14 DAY TRIAL // The Sims 4, the next installment in the long running life simulator series from Maxis and Electronic Arts, focuses on emotions and, thanks to the constant iterations released by the development team, players will have a lot of fun figuring out what feelings their Sims have inside the game and how that affects their virtual life.
The Sims 4 is set to debut in 2014, and the team at Maxis wants to usher in a new type of Sims experience by focusing much more on emotions and how these affect the life and actions of a regular Sim.
After showing off such things in recent weeks, particularly at Gamescom 2013, The Sims 4 Producer Grant Rodiek talked with VG247 about the new emphasis on emotions.
"Emotions have come about through a lot of iteration," he said. "We’ve done three Sims games in the past, we’ve been making games for a while now, and we had to really sit back and think about ways to make our Sims more interesting, make our strategy more interesting. The emotions came about because we realized our Sims have pretty much always been on this very binary line of they’re either happy or not happy."
With this new realization, the Maxis team started creating the new SmartSim engine that emphasizes completely new things than the previous games.
"We realized we’d accomplished a lot of things," Rodiek added, "but we hadn’t really tackled that issue yet. So for us it was just a natural step to take it, and as we prototyped it, experimented with it, it really just came to life and there’s a lot of natural design there that we don’t have to reach for. It just sort of makes sense, and people understood what we were talking about."
Now, after the groundwork has been done, the team at Maxis is quite excited about fleshing out how emotions interact and how the Sims will be affected by their feelings during regular gameplay.
"We put in a lot of technology, a lot of foundation work, and now, basically our design team is just going wild. They’re like kids in a sandbox," he continued.
"We’re now thinking about, ‘how can we represent this emotion?’, or ‘how can we make this trait affect this emotion?’, ‘what happens if I come home from work like this?’, ‘what happens if I succeed at this? It’s finally paying off. We finally get to just play with it and make some fun stuff, and this is just sample."
This amount of fun will be transmitted to fans of The Sims 4 in 2014 when the game launches for PC and Mac.