Our writer’s (Leighanne) sister Stacey found something very interesting. There were lots of speculations about The Sims 4 releasing on March 2014, but now it looks like these speculations are true! In UK Toy/Game store called Smyths, there are placeholder boxes for The Sims 4, including the release date.
SimGuruGraham recently replied to an issue on Mod The Sims, saying that issues with camera that we had in The Sims 3/past Sims games won’t happen again in The Sims 4. Big thanks to HoneyWell’s Sims 4 Blog for finding this!
The Builder: The camera! Seriously, the camera in TS3 sucks when building. It cannot focus properly when you have all floors+roof active. When I colour and build my house, I really prefer having it all walls and floors up, but then the camera flies away so you can’t have your house centered, because it focuses too much on the roof. If I move the camera slightly down, it falls down to the ground instead. There is no in-between.
SimGuruGraham: This constantly bugged me in Sims 3… it was one of the first things I asked them to overhaul when we were building the demo we showed at Gamescom. As things currently stand, the further your camera is zoomed out, the less the camera bounces when moving across different floor levels. Personally I think it feels a lot better in-game now; I hope you’ll agree when you get your hands on it
Last night, Gizmodo got a sneak peek at the new SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack due out next month. The eye-popping visuals of the relaunch were covered widely, immediately making a game as easy to discuss for its many frustrations as for its design advances, and we were thus keen to learn how Cities of Tomorrow expansion would continue or depart from the recent refresh.
There was a lot to see—a truly bewildering amount of new content—and an almost impossibly dense web of subsidiary information to take in. They’ve been working on the expansion pack since the re-release, back in February, and, creatively speaking, it shows.
Continue Reading/See more Screens…
UPDATE: Teen Adoption is now 50% off! Thanks to BunBunnyny for the find!
New update for The Sims FreePlay is now available for iOS/Android Devices. Check out the description + new trailer for it!
Teens have arrived in Sim Town! Osiris, our little alien friend, is back and ready to use his extra-spectacular-technological skills to give Birthday Cakes the ability to turn Preteens into Teens. Get Baking!
• Teens – Age your Preteens into Teens by completing the “Coming of Age” quest at Level 23 and higher.
• High School – Send your Teens off to make the grade at the new High School. Build yours today by completing the “Higher Education” quest at Level 24 and higher!
• Teen Idol – Become a Teen Idol and make other Teens swoon! Live a life of fame and fortune by completing the “Road to Fame” quest at Level 25 and higher.
• Halloween Madness – New ghost have invaded Sim Town! Complete the “Great Ghost Escape” at Level 10 and higher by November 1st to unlock spooky new items and costumes.
• Sim Town Sign – Now that Sim Town is home to so many rich and famous Sims, it’s time to celebrate with the iconic Sim Town Sign! Build it to unlock the Teen Idol Mansion, the perfect hideout for your Teen Idol.
• Need a new family member asap – Use the telephone to adopt a Teen or Preteen!
• Complete weekly quests to earn Keys and win prizes in the Mystery Box Shop.
The Sims Italia posted 29 Screenshots of the Utopian Future. Check them out!
Hey everyone! My name is Ryan Vaughan and I‘m a producer for The Sims 4. A lot of you might be wondering what the heck a producer does day-to-day. How do I spend my time in The Sims Studio? And, maybe what my favorite food is? This is my opportunity to let you get to know me and the role I play on The Sims 4 team a bit better.
First, let me say that I’ve actually been working on The Sims for more than six years! It’s gone by pretty fast, but when you truly love what you do, it’s inspiring to come in on a daily basis and have a lot of fun. Don’t get me wrong, all jobs come with their own challenges, but working on The Sims has been incredible.
In The Sims Studio, a producer works with all the different members of the team. We work with artists, computer engineers, designers, QA, other producers, you name it! In the simplest terms, we help keep them on track, hit their schedules, and make sure the game is the best that it can be. Simple task right? It’s actually a lot more than that.
One of the most important jobs of a producer is to ensure that specific features evolve and change from their original design when they don’t end up fitting correctly into the game. We ensure that game features like Create A Sim (which we talked about last week) and Build Mode work in a way that feels right. Games are made of many different parts and finding a balance is one of our most important goals.
