skillful manager, you'll be able to use a motivational speech to temporarily increase your employees' entire skill set. Of course, if you have troublesome employees who aren't good at their jobs, you may end up having to let them go, which will hurt them emotionally. In your ongoing search to create the biggest and best business, you'll be able to recruit your friends, neighbors, and even random customers; some sims may have existing skills that will make them more attractive to hire, but they'll also demand a higher paycheck. Fortunately, if you've built out an entire family of sims, everyone in your household will officially be an employee and will be able to service your customers.

Customers will have an all-new relationship system called customer loyalty, which will be affected by their experience in your shops. If you provide them with attentive customer service by promptly ordering employees to wait on a new customer, and you provide them with good merchandise at a reasonable price, their loyalty will increase. If you let shoppers wander aimlessly without bothering to help them, or if you let them be solicited by unskilled salespeople, or if you take salespeople of any skill level and attempt to use the new "hard sell" ability, you may decrease their customer loyalty, making them less likely to return. (And as it turns out, your sims' personal relationships with customers may also affect their loyalty.) However, if you can build up a successful business full of loyal customers, your business will increase in rank up to five different levels. With these increases in rank, your sims will also gain powerful new perks, such as a social networking ability that will instantly put your character in touch with another sim's entire group of friends. Then again, one of the major costs of business is spending time away from your family, so you can opt to try to work from home. However, if you have a low-ranking business, your sim will need to spend hours of game time on the phone, talking the low-level manager through the day's business--top-flight operations with great managers will require only a little time each day to make sure everything's running smoothly and to make sure the cash keeps coming in.

In addition to these new selling features, the new expansion pack will add a whopping 125 different fixtures, including more toys for child sims to play with (a highly requested feature from fans) and craftable robots. Robots can be bought and sold and will perform day-to-day chores, like watering the lawn, though the most sophisticated and expensive robot, Servo, will instead fully mimic the personality of the sim that activated him--and Servo can be put to work on a variety of tasks, and he won't get hungry or need to use the restroom. Open for Business will have a lot to offer both new fans and existing fans of The Sims 2. The expansion is scheduled for release on March 2.