Premades and Precepts

There is a two-part interview with Russell Arons, VP of marketing for EA Play (so that’s what it’s called now) up on Gamesindustry.biz. I like to read these ‘industry sources’ because you often get a totally different perspective from what press releases and official previews tell you, such as…

TS3′s REAL core audience

“The Sims 3 is looking at 16-24 year-old PC players .. [it] has been developed from the ground up specifically against those consumer audiences.”

“it’s not just about appealing to the current Sims fans – they’re critically important, but we know we have to bring new consumers in too.”

So the people complaining about unnecessary changes, and who aren’t in this nicely-segmented age bracket or are ‘old consumers’, have a point. It’s not “developed against” them.

More below about the delay, social networking and kids, and the surprising use of the Internet to market games.

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I’m not really a ‘news blogging’ person but Rod Humble (Head of Sims and EA Play, and the guy who wrote the no-DRM open letter) mentioned a few interesting things in this forum thread. I’m just picking out the interesting stuff that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

• “… we open up a whole bunch of the game to modders that I think will impress people. Not sure where this idea that [modding] was harder came from. Newer, yes, different yes but not harder.”
• “I assure you, there will be fully featured very large expansions.”
• “Similar to Sims 2, the new formats will start out hard and get easier as the team works with the modders and updates/releases tools.”
• “Meshes are at the high end of hard (as you would expect). I just went down and asked the (very tired) Sims 3 team leads. It is very high on their agenda.”
• “Making meshes to put in the game is not that hard, its getting everything to work perfectly throughout the game that is the tough part.”
• On availability of nude/no-censor mods: “Given the priorities of modders, learning the system, testing time, audience demand etc I would say ………. Day 1.”
  

That seems to confirm post-release tools (neighborhood editor FIRST please!) and technical support for modders.

Also, Rod Humble thinks Sims players are perverts. Aren’t we all? :)

As we approach the release of TS3 I’d like to give a shout out to all the sensationalist media outlets and moral crusaders. Your misinformed insights and biased reports bring joy to all gamers. I know that the game isn’t out yet, but if most ‘angry’ critics don’t bother to play the games they’re complaining about, why should I?

Here’s ten fresh controversies for the nutters with microphones. (Keep in mind some of my suggestions are actually saner than others. I needed ten things, OK?)

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This post is very emo and whiny about pirates getting stuff before honest folk, and the second half is really me railing against oppressive broadband quotas.

Regard this as your forewarning.

Well, it was 99% certain to happen early, but the Sims 3 (weighing in @ 4.94 GB) has leaked.

Edit I: SecuROM is BACK. Run.

Edit II: Whispers that it may be an early leak of the Download Edition (already confirmed to contain SecuROM). Jury is out on whether the disc version will have the Blight. Alternately, may be preview code, due to missing content. Smart to wait until retail version is up. Smarter to buy the freakin’ thing.

I’m angry at this. Two reasons.

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It took a while, but I’ve finished setting up installing WordPress on my own domain (for the fourth time!), setting up the blog, and importing the posts from my old Blogger site (now consigned to the Internet wastes).

I actually spent most of the time doing this tagging, categorising, and editing all of the older articles to look less like obsessively egocentric Sims fan ravings. Fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, especially while doing it all on a 64k connection.

Edit: If you’re looking for the careers in the full game, see this post

SimSocial, the so-called “free trial” of TS3 went live this weekend. I currently have horrendously slow internet but I did play it for about half an hour, and found the most interesting aspect of it the careers. We now have some information on career tracks that will probably make it into the final game! There’s probably a list elsewhere on the net, but here’s the one I’ve been compiling. As you may tell from the snarky comments, I’m not a big fan of them.

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Huge missed opportunity here. Here’s my list of suggested traits,
political correctness be damned. Almost all of them were derived from
the ‘opposite’ of the vanilla traits.

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