Now that I mentioned them, I have to tell you that one of the things I’m most excited about in The Sims 4 is the brand new Create A Sim. Being able to directly manipulate the way my Sim looks (without using sliders) is something I’ve always wanted from the very first time I played The Sims. I cannot wait to finish this game so everyone can enjoy how much fun it is now to create Sims.
I’m also constantly tracking the status of projects, playing the game, and working with my various cross-partner team members. A lot of my job, you see, is being a support system to the team. If a developer has an issue that’s keeping work from getting done, it’s up to a producer to either find a way to get it done, or to find the right person to get it done. People who are good problem solvers make great producers!
My life is not all work. I have a beautiful family that I come home to every night. These moments where I’m unwinding is where I derive a lot of my stories for how I play The Sims. In fact, watching my son build houses out of blocks the other night reminded me a lot of how the new Build Mode works – constructing houses by building individual rooms and shapes. I relish those moments of watching real life at home and then recreating them when I come to work.
That about sums it up. Hope you had a chance to get to know me a bit better.
Oh, and by the way, my favorite food is pizza – no question about that!
Follow me on Twitter @SimGuruRyan.
thesims3.com recently updated their Slider design. There’s only a slight difference between the old one. Also, they added new Into the Future Background!
Update: TheSims3.com also updated the Purchase History. Now you can download mutliple things at once!
Design
Emotions are a real pain, aren’t they? Think of all of the amazing things we could achieve if we didn’t feel anything other than the momentary satisfaction of having our needs met. I’ve been playing The Sims 3 lately, after a visit to Maxis to see the hyper-popular life simulator’s upcoming sequel. In The Sims 3, tiny virtual me has no worries other than when he’s going to eat and when he’s going to sleep.
When the toilet breaks, he gets cross – but the satisfaction of fixing the toilet (something I never thought I’d particularly go for) is sufficient to send him bounding on his happy way. He doesn’t slack off and go eat ice cream in the bath because he’s feeling down. He isn’t compelled to lay into a punch bag after a rough trip to the supermarket. He doesn’t pass by a painting and find himself compelled to go create something of his own.
Instead, he’s focused, lean and efficient. He’s had three books published and works out in the afternoon. I sort of wish I was him.
In The Sims 4, Maxis are bringing the full weight of emotion to bear on the shoulders of the game’s tiny automata. An argument might leave a Sim feeling angry, while professional failure might lead to depression. A darkened room lit by flickering candles might spur your Sim into a ‘romantic’ state, an emotion I suggested several unpublishable names for during my visit.
“We really want to dive deep and focus on the Sims’ emotional experience,” producer Ryan Vaughan says. “We feel like these Sims are more relatable and believable than ever and the content supports that.”
The Sims FreePlay posted a new video showing that Teens are coming soon to FreePlay! It’s still not known when will they release this update, but my guess is somewhere around Halloween.
YouTube – Twitter – Facebook – Vlog
Hey, my name is Torben also known as SimLinks on YouTube. The Sims has been a great deal in my life till to this day. I started one day my parents friend house who had The Sims 1. Let me tell you. I had no clue how to do anything at all. I took the game home and played it on my brothers super old laptop, well back then it was one of the best but now you can say it’s a giant laptop. I played The Sims all day after school and night. I thought it was the best game ever. Not long later maybe 1 year into playing the game, I had all The Sims 1 games and The Sims 2 was released. Now yes I did get it the day it came out, so you can say nothing has changed at all. I was always up to date when it came to The Sims and even got my best friend into playing it. On my free time, all I did was play sims and build houses in game. It was one thing that made me feel happy and relaxed. I loved it. My parents got mad at me a lot for not coming to dinner at night, well I mean I had better things to do then eat. About one and a half years ago I started YouTube. I always wanted to share my ideas on house building and Let’s Plays, so YouTube was it. I loved it and I still do, it’s my number 2 thing after The Sims to do on my free time, well, let’s say they are the same, love doing both of them. I had to change channels about 6 month ago to SimLinks. I mostly have Let’s Plays and some houses. I’m planing on building more in the future and I’m working on my first world. More info on the world is coming soon.I can’t wait for The Sims 4. I’m in love with the graphic and the way it looks. I think it will be an amazing game. I love what they did with it. I’m really looking forward to the game. It’s already preordered.You can find me on twitter @Sim_Links and on YouTube at SimLinks or send me an email at emailsimlinks@gmail.com
It’s been seven months since we released SimCity and I wanted to take stock of where we are, respond to some questions and talk about the future.
