Kotaku – Sims Medieval Doesn’t Stray Far From Its Roots (GamesCom 2010)

A rather great article from Kotaku on The Sims Medieval – they provided a pretty good amount of detail.  Some may hate the idea and I can’t blame them for that…but I would like to try the game before I speak on it.

Unlike typical Sims games, Sims Medieval doesn’t remove the walls of the buildings when you zoom into a building or castle. Instead it peels away the front of the building, leaving the sides and back in tact. The effect is like looking at a visual dictionary, which pulls away the layers of an object to let you look inside.

“We wanted to make sure you always remember that you are inside the castle, so we just peeled away the front so you can peek inside and see what’s going inside,” she said.

There has been a lot of work done to the Sims 3 engine for this game, Bernstein said, like adding sub-surface scattering to the character models to make them look warmer and alive.

“We wanted to go with a painterly look,” she said.

The look of the game isn’t the only thing the team tweaked for Sims Medieval, they also reworked the way the Sims speak.

“Simlish was altered to be more medieval,” Bernstein said. “We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it would sound. Initially we thought about making everyone sound more British. We tried an over-the-top Monty Python simlish.”

What the team ended up with was a similish designed to sound like old English, she said.

read on at Kotaku