The Sims 4 Get To Work: Gamespot Interview with Lyndsay Pearson

How do you balance what things are going to be saved for an expansion versus what you develop for the main franchise?

The focus of the base games in all the different generations we’ve done is about setting out that baseline experience of getting your Sims to live out a day, be able to make some money, be able to have a relationship. Really setting up those pieces of what it means to have a base life for you to play out. The Sims 2, with that notion of lifetimes, was about making sure you have something to do at all of those different life stages. How to challenge yourself at making your Sim excel, or purposefully fail, at achieving those goals.

The Sims 3 foundation was about that world and creating a space where your Sims could have an opportunity to go down to the bookstore or what it meant to navigate a space where all of The Sims are simulating all the time.

And The Sims 4 foundation is about setting that groundwork in the same fashion. How do we make sure there’s a way to make money for your Sims? A way for them to excel and progress? A way for them to tell really interesting stories about who they are and who they met and how all those Sims interact? When we evaluate whether something’s an expansion content or not, it has to do with that core of setting up that foundation. When you look at some of the things we’ve done with expansions in the past, we put in things like dance speheres or vampires. And those aren’t really things you run into in your traditional day-in-the-life, and that’s a great opportunity for us through expansions or game packs to give you a very themed and flavorful new slice of life.

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