You’ve probably already seen these questions before as for some reasons, Maxis or the interviewer loves to stay on the same questions and answers for ever (either that or I already posted about this). Either way, another Q&A arrives with Ben Bell. He speaks to Venture Beat on the making of The Sims 3:
VB: What role has direct player feedback had in crafting The Sims 3?
BB: We’re all fans of The Sims, and a lot of our team worked on The Sims and The Sims 2, so player feedback is built into our team. We also spend a lot of time interacting with members of The Sims community around the world. I don’t think the game would be what it is without The Sims community. They make the content that keeps the game alive, and we are going to amplify that activity with The Sims 3.
hello my name is Natalie Oram and I have a few ideas for the game sims. You know how with the XBOX 360 you can play on line with all of your friends, and meet new people when you play? What if the Sims was made like that but for a PC. I think it would be totally cool for my friends who play the sims, if they could be my neighbors on sims. My children could date their children, go to the same school, have them over for a sims Bar-B-Q, you know that kind of thing.
Here are a few things I thought of: There could be a chat box or a window for a computer camera so that you can talk to the other people online. You know when you are playing the sims and you see you own sims walking around in the store but you are playing with a different family, with the online version your sims would not be able to walk around if you were not online that way your sim would not be friends with anyone you did not want them to be friends with. I figured it would work like this: Once you signed in online you picked a neighborhood just like in the original game, and the other people who pick that same neighborhood would be the people you could be friends with, there would also be and option to drive or take a cab to another neighborhood to visit and meet others. I thought it would be cool if you could appear offline during the game too, that way the gamer could work on building their sims skill points with out others bothering them.
I am sure it is harder to create than it sounds, anyway it was just and Idea that I came up with, and my friends and I talked about how cool it would be. I just figured I would run it by some EA game employees, just to see if I could make it happen. Thanks for you time.
I’d love to see them include online features for The Sims 3, but I don’t think they’ll go back to that route due to the fact that The Sims Online was a failure.