Awesome, there are new screens, a Q&A with producer Rachel Bernstein and a new trailer for The Sims Medieval over at GameSpot! In the interview, Rachel discusses ways your Sim can die, what happens when you fail your quests, achievements and much more:
GS: On that note, can we expect to see some of the hazards that Sims players know and love rear their ugly heads in Medieval? Will that tiny contingent of sadistic Sims players who enjoy purposely killing their little computer people (surely, there are very, very few of these sick, sick people out there) still be able to sabotage little virtual lives? Accidental blacksmith fires? Embarking a ship to sea and immediately deleting the docks afterward?
RB: Our more deviant players should find no shortage of ways to harm their sims, despite the lack of pool ladders. I expect people will enjoy such grief as sending sims off to hunt bears with low focus, placing a keg in the throne room and adding a touch of “reaper’s scythe” poison, or sending a plague-ridden sim into the reception hall on a make-out spree.
GS: We know that Medieval is a different game from its predecessors, since the game has actual victory conditions and actually ends at a certain point. Is it possible to fail? Will there be a losing “Game Over” screen?
RB: There is no “Game Over” screen, but there’s certainly a “Quest Failed!” screen that can be reached if your sim somehow dies on a quest or fails to complete it in a timely or effective fashion. We don’t want the players feeling like it’s easy to fail in the game, but we do want there to be consequences for the player’s actions.
There is also the possibility of failure on an overarching ambition for each run-through of the game and the possibility of succeeding at the ambition at different levels of achievement: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. For example, if players run a kingdom in the “imperial domination” ambition and fail to take over any foreign nation, they will fail the ambition when they run out of quest points. If they take over only two territories, they get a bronze. Taking over four earns them a silver and unlocks the “fame” ambition. Taking over six foreign territories earns a gold medal and adds the unlock of the “safe and sound” ambition. Taking over all the foreign territories earns the platinum medal.
No offense. This game is sounding increasingly boring to me. Fail screens? Medals? Part of the fun in The Sims is experimenting with different options and watching things unfold – possibly with dire consequences! I don’t want to reach a fail screen if I burn down the house. I don’t want to reach a fail screen when my sim dies. I want to keep playing, seeing how my ghost sim is now scaring my living sims, or having sims grow fearful of the stove because of the recent fire!
So basically your play through gets more and more rigid as you run out of a predetermined amount of “kingdom points”?
This isn’t a Sims game. It’s a deformity.
I hope this game is a HUGE Fail so they will stop with nonsense like this and hopefully make a better Sims game. The Sims 3 could have been SO much better and I would rather see them try to fix all the bugs and implement some fun gameplay into it rather than introduce games with Sims in the title which aren’t really sims games at all.
*crosses fingers for HUGE fail*