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The Sims 3: Ambitions - Interview Part 1
We sit down with the expansion's producer Grant Rodiek to discuss all things Sims.
Written by Andy Griffiths, 03 June 2010
GamerZines: What will make Sims fans want to pony up the dough for this expansion?
Grant Rodiek: Ambitions is all about new careers and now it's all about making choices and watching your Sims all day long. For example with the firefighter, you go to the station, you build up your equipment and then the fire comes. There're big fires and small fires where you're having to break down doors and try to figure out who to save first in tough situations. You're controlling your Sim the whole time instead of just saying he's a firefighter and letting him go off to work.
As a private eye you've got several different cases to solve with many different stories and some of them have different choices for you to make. You can blackmail Sims, search for clues, snoop around locations and even stakeout potential suspects. There's a real noire writing style which is goofy with Sims thinking out loud and talking to themselves using ridiculous similies in a really camp and funny way. There's also the doctor and ghost hunter career paths.
We have things for creative players as well, such as the option to be an architectural designer or stylist. Being an architectural designer is all about being hired by other Sims, for example a family may be expecting a baby and they want a baby room, so you stop by their place and completely redesign their home. You'll need to work within their budget and you can learn their traits, so you can design their home more in line with what they want in order to get a higher score. So we have a huge variety of different jobs you can do and within those there're lots of different things possible using the new skills. On the whole it's more interactive and a much more interesting way to make money in The Sims.
GZ: How much of the expansion's development has been geared towards giving fans what they have experienced before in the franchise? For example you could argue that Ambitions takes a similar approach to Workin' It Up or Open for Business.
GR: We're inspired by a lot of things. For example World Adventures was clearly inspired by Bon Voyage, which was heavily dependent on the feeling of going on vacation but what if the exploration had light RPG, puzzle solving and adventure elements? You know, we wanted to do something different. So we started with what we did in the past, we took the things that worked really well and went in a new direction.
Ambitions is less of a departure than World Adventures was, so we thought let's do Open for Business, but instead of retail lets focus on the entrepreneurial spirit and change it to accommodate more active gameplay by controlling what your Sim does, how they choose to work and inevitably how they succeed or fail.
So you can see the six big careers aren't retail at all, but then we have other little side-features where you can eventually own the consignment store, you won't manage it but you'll get money for items sold. There's a real estate venture part of the game as well, where you can invest in different lots. If you want to be a writer you role will now be updated as a professional writer rather than unemployed and there's ten different levels for that.
We figure out what players like and tailor that to what The Sims 3 does best for example utilising traits, new customisation options and the open world.
GZ: How does Sims 3: Ambitions tackle the problem of piracy and DRM?
GR: I remember reading the boards the other day and one guy was talking about the stylist career and how much he enjoyed playing it in Indonesia. Whether he was full of crap or serious, this was weeks ago and the game is only just coming out. I thought that was kind of funny and sad at the same time. People do pirate our games, it's a reality. Our approach with this game is lets back off the DRM (Digital Rights Management), we have a disc check and that's it.
Basically we want to reward our paying customers with light DRM, a good price and we'll give you great stuff. You have Riverview if you register the game, and you get free updates which you can only get via registering, it takes months of our time to build this exclusive content. For World Adventures we had extra decorative items for your home and you have a bunch of new objects for this game as well. Hopefully this philosophy of nurture not punish will pay off and if players help us out and support our game then we'll do our best to support them. We can't stop the piracy, it's maddening to me. It's theft and that is all it is, but we'll still try to support players.
GZ: DRM is something that will never go away, are you ever tempted to slap the hardest, most limited solution onto the game as possible?
GR: It always tempting. I know that on Sims 2 around the fifth expansion we added SecuRom and that made a lot of people really angry. That was a huge discussion point for The Sims 3 from top to bottom, junior engineers were writing emails to senior staff members arguing why we shouldn't use specific forms of DRM and from there throughout the company we all decided we would only do a disc check and cross our fingers that the community would support us. I like to think that more people bought it because of the way we have acted, by respecting the consumer.
