DICE 2009: Sims 3 Panel Wrap-up

There's perhaps no bigger franchise in all of gaming than The Sims. The third major PC release in the series is currently wrapping up production, so Ben Bell, executive producer for The Sims 3, hosted a panel at DICE 2009 to talk about what it's like to head up a billion dollar franchise.

He opened up by stressing that previous successes of a franchise are a blessing and not a curse. While living up to gamers' expectations can be difficult, already knowing that you have an audience and that the franchise has been established makes it much easier to jump in and work on the important stuff rather than trying to figure out how to cater it to an unknown audience.

Bell went on to talk about how players use the game in very different way. Some folks will play it as it was designed, some use it only to create houses or items, and some use it to tell stories that they then share with others.

Next up was an overview of the Creator's Camp that EA held a little while back. The studio brought in some of the top content creators from all over the globe to get a taste of The Sims 3 and to be able to dabble with its creation tools. Bell says that this was very inspirational to the team as they got to see feedback from their biggest fans.

One important element of creating the latest game was experimenting with different social interactions. They built a number of simplistic prototyping applications that they could use to track interactions between the characters over long periods of time, places they would naturally migrate to and so forth.

Bell talked a bit about changes and reinventing existing elements in a large franchise like this. Changing stuff just to change it can be a waste of time - he suggests that you have an idea of exactly what you want to implement.

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