Interview: The Sims 4 Producer Graham Nardone

After getting acquainted with Sad Keanu, Stevivor got to sit down for a chat with The Sims 4 Producer Grahan Nardone.

In this interview, Nardone talks of new features, almighty emotions, role-playing, construction and more.

Luke Lawrie, Stevivor: Going into production for The Sims 4 what were some of the key features that your team wanted to introduce into this new iteration of the series?

Graham Nardone: This was kind of an interesting crossroads for us because we are coming up to the 15^th anniversary of The Sims next February, so when you think about all that past wealth of content that we have built for the franchise the one really consistent thing throughout all of it has been the Sims. But they haven’t changed too much over that period of time, so we really wanted to bring it back to being about the Sims, making them core focus of the game, and changing a lot about them to update them for this game.

Doing things like giving them in depth emotions, giving them real personalities, and making that come to life through the way that they behave, move, and interact with other Sims. Rather than just trying to surface information from the UI, you should be able to look at your sim and see how they are feeling; understand and empathise with them. That ends up being a really powerful thing in games, not only for how things look but also the depth of the gameplay as well.

Stevivor: So with the emotions then how does that work alongside the A.I. of the Sims, what sort of challenges did you have trying to fit those systems together?

Nardone: Well that is a fun one because there are so many possibilities and directions that a Sim can go in at any given moment. We have this interesting tool that we run at the same time as the game, and it shows us what the A.I. is considering not doing, as well as what they are deciding to do. So at any moment we can have 20 Sims running their full simulation and each Sim is considering hundreds of different possibilities of interactions that they could do, or socialisations that they could engage in.

They are taking different aspects of each one and trying to build towards a score of what’s most important for them. So they are factoring stuff in like what their emotion is, what objects are surrounding them in their environment, what relationships they have with the other Sims around them, what their needs are at the moment and what they are trying to satisfy. All of that builds up a score for each possible thing they could be doing, and we look at it and we randomise it a little bit so that you can’t predict exactly what is going to happen, and then it spits out the outcome – which is what the Sim decides to do next. But literally every second they are going through all these decisions that they could be making, in the background of the game the A.I. is always churning away at these complex simulations and possibilities.

It’s an interesting thing to see and of course what you actually see when you play the game it doesn’t spit all that information out at you, ultimately if we have done our jobs right it feels like a really natural simulation with believable behaviour, or occasionally kind of fun wacky Sims humour.

Stevivor: Just expanding on that a little bit people play The Sims games in different ways, some like to build things, others might like to get into the role playing aspect of the game. Then within this you have people that want to play it seriously and then others that just want to have a bit of fun with it and go crazy. How do you draw that line of having the Sims behaviour either as a simulation or the fun wacky humour you described?

Nardone:  Interestingly enough from the research we’ve done we see 4 different types of players. You already mentioned the creative one, who go out and build houses and spend very little time in live mode. There are also the story tellers who want to live out specific scenarios in the game. Achievers are the ones who want to complete all the different skills and careers, everything that the game has to offer. Then of course everyone’s favourite to discuss is the deviant players, these are the ones who want to mess around and torture their Sims a little bit. So when we are designing content or thinking about what goes into the game we keep each of those types of players in mind and make sure we are splitting up our content so that it servers each of their needs.

From the other aspect for where that line is of what’s appropriate, what’s a life simulation, what’s the kind of funny Maxis humour we can use, I think that really comes from looking at the game and not just as a life simulation but as an optimistic look on life. So we never do things that are too dark, or too depressing. We never have Sim to Sim violence, or never have anything that is out of the players control. So if the player wants to take their Sim and put them into a dark situation they are able to do that, but that is always a choice that the player is making.  When we talk about funny behaviour or a funny situation, certainly when Sims are levelling up in skills there’s always unfortunate failure moments for them.

One of my favourite moments in The Sims 4 is getting up on the treadmill and trying for the first time to do a hill challenge where it starts to move up and down, and they just fall smack down flat on their face. But there’s other kind of wacky elements that come into it as well, there’s lots of great humour with the Grim Reaper this time around, especially when you put him in interesting scenarios. I had one time where the Reaper showed up where the parent died and the baby was still there, the baby would have been the only one left on the lot until the mother came home from work. So the Grim Reaper reaped the Father and started taking care of the baby afterwards because it needed its diaper changed. So just funny behaviour like that which just manifests itself through gameplay is where we take a wackier look at life.

Stevivor: There were a lot of things I was quite impressed with while playing the Sims 4. In particular was the build mode, I seemed to be able to do just about everything that I wanted to do while playing – although you did point out to me that I didn’t put any stairs leading up to the roof for anyone to get up there. But is there anything you maybe weren’t able to implement into the build mode that some of the really hardcore Sims fans might have really liked to use?

Nardone: There are always aspects that we can always build on and improve upon for the future. We have already put a number of new things into the Sims 4 build mode, and I consider myself a builder – that’s my primary enjoyment from the game so this is kind of the area that I geek out over the most. There’s a lot of new things that have never been in the franchise like changing the heights of walls, and you can do that on each different level. That just unlocks new architectural styles that were never possible before.

The floor trims, roof trims, spandrels, those are all in a Sims game for the first time so we wanted to give people a lot of different possibilities especially once they start digging deep into the tool and exploring all the different things that it offers. If there’s one specific thing for build mode that I’ve heard a lot about which we have had a lot of request for in the past, I’d probably say curved walls. We still don’t entirely have that in the game, but we are doing some initial stuff with curved objects like curved fences, and curved decks, but not officially curved walls yet. We will have to see where the future takes us.

Stevivor: The Sims series is known for having a lot of expansions and extra addons. Is The Gallery somewhere that we may see a lot of this content coming from in the future or will the expansions still be their own separate entity?

Nardone: I think The Gallery is going huge throughout the life of The Sims 4. What is in there right now is basically the foundation of what we could do in the future. At the moment you can share Sims, homes, and individual rooms. That to me is the basics of what you want to share. I think what is going to be really exciting is once players start using it and seeing patterns develop for how they use it, and getting feedback from them about how they want to use it. We want to see what sort of addition content they want to share, can they generate their own content and want to share it. I think there are so many possibilities there that it’s only going to grow in the future.

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The Sims 4 is available today on Windows PC. A Mac release is set to follow.