Sims 3 Focal Points — It’s Your World
Written by Matt Brown
This was the original master vision/focal/pillar doc for the Sims 3. It was a level of document that sort of lived in a fuzzy space between upward facing to executives and whatnot and “outward facing” to the team and the rest of the company.
It was something that I intentionally wrote in my own voice, a little excitedly, confidently nerdy in places and definitely not quite marketing ready in others, but it fundamentally was the core vision and the “North Star” direction, for the Sims 3. There are bits in there if look closely that didn't end up menifesting in the game (multiplayer, elimination of base motives), but this is the original doc that we used to make calls against designs, features, content... everything, while developing the game.
I'm still impressed with how much of this original kinda crazy vision the team was able to pull off.
Sims 3 – It’s Your World
Create and share your dreams in a seamless, living world filled with uniquely interesting Sims.
A seamless, living, clockwork world – Create a sense of awe and wonder in the player through scale and coherent attention to detail. Introduce seamless exploration, collecting, and extended social networking into The Sims. Introduce location-specific behaviors that materially affect gameplay dynamics to give the player a reason to choose one location over another for their home. Introduce the passage of time and seasons at the world level. Maintain the intimacy of the Sims franchise while allowing the player to be part of an expansive, intricate, interconnected, clockwork world.
Build anything. Customize everything – Make building and decorating significantly more accessible. Allow players to re-color and replace materials on objects and clothing trivially within the game. Enable and encourage customization and extension of all elements of the game (including models, animations, scripting, behaviors, etc.) with appropriate audience targeting… from the casual player for certain elements to the “hardcore” modding community for others. Casual content creation must be toy-like and creatively empowering. Hardcore tools must be professional and rich.
Every Sim is a unique snowflake - Allow the player to create Sims with recognizably distinct character… visually, behaviorally, and interactively. Enhance and assist storytelling, and introduce meaningful strategic gameplay to character creation. Remove soft character definition elements such as personality and zodiac and replace them with discrete character traits and behaviors that are directly and clearly manifest in game. Emphasize thoughtful caricature. Introduce non-uniform, acquired, opt-in skills and abilities. We don’t need to make Sims smarter. We need to make them more interesting and worth watching, nurturing and caring for.
Rich Exploration, Discovery and Experimentation – Emphasize “lego-ization” of objects. Design objects to be usable in more than one way and in multiple contexts. Doing the same thing in different contexts may have interestingly different results. Emphasize distinct variability in lots, character traits and associated behaviors to motivate exploration of the environment and its inhabitants. Introduce “quest-like” mechanisms in the context of career advancement, skill-building, item collection, socialization, and Sim desires and dreams.
Rich character growth and meaningful relationships without all the peeing – Fundamentally modify the core gameplay “economy” to slide the interactive and strategic window up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, emphasizing socialization, relationships, and character growth over base physical needs. Remove physical drives as continuous player motivation without sacrificing realism of simulation. Provide a new interactive and strategic model for social interaction and networking that is less a collection of independent, discreet interactions and more aligned with a player’s conceptual model of real-world social interaction. Introduce a richer relationship representation that allows for greater distinct variation in the nature of individual relationships, and which emphasizes the need to interact with different Sims differently. Who you know and what you know about them actually matters. Pee less. Grow more.
Seamless Online and Casual Community – Make joining the online community feel safe and comfortable, not creepy and geeky. Make acquiring user-created content terminally simple, nearly accidental, and unerringly pleasant and safe. The player needs to feel that they’re part of a community but that they can opt out of the bonding and be anonymous if the want. I want to be invited to the party but I don’t want to have to dance. Embrace lurking. Get every Sims 3 player to become part of the online community, to download content, and to share experiences with their friends. Maintain a player’s “presence” and interaction with their Sims-playing friends even when they’re not playing. Make The Sims part of every player’s everyday life so that we can keep them “active” between expansions. Monetize the masses. Become the facilitator of distribution and consumption of community created content.
Grow the Base – Embrace new players. Target E10+ (even if we miss). Sims players aren’t hardcore gamers, but they are hardcore Sims players. Avoid catering solely to hardcore Sims players. Support and feed existing users’ addiction without alienating the Soon to Be Addicted. Obsess about the difficulty and complexity ramp of the game such that new players are introduced gradually to the depth and richness of the game while Sims players experience and embrace the new systems as quickly as possible. Provide a seamless, adaptive, contextual tutorial mechanism for both old and new players.