A lot of the community was upset that there was no elevator except for in apartment complexes. Do you think fans will get over that?
Especially when they’re looking at announcements, a lot of the players kind of edit the feature list. And it can be frustrating as a creator, especially since we spent a whole year on this. It can be frustrating sometimes that they can sometimes focus on what they don’t have instead of what they do. But then again, I don’t expect them to understand or even care, because it’s not really that interesting, about all the reasons we did or didn’t do a thing.
But we look at the boards. We know what they care about, and sometimes we make the choice that we think we have something we can do that’s cooler, or we think that there’s a thing that will be better in the end. On like the elevator question, we actually debated about this and talked about it a lot. And we knew that players would want to be able to place an elevator, but in reality, most people don’t have elevators in their homes, and it would have been very, very expensive and complex to make it work. And we felt that that time was better spent making the festivals cool and interesting, adding new objects that they didn’t have in the game, adding things like basketball courts and all the different dunks, adding the ability to sell paintings on the street with the craft cart.
It’s always a trade-off, and we don’t do it will-nilly, but we try to have good reasons for it. I think that most players will not be bothered by it. I actually worked on the elevator in both Sims 2 and Sims 3. Personally, I just don’t’ think it’s a very interesting object. I get why some people like it, and it’s great that you can have woohoo and you can die in it. It’s just a trade-off. It’s always us trying to figure out where we can make the most people happy with things that are really cool and surprising.
And we have made [elevators] in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. And with The Sims 4 we wanted to be different, so we’re not doing it just to be different, but there are things where – sometimes we’re going to prioritize the new thing because our players already have that old thing. But we understand. We get it, and maybe we’ll do the elevator at some point. Maybe we’ll do those other things at some point. But I sincerely believe that they will get their money’s worth, and that there is a lot to love in City Living.
The scope of the world is so huge. What were the challenges in building that? Did you scale back/add anything last minute?
This was the most difficult world we have ever made in the history of The Sims. It was just an overwhelming undertaking, and it’s just like this sort of phenomenal – I’m super proud of that team, and I think they have a lot to be proud of.
For example, we had to build what we call shell technology. The apartments are essentially just enormous models that then have to interface with our build system so that people can build on top of those. This changes our camera system. This changes LODs, which is effectively when things pop in in-frame based on where you are in the distance, which has huge implications on our video card and performance implications for how well the game runs.
We had right up until the very last minute, right up until the wire, all kinds of stuff like ‘Oh my god, we have to touch up the background map painting.’ So we effectively have paintings in the very background for the distance views. Like a lot of movies do that, for example. And so we had to touch that up, make sure that was clear. At certain camera angles, there might be empty spots that we had to fill in. Our visual effects team was placing sims in the world to create a sense of traffic. They designed a real traffic simulator for all the cars that are driving, so the cars will stop and use the stop lights. They don’t just plow through each other.
There were just so many details and places to examine, and our art director was just doing passes and passes and passes and passes. ‘Oh god, we missed this camera angle! Oh god this shot doesn’t work. Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god!’
I don’t think we compromised on anything, and maybe in some cases we should have. It’s one of these things where we basically went all out. We just sort of went crazy on this one, and I’m sure I will get yelled at by some manager for the budget implications.
What’s your favorite feature about the pack?
I really like the apartments. I think they’re a really fresh take on apartments from the past. I think they’re above and beyond better than our past apartments, so they’re pretty exciting for me.
I’ve been playing The Sims 4 for years now, and I like how they change my day-to-day life. I like how they change my decisions, and also just sort of from a sense of developer pride, just seeing – things from the apartment touch every development discipline on The Sims 4 team. Every single person. So there’s just a lot of collaboration stuff.
For hardcore open-world fans, this feels almost like you’re in an open world. Do you think that will get people to come play The Sims 4 now?
Maybe. We really tried to put in some stuff to make it, like, reduce the load times, reduce the loading instances, bring more of the content to you. You know, it’s still not a true open world experience, and players who want that true open-world experience still won’t get it here. I think it will alleviate it for some people, but we’re not positioning it according to that, because I don’t want players to misconstrue and come off as lying or – I don’t want players to think we’re saying ‘Yep, we’re done. We did it.’
So it’s sort of a whole thing where hopefully people notice it, hopefully people appreciate it, hopefully it makes them happier with the experience. We’re always trying to look at little details like that that will hopefully improve the experience for more people.
