Sims Galore had the chance to interview EA’s Marketing Manager Aaron Cohen on The Sims Medieval.  Below is just one of many questions:

SG – Of all the times in history and civilisations, how did you come to choosing Medieval?

AC – It actually came from a few different places, and all came together at the right time. Ever since The Sims 1 and The Sims 2, the development team always had this idea – “What would happen if The Sims went back in time?” What would they do, how would they react, what kind of game would it be?

With the medieval age, as we’re familiar with characters and all the rich history, myth and legend, it’s easy for your imagination to quickly go there and start playing that game. It’s all thanks to those influences we talked about before – Shakespeare, Tolkien, legends of King Arthur and so on – medieval times bring a strong idea to people of what life was like then, and that lends well to fun gameplay. With The Sims Medieval, and images of Kings, Queens, Knights, and Peasants – you could play the game almost immediately in your head. For something like The Sims in Ancient Greece? Ok, you’d know you’d have a lot of Sims in togas, but would your mind as easily leap to how to play the game after that? Senate? It’s similar for Ancient Rome, the old Wild West and a bunch of other things.

After focussing on Medieval, we asked a lot of questions and did a bunch of research. In terms of time periods, The Sims Community we’re already making a lot of medieval era stuff in both The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 – especially castles! As we looked into it more, we discovered that it was actually pretty tough to do this. The Sims toolset lent itself really well to modern times, as The Sims was a modern game. However, making something look older with lots of sides, detail and to look handcrafted was hard. In buildings, curved roofs and big ceilings could be quite hard to produce in The Sims 3. The Sims Medieval was built to cope with these kind of things, both for the creative community and for the atmosphere of the game. We talked to a lot of fans and gamers to check that we were on the mark with this, and it turned out that we were pretty close. Other eras were looked at and asked about, but Medieval was by far the most popular.

Full interview here