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This interview was originally posted by PC Gameplay.
 03 August 01 PC Gameplay Interview |
| ONLINE SIMMING There’s a new virus about to hit the net – The Sims Online is taking over. We saw earlier this week that, thanks to the forthcoming Hot Date expansion pack, The Sims is set to remain as one of the most popular gaming franchises ever. Well hold onto your hats people, because The Sims Online is going to take everything The Sims has achieved so far, and throw it all onto the world wide web to create a virtual community like no other. But is it a game or is it a digital soap-opera? We caught up with Jeff Charvat, Series Producer of The Sims Online, to ask him all about it. PCG: So firstly, tell us how The Sims Online differs from what we’ve seen. JC: In The Sims you take control of a family, in The Sims Online you take control of a character. One of the reasons The Sims is so popular is all of the custom content out there, all the unique skins. This is really what got the game up to the level it’s got to. In The Sims Online you’re going to be able to bring all that content into the game. We’ll ship a couple of CDs in the product. It’s going to have a lot of different data on it, but you’re also going to be able to go out onto the Web and get more. PCG: How does creating a character differ from creating a family then? JC: We’ve redone the create-a-Sim screen to support the wider variety of choices we expect people to have in heads and skins. One thing Will Wright spent a lot of time on was this idea, which we call ‘the interests’. We noticed from playing online games that people ask a lot of questions like “Do you like basketball? No, uh, okay.” The idea is that each person will be able to define what they are interested in, and what they’re not interested in. When you go into a lot and there are other characters there, if you have strong compatibility with someone we’ll flag it for you – like “You’re both interested in basketball.” That’s just one way we’re making it easier for people to meet other people. We’re trying to bring people out of that shell. We want to get people involved with one another, because we think that’s what brings people back to online gaming, the friends we make. PCG: So where does your character live? JC: Each person gets three characters, and each character can buy a simple house. We’ll give you enough money to buy a one-bedroom house, but you can share a house with other people. In the city there will be over 50,000 buildable lots that people can go in and own. The unique part of this is that we’re not defining the world, all we’re defining is the terrain. People will buy the lot and build their houses on it, and they’ll describe what the cities look like in the end. Each city will be unique. Most online games take the same world and stamp it over and over. We’re going to have different cities. There’ll be a coastal town, a mountain region, a desert wasteland, an island atoll out in the Pacific. This way, we think each city will have a unique feel to it. With all these lots, we need to give people a way to find who they’re looking for, so we’ve got some prebuilt features in, like the most popular people in the world, the most visited houses or neighbourhoods – you can form neighbourhoods if you want to. PCG: How do you determine who the most popular person is? JC: In The Sims you have relationships with other characters. It’ll be similar in The Sims Online. You can establish friendships or enemies with different people, and we can see who has the most friends. We’ll also have ways to do Web searches. So you can search and try to find people or houses. So I might want to search for a comedy club, for example. As a single player I’m not going to have much money, but if I share with other people I could buy a TV, you could buy a refrigerator, and so on. PCG: Where does the money come from? JC: When you create a character, you get just enough money to get you going. But you can make money too like going into a casino. Say the player that owns it is a well-established player; when I go to bet on these machines, the owner of the machines will gain the money. If I win, then he has to pay me. So I can play blackjack, and other people can play with me. The other way I can make money is through the ‘Visitor game’. We’re going to reward players who build lots that other players come and visit. In other words, we will reward players who entertain other players. So what we foresee happening is that people are going to compete to build the best places for people to come, because they want to win the visitor bonus. This fills another need that Will foresaw. He believes a lot of the casual gamers aren’t going to take part in the money game or in the room-mate game. They’re going to treat it like the Web. They’re just going to want to see what’s going on in the world. To support these players, we have to give an incentive to the other players to build environments that people will want to visit. PCG: Do you have to control