Electronic playground Story

Electronic playground Story

Courtesy of The Sims 2 Station

This part of an Electronic playground article from May 23, 2003

The technology behind this game was some of the most impressive of the whole show. Maybe when it's done, EA can ship a few copies to scientists everywhere. They just might learn something.

The key elements of The Sims 2 are generations and genomes. As in, each Sim has a distinct genome, aspects of which will be passed down through the Sim's children to determine the way they look and behave. So your kids will look and act like a mix of their mother and father. And there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than the game randomly choosing 50 percent of mom's features, 50 percent of dad's features, and then generating the new child. There's also a random element, so the child of two Sims will have a tendency towards ma and pa, but won't necessarily be a clone.

You can "Grab n' Go," that is play the game by quickly choosing a character without taking the time to customize every last personality and appearance detail of your Sim. You can simply choose a Sim with a random appearance. However, if you choose to make full use of the Create-a-Sim feature, you will find an astonishing level of detail. This feature literally allows you to edit the genome as you go. Now you can choose specific hairstyles instead of just choosing a head. You can put make-up on your Sim (make up, obviously, does not pass down through the genome). But you don't just choose from a series of pre-rendered faces. You can pick two faces from a palette, and using a slider bar, change the face so that it is a mix of the two. But it goes deeper than this still. You don't have to take the entire face. You can isolate specific features of said face, such as the nose or mouth, and then add them to your Sim. So if Face 1 has a nice chin that you want but you don't like the eyes, just grab the chin from Face 1 and the eyes from Face 2, and so on. You can also play around with these specific features--mouth, lip, bridge of nose dimensions; shape of face, etc. Quite simply, this is the most sophisticated character creation system I have ever seen in any game.

Under this system, Maxis expects the look of Sims to be very different, especially as these customized Sims mix, marry, and have children. Sims will practically be as unique as fingerprints, although you might recognize certain family features. For example, Maxis created a green-skinned, black-eyed Roswell-style alien, and then married him off. Over several generations, the alien features were mostly gone from the family line, but you could still see a hint of it in the eyes.

Once you go online and start swapping customized genomes with other players, things get even crazier. You might launch an entirely new branch of your family tree as your traits are passed down. And months down the road, you might see a Sim you've never met before, but looks familiar because you're distantly related to them.

Maxis is planning to release the Sim builder tools before the game's released, so you'll be able to get the look of your Sim down before you start to play. I personally predict that Sims fans will produce sites who offer all sorts of crazy custom content--like someone making a series of Brady Bunch Sims for download. Remember how in Freedom Force somebody made skins of ex-Presidents? I expect wilder things to happen with The Sims 2.

During our E3 demo, some wag at Maxis had created Sims that looked exactly like Halle Berry, Mr. T, and Better Midler. So, to show us how the children turned out, they mixed the genomes of Mr. T and Berry, to produce a new Sim we dubbed "Halle T." We could preview what male and female children would look like over the years. The male Sim did look a little like both parents, with a lighter skin and leaner face, like his mother. He grew a mohawk when he was about 25. That's right, Sims now age, from toddlers to teens to adults to old folks, appearance changing as they grow. Apparently though, the aging option can be toggled off if you don't want your Sim to die.

Maxis' designers acknowledge that the life of a character in the original Sim was "too much like the movie Groundhog Day "--the same day over and over again. They wanted to get away from this, and the aging aspect was one such way. Furthermore, gameplay will now be based around achieving certain life milestones, and racking up a Life Score. These events are both positive and negative, things most people go through in their lives. Our demonstrator showed a teen party where a young girl went looking for her First Kiss. So our demonstrator had her start flirting with a boy. Since Sims get older, you might miss an opportunity to do a certain life event. So don't wait live life to the fullest. It's harder to have children at 80 than at 30.

The Sims' behavior now contains many more lifelike animations and facial expressions that show what the Sim is feeling. I saw a baby Sim beating up his teddy bear in frustration, then going on to bug big sister, interfering with her efforts to flirt with that boy I mentioned before. Big sister noticeably sighed, and her shoulders slumped at the baby's pleas for attention. She tried to ignore him. She should be careful about that--the things that happen (or don't happen) when the Sims are young affect their growth. Little brother might grow up to be unpleasant and maladjusted if he's not nurtured correctly. Sim behavior and attitude will also affect physiology. Sims who exercise will stay fit and trim, the ones who sit on their asses will gain weight.

There's more chaos in the life of Sims, too. I saw two of them playing SSX on an undefined game machine, and a fight broke out. It appeared as a cartoon-style cloud with the odd limb and Sim curse shooting out. Maxis said they wanted Sims to be more aware of--and reactive to--what happened around them, and this was a good example. Some Sims gathered around to watch, others ran to a safe distance. During the fight, some of the furniture got trashed, too.

Speaking of furnishings, let's face it--one of the great joys of The Sims is placing furniture and designing homes. Things will be even more fun now, as the game will present a fully 3D world, and you can build homes with more than two levels. Why not make a rec room in your basement? You can zoom in, out, and rotate the camera to get a better look at your work and your Sims' activities too. There will even be a neighborhood now, which will change and expand over time as you have offspring, and they move out to their own homes (make sure you get some new DNA into your neighborhood. We don't want inbreeding).

Our E3 demo was all too brief, but we like what we see, and we'll be on the lookout for Sims 2 updates in the future. The only downside to The Sims 2 is that we have a bit of a wait on our hands. The game isn't due until "early" 2004.