THE SIMS 3
The Sims Is a house divided—not
against itself, but into two distinct
wings. One side regularly puts titles
like The Sims 2. H&M Fashion Stuff—an add-on pack devoted entirely to the acquisition and wearing of store-branded clothing—on PC-game best-seller lists. It pushed British songstress Uly Allen’s Simlish rendition of her hit single ‘Smile past 3 million views on youTube. “We had a Girl Scout troop visit our studio last month, and there wasn’t a single girl who didn’t play The Sims on some platform.” says EAs Sims Division President Nancy Smith, putting a period on why “real” garners tend to shrug off the series as little more than a virtual dollhouse. But don’t confuse superficial with creative:
This Is the storytelling wing, too, the one that uses The Sims to make movies and designs furniture for content-craving peers—and no doubt led Will Wright to the concept of Sporecasts (a way for players to cubscnbe to each other’s custom-made stuff) in his current project. And then there’s the other wing. where Sims studio head Rod Humble and design director Matt Brown toss around phrases like “buffs and debuffs” grind. and “consistent randomness.” This side constantly reminds itself that The Sims is short for “simulation” and remembers its roots in 1984’s Raid on Bungeling Bay.
“A lot of garners felt that LThe Sims] had moved past them and into a creativitytool-only kind of area,” says Humble. “So in The Sims 3, we’re putting a lot of the game back—for people who want it”
HAMSTERS WITH JOBS
Meet the new simulation, exponentially more complicated than the old one—mainly because the scope has shifted Iron, household microcosm to community macrocosm.
‘While you’re playing in one home [en The Sims 21,’ says Sims 3 exeutive producer Ben Belt ‘nothing eke changes in the ether homes in the neighborhood.’ Unless you were pretending your family lived ire The Twilight Zone, the selective march of time screwed up stories and kept your familial snow globe disconnected from the rest of civilization. Says Smith, if you had a little boy next door you were fond of, but you kept playing your family on your lot and didn’t move the other family along. you’d be 30 years old and he’d still be a little boy.’
And so in The Sims 3, the den becomes a warren, and evorything you would expect to be happening is happening, whatever the time of day,’ says Bell ‘All of the characters in the town are changing together You can zoom en on your Sims. You can go next door to visit your neighbors. You can knock on the door or peek in the window. You can go downtown, and the people you meet are people in your Sims lives. What would happen
ii you ran into your boss on the weekend in town? Would you ruin your Sims life by doing something embarrassing?’
That time-lost little boy next door from The Sims 2 now ages and changes alongside your own child ‘They can become high school sweethearts.’ says Bell. “They can grow up togcther get marred, have a family of their own—and Chose characters will advance along with your family. These Sims will act out their lives en an intelligent way depending on the personality traits they have.’
Sims players know how overwhelming it can be to manage a family of four confined to their own living room—so it’s easy to see how running into an ex-husband while shopping fo Jimmy’s back-toschool supplies could just complicate, not complement And so Humble’s Sims 3 directive was to scale back some of the primal trappings of day-to-day life. Th.at includes what he calls the ‘motive grind.’ the endless plate-spinning required to keep your Sims’ eight attributes—comfort, hygiene, bladder. et al—topped ott in order to prevent them from pisseng their pants while company’s over for pizza
‘Matt [Brownj’s phrase was always, ‘The Sims are hamsters with jobs,’ says Humble ‘Now we’re hying to make the hamsters a bit more interesting’ To that end, the number uf attribute bars ha been reduced tram eight to three, with one—a ‘stress versus fun’ meter—standing out as the most essential, Sims still need to bathe, sleep. and eat, but the gauge presenting liters of urine versus free bladder space is hidden behind the curtain ‘We’ve added one-off mechanics like the butts in World of WarCro ft says Brown, ‘Of course, you don’t get poisoned by spiders, and you don’t have armor or spells. In our case, if (your Sim’sj Out ii the rain, he would have a debut t—we call them mood lets—that would just say that he’s soaked now and he’s miserable, Or if his morn dies, he’ll get a moocilet that makes him miserable, Itil go away after a certain amount of time, or you can get rid of it If there’s a way to get rid of it
Moodlets range from umple things like ‘I’m thirsty!’ with immediate psychological effects to ‘I just got a promotion” that can grant a boost that carries for days. Such buffs and debutfs exist in the original game.
too. says Humble, but are kept hidden from the player—a fact that made for some confusing (or funny, depending on your disposition) situations. Picture this: Your Sims mother just died. You don’t play for a few days— and when you return, your Sim has his first kiss and he bursts into tears
reasons you ye entirely forgotten. 
WELCOME HOME
Welcome to Pleasant Valley, the new home town in The Sims 3—and a town that will begin as the same consistent, open world for every starting player. Everyone will find the same characters living In the same places, but how this town evolves—what happens to all of the characters and to subsequent generations—is entirely in your hands.
Remember that in previous versions of The Sims, no matter how many buildings or places the developers added in the 10 million expansion packs, th. only life that really matters, that time really exists for, is that of your own Sim, Gotpg to a new location means loading a discrete uált, and while In that discrete unit time basicaity stops. for everyone else. (This is why in The SIms 2. you coutd often end up elder than your pajents.) In The Sims 3, however, your Sirn will now walk out of your borne and see and i.it other Sims, othe5._ building and other rie.ghtiorhoods in real tirji The world is changing and evolving around you. characters are going on with their lives, marrying, aging, and dying, as you proceed with your own life. And every action you iake may have a ripple A effect that spreads. across the town and affects the” lives of multiple generatkins.The tough part for the designers has been to make the world big enough to be Interesting 
without making it too overwhelming for pIayers
too complicated for themselves to design. _‘
started kicking around big-city ideas7 sAys
art director Morgan Godat. “bUt what we came
to pretty quickly was that we didn’t want to
put in entire buildings that were just there as
a backdrop. We were worried that If the player goes into this world and there are 100 buildings,
•but only 25 of them can be interacted with,
they’re going to be disappolflted.’ *
As such. all of the buildings in Pleasant Valley— some of which we’ve highlighted here—are places
you can visit and interact with. Exactly what that
interaction will be depends on the situation but in a nutshell, the designers have broken locations up into two broad categories. There are “rabbit holes,” the informal inhouse term for a building your Sim will disappear into without you actually following inside (for example, you won’t follow your Sim into his off ke job and watch him space out on the Web for eight hours), and there are venues, which are locations such as a pool or park, that will be Filled with lots of Sims and accoutrements of all types to interact with. And, of course, expect the town to expand and grow over time, both from users’ custom content and from the teem itself. Says Humble, “A tot of those locations, and also the scope of the world, are designed to be able to go deeper and expand over time. As we work through this year. we may change some of the locations’ functionality, whether you can go in and walk about. (Andj then we’ve got our expansion pecks going forward Actually getting a freaking world done on day one is going to be hard enough. We’ll see what we can do With that as we go on.
