How did the conversation for making The Sims 4 begin? What prompted it?
Well I think a lot of it reaches back to where we want to take the franchise and what we want to do with our sims. Realistically, when you look at it, being a life simulation, it’s all about injecting life back into our characters. So you see a lot of that come through in the main things that we’re talking about at Gamescom, so the way thay emotions drive a sims behavior really brings them to life in realistic ways.
Our new technology that we’re calling ‘SmartSim’, it allows us to do a lot of things that make them act realistically that we simply couldn’t do in the past. Stuff like multitasking, things like being able to have real group dynamics where you can have a conversation and it looks believable and we just couldn’t accomplish that in the past. I think some of it almost seems subtle, but when you see it all brought to life within the game, you instantly get we’re delivering a life simulator that’s better that any that we’ve ever built before.
So is it a case of now the technology is at the point where you can incorporate these things? Was that the driving factor behind making The Sims 4 now?
That’s a big part of it. Technology is constantly marching along and just as a studio, we want to be able to deliver these new experiences. I think developers are ultimately their biggest critics. We can look at a game and say ‘this worked really well’, ‘this is something we can do better, ‘here’s something we want to scrap and re-imagine completely’ and we use those internal metrics to say, ‘okay, we’re at a point now where we can do cool things that just where not possible and let’s give it to players because we know they’re going to love it’.
