Was that a problem you tried to solve?
There were things we did,
but we couldn’t get around
the central fact that every-
body was on the same
timeline. For instance,
whenever you tell a sim to
go somewhere in The
Sims Online, they pretty
much run everywhere to
minimize the routing
time. We experimented a
lot with transportation
time and cost between
lots, and we ended up
doing that in a slight way,
but for the most part we
found that just wasn’t fun
— having a lot that’s further away takes longer to get to. So there wasn’t a lot of topol-
ogy to the world in that sense. Although we started adding a little bit of topology to it, in
terms of your motives will be drained as you were moving between lots, and the further
you went the more your motives were drained, so the more you’d have to recharge at
that lot. So we wanted to have some feeling of locality. But aside from that, a lot of your
interactions got sped up, so that when you sleep inThe Sims Onlineit happens about
five or six times faster thanThe Simsoffline. So those interactions that you were basi-
cally just using to fill your motives, your bars, where it wasn’t an interesting activity but
more of just a maintenance thing, we sped those up relative to the offlineSims.Sowe
did a lot of adjustments to try and alleviate the time issue.
In the end did you feel it sufficiently solved the problem?
For the most part, yes. Once we adjusted that stuff, at that point it didn’t feel like a big
deal. The trick was, don’t put the player in a situation where they’re sitting there wait-
ing for something to complete and they don’t have anything to do. We have other things
that do take longer to happen, but you’re actually making decisions or there’s a
mini-game involved.
Did you spend a lot of time trying to make the game like the offlineSims? Or did
you just viewThe Sims Onlineas a separate game?
It was pretty apparent to us really early on that it was a totally different game. It looked
a lot likeThe Sims. That was the weird part is people look at it and say, “Oh, that’sThe
Sims.” And then they play it and realize it’s an entirely different game. First of all you’re
controlling just one person, you don’t have that God-like control, there’s no cheating
allowed, you can’t speed up time, the other people are real people doing God knows
what. The original concept was that we were going to build something that would not be
as elaborate and would be a peer-to-peer experience. And due to some business
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The Sims Online