your own character all the time? JC: Yes. In tests we found that when the only thing you are doing is controlling your own character, it was really frustrating when he or she would go off and do something on her own. It wasn’t as rewarding as it was in The Sims, when you had this whole family going around. We’ve really tuned down all the needs a lot, so you don’t have to sleep a lot and spend most of your life taking care of your own needs. You spend more of your time interacting with other players. But the needs are still there, so they kind of add tension. PCG: How do you do the self-improvement stuff? How do you improve your logic skills, for example? JC: Similar to The Sims. You can play chess for logic, or paint a painting for creativity. PCG: What else have you come up with? JC: We were in these online games, and we noticed there were a lot of people saying things like “Hey, do you know Mike?” There’s this whole social network going on. Hence we have the friendship web, and it allows you to navigate the social landscape of the game. We keep track of who you like and who you don’t like. Green arrows indicate who you like, and red arrows show who you don’t like. Will came up with that. PCG: How many people would appear on the friendship web? JC: We’re trying to tune the game so you don’t have more than 30 people on there, but there are ways of showing more than 30. PCG: How many people can interact on the same lot? JC: Somewhere between 20 and 32. We want 32, but the technology is telling us somewhere nearer to 20. There’s a lot of variability in that, but until we get the technology where we want it we’re just going for a range. PCG: How would people get to the stage of being able to afford to build a restaurant? Would you have to start off with a mobile snack bar and then build up? JC: That’s definitely one way you could do it. A lot of it’s just going to be role-playing. We think a lot of communities are going to form, and people are just going to chip in and buy a restaurant. So you’re not going to necessarily do it by yourself. You might meet a few people and say “Hey, let’s build a coffee shop.” Another way of making money is through what we call turnstile doors. These are doors that you can charge people to walk through. These are really intended for clubs, but you could also use them for a coffee shop if you wanted to. Someone joked that you could run a coffee shop and put a turnstile door on the bathroom. PCG: Will there be any jobs? JC: The jobs will all be role-played. It won’t be like in The Sims. You can do anything you want. There’s a ‘Give money’ interaction, so we’re expecting that people will set up economies that will manage themselves. We’re also toying with the design right now where you can employ someone to do jobs at your house, for an hourly wage. PCG: How do you prevent players from doing X-rated things in the game. For example, setting up a sex industry? JC: We’ll control all the animations, so they can’t control us from that point of view. But for the skins, we’ll just have to police it. We’ll try to give the players themselves a mechanism to police it, but if you do that kind of stuff we’re just not going to put up with it. You’ll get kicked right out of the game. PCG: One of the big problems with online games is respawning. Do you see any potential pitfalls in this game? JC: We have a few that we’re working on right now. One of them is that when you create a new character you get money, so you can give it to someone else, create a new character and so on. So we’re thinking of regulating how often you can create a new character. As we find problems, we address them. But a major goal is to keep a level playing field. PCG: Is there a way to exclude people from servers? JC: At a lot level there is, but not at a server level. Players can have a ‘Ban’ list, or you can just have an ‘Admit’ list and only those people can get on your lot. If there’s someone really bad out there, you can just report them to EA.com. [That’ll scare all you trouble makers, won’t it?] PCG: Will you have organised events? JC: We’re doing a lot of brainstorming on that right now. We’re thinking of ways to get around the 20-to-32-person cap on a lot, by allowing people to be in a lot but not be visible. And we have the concept of clubs. Anyone can start a club on anything they want. We’ll give you a bulletin board system so that you can manage the club. PCG: Will there be mini-games? JC: We’re looking at ways of putting generic things in there, such as maze objects. We haven’t fully designed it but we’ve talked about ways of putting a pair of dice in there, or a deck of cards, and not really enforcing the rules – just allowing the players to form their own rules. That’s the kind of stuff Will likes playing with. PCG: When you log in do you reappear where you left the game? JC: When you select your character, you’ll be able to go right into your house or into your neighbourhood or your city. But if you’re in someone else’s house and you log off, you won’t be able to reappear there. But