Looking for a place to chat back and forth about The Sims with Maxis employees? Check out the “Maxis Thread of the Day.” Each day brings a new topic pertaining to The Sims, The Sims 2, The Expansion Packs or The Exchanges. Join in the discussion!
Nieuws
4 sep 2003 - 23:30
4 sep 2003 - 23:10
"Everything from the size of your Sim's feet to hair accessories will be customizable."
GENIUS AT PLAY: Wright clings to one of his Sims creations near his California offices
Reinventing the Sims
Will Wright hopes to erase some bad memories with a new version of the best-selling computer game
By Chris Taylor
In the beginning—that is, in 1989—Will Wright created Sim City. And it was good. Millions of PC owners got hooked on the game's godlike powers that let players create a town, fill it with enough parks and police stations to please an unseen population, and watch the town grow. Then in 2000 Wright said, "Let there be life." And he created The Sims, which let players micromanage the lives, loves and careers of adorable little people (called "Sims") who lived in homes reminiscent of the Cleavers' in the simpler era of black-and-white television. The Sims shipped 8 million copies, becoming the best-selling computer game of all time. For Wright, it was all very good.
As the 21st century dawned, Wright reigned as the undisputed deity of the PC-game world. That is, until his next big thing: The Sims Online, in which players from all over the world let their little people roam and mingle in a vast virtual environment. It sounded like the Garden of Eden. And lo, it was a boring, poorly populated bomb. Gamers suddenly realized that Wright was not infallible after all.
So what's next for this unflappable 43-year-old geek whose brain seems to overflow with ideas? Since The Sims Online debacle, he has been back at his virtual drawing board, sketching out a new breed of Sims. They look cooler, sound clearer and inhabit homes that are less Leave It to Beaver and more Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Most audacious of all, they have real lives: they are born, they grow up, give birth and die. Legions of fans await the result, The Sims 2, due for release in February. Will it be a return case of divine inspiration—or will Wright slip again? His reputation rests on the outcome—as does the computer-game industry's best hope for the mainstream recognition it craves.
Wright is a gaunt, wiry figure with large glasses and a perpetual ironic smirk. His wardrobe seems to consist pretty much of gray shirts and black jeans. He is soft-spoken and reserved, with a playfulness just beneath the surface. At this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the biggest date on the computer-game industry's calendar, Wright casually slipped reporters near worthless Argentine banknotes as a surreal bribe. In his office at Maxis, his Walnut Creek, Calif., company, he is a nervy, perpetual-motion machine, methodically pulling apart glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty or constructing towers out of magnetic plastic toys.
Wright, in other words, is obsessed with creating things. As a child in Atlanta, that meant balsa-wood planes and train sets. When he discovered computers, it meant digital cities. These days it often means building battle robots with his 17-year-old daughter or inventing a special set of toy building blocks, which he calls Architex, that can be used to design houses. Indeed, it is his love for architecture that has led Wright to his greatest success. When the Sims germinated in his mind, it was like a virtual version of Architex. You built a home, then computer people called Sims moved in and told you whether they liked it or not. The original game was called Doll House, and teenage boys in a focus group rated it the worst idea they had ever heard.
But Wright persisted. Eventually The Sims became less of an afterthought to house building and more the focus of the game itself. Soon each Sim had a realistic set of needs represented by bars on the screen that turned from green to red. When a Sim registered as hungry, for example, it was time to point him toward the fridge (assuming you had bought him one).
The objective was to keep the Sims' needs fulfilled so they could get promotions and raises when they went to work or buy more stuff to meet their needs faster. Like a lot of Wright's work, it was all very tongue in cheek. The Sims were caricatures who never aged (neither did their children, who arrived as if by stork). The products you bought for them got ever more expensive and outrageous (like the Love-o-matic vibrating bed), and the chirpy 1950s movie music enhanced the Cleavers feel. Somehow it all worked.
Players found it easy to invest their imagination in the Sims' lives, with their carefully constructed needs, personalities and relationships. After the game was released, more than 1,000 fan websites sprang up in which players posted screen shots from their Sims' world. After the runaway success of the original, Wright supplied ever more storytelling tools. Six expansion sets—the Sims have pets! the Sims go on hot dates!—sold 6.8 million copies. (The seventh and final expansion, Makin' Magic, is to be released this Halloween.)
