The Sims 3: Showtime - Interview
Next month your Sims will try to become singers, magicians or acrobats as as EA's series meets Pop Idol and Britain's Got Talent in The Sims 3: Showtime.
We sat down for a chat with Michael Cox, producer on The Sims 3: Showtime, who was worked on The Sims for many years and has been at EA for 14 years, at a recent event for The Sims 3: Showtime in Stockholm.
What goes into planning and deciding the themes for the various Sims expansions?
We're very fortunate to have a very active and vocal community. We get a lot of feedback, ideas and inspiration from listening to our community. We also do a lot of market research to make sure that our fans are correct. By that I mean they've got a lot of ideas and we really want to deliver what people want to play. And at the same time we want to make sure that what we do has broad appeal, not just for the hardcore fans, but in addition we want to make sure that we're doing things for the more casual users. We have such a variety of people playing this game that we really want to resonate with, and be relevant to all of them so we'll do market research as well.
That takes us to Showtime, how did that idea come up?
Again it's something that the community was really excited about. They've asked for different things that the Showtime expansion pack delivers on. And market research validated the direction we wanted to go and I think also with Showtime it's quite relevant at this time.
There is a lot in the world about the average guy, average girl, someone you've never heard of, having a chance to reach stardom through some sort of competition or that sort of thing. So it seemed like a very relevant theme. It's also a theme that plays really well for the Sims. These career tracks, these great moments for success and failure, the extension of building your own stage and all the props that go with it, the ability to sing your own songs or have a variety of songs to sing and that sort of thing. So there are a lot of aspects of Showtime that seemed like a rich area for us to play in and gain inspiration in, and offer up in this expansion pack.
So there has been no road map since The Sims 3 launch where you go, now we want this kind of expansion and then we want that one...
It's definitely a bit more flexible than that. With The Sims 3, when that launched we offered a bunch of new things - this open world. This world in which Sims could go across town and share their experience with other Sims across town. So it's a really rich and fertile place to expand upon. And we've been able to take that into different areas with each expansion pack and Showtime is a good example of that.
You touch on the Sims audience, obviously with a game that's so popular you pretty much have every type of gamer out there playing it. So do you try and satisfy all of the audience with each expansion or do you tend to focus on hardcore and casual users with different expansions?
We try and offer a broad and deep experience and we've been doing this a long time. The Sims are going on 12 years, 140 million units sold and in that time we've really been able to break down our players into different categories. The builders - I want to be able to build my Sims and build my world, build my houses. The achievers - I want to unlock everything, it's a very deep game so I want to experience every career or get as much money as I can, own every object. There is experimental types - I want to put the sloppy Sim in the same room as the neat one and lock the door and see what happens. And then there are those storytellers - you saw me tell a little story during the presentation and I'm using the game as a vehicle to tell a story to someone. That's how we think of our players and we really try to offer up an open ended experience that empowers all those play styles.
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- System:Mac, PC
- Genre:Simulation
- Developer:EA
- Publisher:EA
- Offline players:1
- Age limit:From 12 years
- Release date:08 March 2012
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