We’re Listening
First, I want you to know that we are listening to your feedback. We dig deep into the forums, Facebook posts, and Twitter feeds every day to see what players are talking about. There is a lot of feedback and there is a clear passion for SimCity. That’s great to see. And while we appreciate positive feedback, we take very seriously the players who have criticisms. Players have high expectations of what goes into our games and we have an obligation to deliver.
We continuously review this feedback alongside in-game telemetry to help us decide where to focus our game tuning and development efforts. We’ve formed dedicated teams to explore specific features. Some player requests, such as a tool to raise and lower roads, were straightforward challenges. Some of the larger asks, such as bigger city maps and an offline mode, have required more thought and exploratory work.
Seven Months, Seven Major Updates
We’ve released seven major updates in the last seven months, which have evolved the gameplay experience and the core of our simulation. GlassBox powered our first agent based simulation and this system created depth and complexity like we’ve never had before. This opened up a whole new world of tuning and we’ve spent our time making sure that all players, whatever track they take their cities through, are getting a challenging experience. I encourage you to watch Dan’s great talk from GDC 2013 to give you an idea of just how complex SimCity’s system really is.
Traffic was always meant to be a challenge; in fact, many of our team considered traffic to be a strategy game all on its own. But, in reality, traffic was behaving irrationally. We got the player feedback and fixed it. Cars are smarter, buses are more intelligent in their routing, and the new raise/lower tool brought new ways to route traffic throughout the city. Tuning is the life blood of the simulation and we continue to monitor and make enhancements to the way GlassBox responds to our players. Stability and performance increases are also a constant area of focus for us; servers are stable and performance continues to improve on lower spec machines.
We’ve also heard feedback on our strategy and pricing for DLC. My commitment on DLC for SimCity is that we do not force players to purchase game elements that are essentially helping to tune the simulation or fix specific issues. And for that optional content, we always want players to feel like it’s valuable. Along with paid DLC, we’ve also been providing free content. The first two million players received the Launch Park, we recently released new hotels and houses of worship, and we’re planning to release additional free content soon – more region maps, more free buildings and more.
User Generated Content (UGC) Discussions Underway
Maxis has a long tradition of supporting User Generated Content (UGC) and the UGC community. We have begun a discussion with our players with the ultimate goal of giving you space to mod while assuring all our players that the multiplayer gameplay experience is safe and has integrity. It’s difficult to determine what makes a “good” or safe mod and what mods cross the line. Clarifying guidelines for UGC will help players understand where that line is. We want to have an open discussion with our community about what you want out ofSimCity and hear your thoughts about UGC guidelines. To join the discussion go here.
Exploration for Offline Mode is Happening
Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode. I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience.
Bigger Cities
City sizes have been a constant point of conversation among our players since we released the game. The game’s original design focused on the density of an intimate urban environment. It was about intercity connectivity and the challenge of managing a region of cities instead of one metropolis in isolation. However, we recognize that many players have expressed the desire to build up one big city rather than manage the interrelationship of multiple smaller cities.
We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space.
After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine. We’ve chosen to cease work on bigger city sizes and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore an offline mode. Some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on bigger cities will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance.
Cities of Tomorrow
Thank You
Our launch wasn’t what anyone on the team hoped for. We think about this every single day, but we’re proud of how far we’ve come over the past few months.
Like you, I’m a SimCity fan and a passionate gamer. That passion for the original SimCity was one of the influences that led me to study Government in college and to work on Capitol Hill. But my love of gaming drove me from Washington DC to California to join Will Wright’s studio 17 years ago. SimCity is in my blood and if there’s one thing I know about Maxis is that it attracts a certain kind of game maker, those who love simulations and take personal joy in bringing these worlds to life. We’re all passionate about SimCity and we want to make it better.
So that’s the state of SimCity right now and we feel that it’s improving every day. Agree or disagree, tweet me at @EAGamer and let’s get the conversation going.