The stumble that was The Sims Online happened in late 2001. It was an Internet-based Sims world in which the storytelling was supposed to come from the interactions among players. It didn't gel. Fewer than 100,000 subscribers signed up to pay $10 a month for the service, far fewer than Maxis' hopes. Making your Sims mingle as if at a global cocktail party was, it turned out, not as addictive as trying to win them a promotion or building them a new bathroom. "The Sims Online was a wildly optimistic view of people providing their own entertainment," says Dan Morris, executive editor of PC Gamer magazine. "They needed a game with a well-defined narrative, not just a sandbox." Wright had effectively abdicated responsibility for the parameters of possible storytelling. The Sims is Wright's world; we just play in it.
For The Sims 2, Wright has learned his lesson—and then some. The narrative arc of the game has gone epic. Whereas the original Sims were as timeless as cartoon characters, their successors go through five distinct ages, from baby to senior—not quite the full Shakespearean seven but close enough. You used to have to try quite hard to kill Sims; now old age will get them in the end. The Sims 2 revolves around Big Life Moments that will positively or negatively affect each Sim's final score when he or she dies: successful potty training, the first kiss, the death of a parent, marriage, divorce. What was formerly a slice of family life becomes a tale of generations—or, as Wright puts it, more like a James Michener novel.
The richness of potential plot lines is matched by the Sims' sumptuous new look. The game's graphics, especially the lighting and the characters' facial features, are way ahead of what was possible in 2000. Everything from the size of your Sim's feet to hair accessories will be customizable. Wright found that a lot of players wanted to turn their Sims into virtual copies of their families and friends. Not only will that be possible, but also at the click of a button you will be able to see a random selection of children that any two Sims' genetic traits might produce.
All this is a long way from the virtual dollhouse Wright originally had in mind. What nobody in the industry can say for now is whether he has strayed too far. The casual gamers who fell in love with The Sims included many youngsters who became aware for the first time of what it was like to be in charge of little people who wouldn't stop watching TV and go to bed. Will those same players really care to see their Sims grow old and die? Will the enhanced realism of diaper changing gross them out?
The answers matter to the computer-game industry, which needs more hits of this kind if it is ever going to widen its appeal beyond the 3 million hard-core gamers (mostly men in their teens and 20s) who typically buy a game a month. As with The Sims Online, expectations are high: this is a business in which sequels often do better than the original. (Wright has one other game in the works—which he isn't able to talk about—tentatively titled SimEverything, in which players start out by bonding molecules and end up building galactic civilizations.) "The Sims is a dream franchise for people who want to see the medium grow," says Morris. We'll find out soon enough. And if it doesn't work out—well, Wright can always try releasing Architex.
4 sep 2003 - 23:00
On September 8th, 2003 we will be removing chat from the “The Sims” site. Unfortunately, the chat client we were using is no longer supported by the manufacturer. On the bright side many fabulous fan sites offer round the clock chat. These sites are not controlled or moderated by Maxis but may suit the needs of our more loquacious fans: The Sims Resource, Sim Gateway, Sims Extreme, World Sims and SimsZone (German), or feel free to use the “Off Topic” portion of “The Sims” bulletin board as a way to catch up with your chat buddies. However do not despair; we will be hosting Maxis moderated chat events with the game developers in the future.
29 aug 2003 - 23:00
Hello everyone:Let me start off by saying that I was thrilled by all of your responses to my first email. It was great to hear from all of you on an individual basis and realize that you are all as excited about The Sims 2 as we are here at Maxis.
As I promised, I want to share with you as much information about the game as possible leading up to launch. It is also important to me that we provide you, our community leaders, with exclusive information whenever possible. So in that spirit, have I got something for you!
Here are new and exclusive screenshots only available to you:
These screens illustrate various aspects of The Sims 2. In the new game your Sims are more believable in every way—in how they look and act, in how they respond to the world around them and how they interact with each other. You can post this screens on your websites.
As before, please feel free to email with any comments, questions or suggestions. I appreciate hearing from all of you.
That's all for now. Again, I am excited about our upcoming challenges and believe that, as a combined team, we can make The Sims 2 bigger and better than ever.
Cheers,
Luc Barthelet
General Manager, Maxis
28 aug 2003 - 23:20
Maxis wants Bay Area fans of The Sims for a top-secret project. We'll divulge what we can, but if we told you any more we'd have to kill you.
Outsize San Francisco Bay Area Personalities Wanted
Do you live in or around the San Francisco Bay Area? Do you have great stories to tell about your Sims? Can you be succinct and ever-so-witty in front of a live camera? If you answered yes to these questions, then Maxis wants to hear from you.
We’re working on a super-secret project for The Sims 2 in the very near future, and we may need your help. Please send an email to explain, in 100 words or less, why you love The Sims, or recount your favorite moments from playing The Sims.
