|  |
This interview was originally posted by PC Gameplay.
 03 August 01 PC Gameplay Hot Date Interview |
| DOING ANYTHING TONIGHT? Time to pucker up folks as we go on a hot date with The Sims. “When the moon hits your eyes, like a big pizza-pie, that’s amore!” Ah, sweet love. Is there anything quite as beautiful or as painful? Apart from Baywatch, of course. And can a computer ever learn to love? Will we ever be invaded by a race of beautiful sexbots begging us to show them more of this strange Earth thing called ‘kissing’? Well, only in our dreams perhaps, but the chaps behind the phenomenally successful The Sims think that love on the PC is a definite possibility, hence they’re busily working on a new expansion pack entitled The Sims: Hot Date. Just imagine it – all your perfectly behaved Sims running around acting as if they just walked through the doors of a hedonist party! We wanted to know more so we got our intrepid US correspondant to collar three of the men behind Hot Date to answer all our questions and guess what? They were only too happy to oblige (with the exception of the question relating to the banana and the nurses outfit). So sit back and relax as we chat exclusively with Steve Crane, Vice President of the Sims franchise, Producer Tim Letourneau and Michael McCormick, one of the designers on the current project.  SC: Great. It’s a very collaborative effort. There’s probably 20 people that contribute ideas to one expansion pack like this. TL: For example, right now we’re working on a nightclub. It’s empty during the day and busy at night. So at 11pm, all of a sudden the nightclub is alive and people want to go and hang out there. So it’s little touches like that we’re working on – little things that mirror real life. MM: All the expansion packs work together. For example, the dance tables, dance floor and DJ are from House Party. That affects what you can create downtown. PCG: It seems like there’s two games. One, you’re leaving home and going out, the other is building stuff downtown while you’re out. How does that work? TL: You don’t build stuff while you’re out. As a player you can go downtown. We’ll build lots so you can go on a date but, like any Sims game, building is a very important part of the gameplay. Players will be able to build on lots downtown, so I can go and build a restaurant and I can take my Sims from their home downtown and they’ll go to that restaurant. The way it works depends on what you build and how much money you spend on the lot, and then the interactions on that lot will cost you in accordance with how much you spend. So a cheap date is to go to the park, because you don’t have to pay for the stuff you can do there. But if you go to a really fancy French restaurant you’re going to have to pay a lot of money. Each object has an efficiency rating. The more expensive, the more efficient. So it costs more to go to a restaurant but your fulfillment is higher. SC: It all goes to how well the date is going. How good an impression you’re making on the person you’re with. The computer always measures that. PCG: What’s the objective with Hot Date? TL: It’s the same sort of gameplay that you would have at home. I can take the dancefloor from House Party and build a nightclub downtown. The big change is that when you go downtown the gameplay is really changing. When I played before I had complete control over the environment of the house. I could move things around, I could send people out. But downtown it’s just like I’m a visitor to the house. If I’m hungry, I can’t just go into the restaurant kitchen and grab something from the refrigerator. I’ve got to talk to the maitre-d’, be seated and order a meal. At the same time, I have to deal with my date’s motives as well. I might ask her how she’s feeling and she’ll say “Hungry.” That’s my clue: we’d better go to the restaurant or I’d better order some food because if you’re really hungry [your character is] going to say “I’m going to get food, this date is over,” and the date will have a negative social impact. PCG: When the game begins, does downtown already have facilities? TL: It will have a couple. It will probably have a park and a restaurant and a shop, and there’ll be a bunch of open lots. You’ll be able to click on these lots and build them up. If you decide to put a lot of expensive objects in the resort, visitors are going to pay a lot of money to use the facilities.  TL: You can make whatever you want. A florist’s shop. A news-stand with a magazine rack. SC: I suppose you could make a bookshop, because you have bookshelves. TL: One of the objects you can buy is a cash register, and when you put that cash register in a room it becomes a shop. Then a clerk appears that comes with the cash register. MM: You could put furniture in there, clothing, ice cream, jewellery. But there’s only certain things that you can buy. TL: The Sims Online will definitely be interesting, because it will be about going to people’s houses. So what if someone decides to build a gymnasium and people come there, or the movie theater or the shopping center. Or a couch store. People will take all of the tools and they’ll come to it will all their creativity. SC: We’ll have over 100 new items that ship with Hot Date. We now have something like 2,000 bits and pieces that you can put together. PCG: Any other new things? TL: I talked about the datable NPCs that you meet downtown. We’ll also have a tool that enables you to create your own NPCs which you can exchange on thesims.com. It’s funny because in House Party there’s this character called the Party Crasher. We don’t really talk about him, he’s not a back-of-the-box feature, but he’ll – actually there’s a man and a woman – just show up if there’s a really good party. What’s funny about them is that all the other NPC’s we’ve created are very distinct. You can tell that it’s not a regular character. But the Party Crasher acts like a normal Sim. They have normal behaviour, they can use all the objects in the home. Players have a very clear connection to the neighbourhood that they build and the people that live there. They know who they made, they’ve played with all of them. There are all these bulletin board posts, like “This guy showed up at my house, and he broke my toilet.” It was really funny to read these reactions. People loved it, because it was a great surprise. The dateable NPC’s will be very much like that. They’re just like normal Sims that you create. You’ll always be asking the question “Is that someone I created or someone the PC created.” You may never know. If you’ve downloaded a bunch of houses into your neighbourhood you don’t always know who’s there. We’re definitely blurring the line between the Sims characters and the characters you control. PCG: Can your family go downtown? TL: You can take your family, and you can take a date from your home area. The difference is that – at least, right now at this stage of development – you’re only controlling one person downtown, because we really want to change the gameplay. SC: You can invite somebody downtown and meet them there. Or you could just go downtown and look for somebody there, and invite them back to your house. MM: You can also use the payphone downtown, and call somebody from there. Or take your family to the park and have a meal. But if you’re with a date there you might sunbathe and massage each other. TL: Also you can use personal ads through the computer. You can pick a ‘Blind date’ and meet them downtown. PCG: What if I meet a date downtown and bring her back and there’s my wife at home? TL: You wait until she’s gone to work. [Much laughter from all present] And like any Sims product, there can be alternate lifestyles, not just the male-female relationship. The same-sex relationships do work a bit differently in the game. A male-female relationship can happen autonomously, but same-sex relationships have to be player directed. The player has to choose one of the romantic moves. SC: Will Wright refers to the “moral minefield.” We’re simulating real life here, and lots of things happen in real life, good and bad. But we have to draw some lines. So, for example, adults can slap each other, but they can’t slap children. TL: Men can’t slap women. PCG: It’s going to get a lot more difficult when you go online. SC: Exactly. We’re already spending a lot of time thinking about that. We don’t want to set moral standards; that’s not our job. But there are some things where we just have to draw the line.  |
shop@noctalis THE SIMS 2 IKEA HOME STUFF add-on  THE SIMS 3  THE SIMS CARNIVAL BUMPER BLAST |
 |