you will be able to bookmark houses and check whether they are online. PCG: Will it be possible to trap a Sim, by removing the ladder while he’s in the pool? JC: Drown your Sims? [Laughs] We won’t be able to really stop that. You don’t have to walk off the lot to leave the lot. I just have to click on the city view and then I pop out. So if someone does that to me, I’ll probably just leave their house and never go back. So we don’t think it’s going to be much of an issue. PCG: If you log off, does your house stay online? JC: No. That’s one reason we like the concept of room-mates, because any room-mate can bring the house online. But if you want to make money from your club you want to stay online, right? PCG: Do you want advertising in the game? Will you be able to stop people from advertising in the game? JC: We are formulating a whole strategy on how to manage that. There’s a very simple mechanic in the game that allows you to ban people, so if Ronald McDonald keeps sending you his free French Fry instant message, you can stop him. But we don’t foresee this being a major issue, or a difficult issue to combat. [At this point, the main man Will Wright joined the conversation, so we decided to give him a thorough grilling as well. And we asked him some questions too.] PCG Are you looking to online games for the inspiration for The Sims Online? WW: Not that much. My daughter plays Everquest online, so I’ve seen a lot of the dynamics that go on in there. Of course, we have a lot of the Ultima Online people within EA, and some of them are working on our team now, but the influences for me come more from outside. How do people play in groups? What do they do when they’re hanging around the apartment together? I think it’s more to do with social research. PCG: What about international culture? Isn’t The Sims based on a kind of idealised America of the 50s? WW: It’s not even America of the 50s. Even America in the 50s wasn’t like that. It’s more like television America. It’s stereotyped America. PCG: But if you’re going to an international online audience now, you’re bringing cultural values into play, not just a stylised America. Do you have to look at the way English people, or French, German, Japanese cultures live? WW: There are two things there. There’s really the assets, which is the architectural styles, the graphics, objects, which the players will be able to customise quite a bit. In fact there’s a huge amount of custom content already out there in these different international styles. But probably more importantly, there’s the social dynamics and the way people relate to each other. How typical is it just to drop in uninvited into a house and say “Hi, I’m Joe – who are you?” Those are things where if possible we want to leave it up to the players to form the online etiquette. We want to give them a broad palette of expression. The players will decide what’s appropriate online behaviour and what’s not. And in fact we’re probably going to be running different servers in Europe and Asia, and I’m assuming that the etiquette that evolves on these different servers is quite different. PCG: Will the servers be compatible, so if we wanted to look how the Japanese live we could go over to a Japanese server? WW: We’re not sure about that yet. There are Americans right now who log onto German servers, so it will probably be done to the same degree as we’re doing with Ultima right now. We do have a lot of interaction symbols, so I can go up to you and shake your hand or kiss you, but the Americans who are logging on to German servers [in Ultima] tend to be Germans living abroad, using the German language. There will probably be language barriers. PCG: Have you thought about a Sims Esperanto? WW: Actually, that would be interesting, although I’ve heard more people speak Klingon right now. From that point of view, we might as well invent our own language. But you can do an awful lot without even typing. It’ll actually be interesting to see how far you can get in the game as a mime. PCG: You mentioned creating buildings in different styles. Is that something you’ve begun already or will you just allow users to do that? WW: It’s really just content. We give you a wall and wallpaper and windows, it’s just a matter of what kind of wall pattern or windows you have. We’re also looking at different themes. There’s cultural diversity but there’s also thematic diversity, and I think our emphasis with The Sims Online up to now has been more on thematic diversity, because I think there’s a lot of cultural diversity already out there on the Web. So we’ll have science fiction, or fantasy, or western themes. And really what I’m imagining is going to happen is that over time people will end up diversifying according to interest. That’s the content we’re working on right now. Well it all sounds very ‘Brave New World’, doesn’t it? Thanks to both Will and Jeff for taking time out of their busy schedules to fill us in on the Sims most intrepid venture yet. |
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