Please be sure to include your user-name, real name (optional), e-mail address, day-time location and a phone number where you can be reached during weekday business hours. In addition, please let us know if you speak a foreign language.
People will be selected as we receive their submissions, so if you live in the Bay Area and have the inclination, please be sure to submit your stories absolutely no later than 12AM PST Sunday, August 31th.
Please send an email to topsecret@maxis.com.
28 aug 2003 - 23:10
Be the first to see these new Makin' Magic characters and objects! Marvel at the flamingo who becomes a sexy hostess! Experience new kids-only magical items! See if you can spot the invisible friend!
28 aug 2003 - 23:00
It’s 3 AM. You’re leaving work. It’s dark. Two figures emerge from the shadows. They approach. What do you do?
Read more below!
When Hardcore Fans and Overworked Testers Collide...
Lead Tester John Cook and fellow Tester Kip Katsarelis had been laboring long into the wee hours of Saturday morning, when they finally decided to succumb to their own circadian rhythms and go home for as much sleep as they could spare. On the way to their cars, they were stopped by two shadowy figures, and... asked for a tour of the office! It seems that a husband and wife team from Kansas City had scheduled some time to swing by Maxis on their trip to California. Perhaps they’re well versed in the working and sleeping habits of game developers. Maybe they were either incredibly behind (or ahead of) schedule. Whatever the case may be, they felt an impromptu late, late, late-night visit was in order. We’re sad to report that the glorious inner workings of Maxis remain a mystery to them, although their sunny Midwestern charm bought them a few snapshots under the company logo and their signatures now grace the official Maxis Guest Book.
Although we heartily appreciate their rabid devotion to The Sims, they might have had better luck if they had tried to gain access to the building during normal business hours. Or at the very least, during daylight hours.
25 aug 2003 - 23:00
Tomorrow, we are announcing that The Sims™ Double Deluxe will be available this September. This ultimate compilation will include The Sims™, The Sims™ Livin. Large, and The Sims™ House Party all in one value-packed product. Bonus content will also be a part of this must-have collection including dozens of new walls, floors, and objects in African and Asian design themes. For all current Sims players, this bonus material will be available to download right here! Each week we will feature a download, so stay tuned for further information.
21 aug 2003 - 23:10
First let me thank you again for being such strong contributors to the Sims' community. As we did 4 years ago when we launched the original Sims, it is our intent here at Maxis to provide to the community with as much information as possible about The Sims 2 leading up to its launch. I am going to communicate directly with you between now and when the game ships and I welcome your honest feedback. Do not be afraid to email me.
I need your help in many domains to ensure that when we launch the new game, we have an even stronger community than we had with the original game. I am ready to do what it takes to get there, but I know I can't do it alone. My dream is to be able to provide more custom content for The Sims 2 at launch than we have now for the current Sims game.
Each of you has a unique strength and a valuable role in the Sims' community. Some of you are running custom content web sites, help sites, forums, email lists, and news sites. I am extremely interested in understanding how you see that role changing and evolving with regard to The Sims 2. The success of The Sims 2 is so interdependent on all of your efforts. All of them are crucial to us and this time around we are hoping to see even more in-depth specialization!
I would like to hear from you about any and all road blocks you might encounter that would prevent you from reaching your community goals. I want to help. For example, I am already working on providing a hosting solution through Maxis that might alleviate the cost of bandwidth for our webmasters.
That's all for now. I am excited about our upcoming challenges and believe that, as a combined team, we can make The Sims 2 bigger and better than ever.
Cheers,
Luc Barthelet
General Manager, Maxis
21 aug 2003 - 23:00
Gamespot gets up close and personal with The Sims 2 Creative Director, Charles London.
The Sims 2 Designer Diary #2
Get more details on this highly anticipated sequel right from the designers.
The Sims took the world by storm when it was first released in 2000. The unusual strategy game, which lets you control the lives of autonomous little computer people called sims, went on to become the best-selling computer game ever, and it also gave rise to a series of successful expansion packs that expanded upon the original game with lots of new household items for your sims' houses, as well as new gameplay options, such as having pets or going on vacation. The Sims 2 will attempt to expand on the original game by letting you build bigger houses, create more-detailed sims, and, most importantly, have sims that grow and change over time--sims that start out as children, mature into adults, get married and have kids of their own, and eventually become senior citizens of SimCity. We caught up with Maxis creative director Charles London for more insight into the development of the upcoming sequel.
Up Close and Personal with The Sims 2
By Charles London
Creative Director
When we set out to make The Sims 2 the greatest game of all time, we knew we had our work cut out for us. After all, we were our own competition. We knew we had to bring every aspect of the game forward to give our players the richest possible experience. The sims had to simply be the most believable, engaging, and truly living characters anyone had ever seen.
