14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Maxis is quite thankful for the legions of fans, as the team can easily learn what's valuable to the loyal consumers, chief among which being an offline single-player experience that will be delivered via the next game – The Sims 4.
Maxis and EA announced The Sims 4 at the beginning of the year and, while they didn't offer a lot of details, they made one thing perfectly clear: the new title will have an offline single-player mode, unlike the recent SimCity that, due to its always-online requirement, encountered lots of problems and annoyed fans.
According to Maxis' Graham Nardone, who talked with NowGamer, The Sims 4 team is quite thankful for the feedback from fans and has learned to spot what features must be delivered to loyal consumers.
"As a studio we have a collective knowledge as we release things, collect feedback, see how things are done," Nardone said.
"So one of the important things we say is, 'hey! We’ve got a very compelling single player offline experience,' and we know that’s important for our Sims fans. We’re going to deliver a fantastic single player title for them."
Nardone also emphasized the great collaboration between fans and the Maxis team, which makes developing a game much easier because the studio doesn't need to go through lengthy tests and focus meetings.
"I just like having discussion with them because I think it really informs a lot of the decisions that we can make internally and we should be so lucky to have that kind of feedback that’s just given to us," he added.
"We don’t have to go out and run a focus test because we’ve got this huge fanbase across the world that want to connect with us, they want to talk to us and they know what they want. They’ve been with our franchise 15 years, they know what they want to see in the next iteration of The Sims."
The Sims 4 is set to make its debut in 2014 for the PC and Mac platforms.