Making little people that we big people really believe in is hard. We all instinctively know when something is alive and when it's mechanical, when it's real and when it's fake. The sims had to be as real as possible. To make sure we delivered on the necessary level of realism, we went back to the drawing board. We spent time identifying what it takes at the core to convince players that the little characters they see on the screen have real wants, needs, fears, and tastes. Only then could we count on our players caring about them and wanting to affect their lives for better or worse.
We started by giving the graphics of the sims a complete overhaul. When we made the decision to push The Sims 2 forward into a fully 3D environment, we knew we'd be judged against the other top-flight real-time games out there. Bringing the sims themselves to that level of richness meant driving their complexity beyond the bar set by our competition. In The Sims 2, sims will have a much more-complex skeleton that permits a new level of realistic motion. The old paddle hands have been replaced with articulated fingers, and the rigidity of their faces has been replaced with a capability for animated and communicative expression. Their hair now moves as a result of their motion or the wind, and even their clothing can move independently of their bodies.
The sims' skin tones have been improved with regard to color richness and material feel, and the clothing they wear has been enhanced with reflection, shininess, and bump maps. Little details are the key to delivering on a goal of richness. We looked for every opportunity to incorporate these details, including actual teeth, variable eye colors, blinking eyelids, and accessories such as jewelry and eyeglasses.
One of the most important goals when shooting for believability in human form is to develop a balance between recognition and uniqueness. When we look at characters in games, we often respond most strongly to those faces that resemble people we know or have seen elsewhere in the world. At the same time, getting someone to truly care about a sim requires the belief that the character is a unique individual. The variety of facial features needed to achieve this went far beyond hand-sculpting each face, as is the norm in the industry. Instead, we delved into the power that real genetics provides by developing a genome for the sims.
When creating a genetic pool of individual faces for The Sims 2, we defined a huge design space bounded by the familiar faces we all know, and then mined that design space to create literally billions of unique faces. This allows players to feel that their sim is truly distinctive. These faces not only respond with animation and expression, but they also keep their identity as the sim grows up and allow for strong family resemblances without losing any of that precious uniqueness. Players can then tailor the look of their sim to help better illustrate the story they are telling in the game.
Once we brought the physical appearance of the sims into the future by expanding the system's capabilities, we then faced the massive task of bringing their behavior forward to the same degree. The animation engine developed for The Sims 2 permits numerous actions and gestures to play at the same time, providing the ability for the sims to look quite natural and complex in their behaviors. They are able to react to their surroundings, both according to the events around them and according to their various particular personalities. Dozens of facial expressions have been developed to allow sims to express real emotions, such as anger, pity, sadness, joy, and fear. The sims' conversations have been improved by developing a dynamic system that draws upon a rich library of gestures to permit sims to talk in tones that range from lively to bored. Even walking has been improved to allow the expression of emotion and personality, and to permit sims to interact with each other as they pass. Underlying all these advances is a new and improved AI engine that drives the sims' needs, memories, aspirations, and desires, providing the dynamic information necessary to weave together realistic human behavior.
Of course, one set of advances requires another. For example, when you give a character the ability to move its fingers, you then take on the responsibility of creating compelling gestures and animations to drive those fingers. Animation and character modeling are demanding tasks, and success relies on clear planning and a solid aesthetic vision. To that end, planning is always king. To make sure our work comes across as powerfully as possible, we spare no effort to design and redesign the artwork until it provides the most satisfying result. It's not uncommon to walk the halls of Maxis and find animators leaping like they've been shocked, or pretending to open a refrigerator repeatedly, simply to properly internalize the action to get that perfect result.
Finally, executing against those final designs meant scouring the industry for the finest talent available, and we did exactly that. The Sims 2 team has one of the most robust and accomplished art departments ever assembled for a game development effort. Tens of thousands of animator-hours have been spent on crafting subtle and compelling motion for sims and on modeling and painting clothing and accessories to let the players create exactly the sim they have in mind. Speaking of clothing, these are the trendiest sims yet, with fashion choices that are varied and hip. Don't even ask how many catalogs we've perused!
Creating characters that people believe in and care about has always been among the most difficult of creative challenges, since way back in the Stone Age when we told stories by the campfires over roasted mammoth. But that's what we committed ourselves to here at EA, and we're just so excited to see it all finally coming together. At last, we can say that our sims really live and breathe, and that they're so much the little people we always wanted to make that they take our breath away. We just can't wait to introduce them to you.