Back in 2014, Stevivor had the opportunity to speak to The Sims 4 developer Maxis about the different styles of play they had seen leading up to its launch. Since then, The Sims 4 has evolved over time and Senior Producer, Mike Duke, explained to Stevivor how Maxis is still surprised by different styles of players.
“Certainly what we’ve seen emerge is that there is almost 8 different styles of play that we get from our gameplay data,” Duke said. “Back then we hadn’t really seen how the player base would show up. Now that we have a ton of data from over the years, we can identify that there is a lot of distinct play types. Some of them you expect, and then others were super surprising.
“Achiever is definitely a style of play we expected. They are there to grind their careers and level up every skill. One of the types which is unique to our game is players who really over-index their time on family play. So they almost always have children, toddlers, or young adults in their family. They are building relationships and telling a lot of real relatable stories that are family moments. There are also legacy players in our community who are doing generation after generation of story telling – there is a whole segment of players who just really like that.”
Along with building relationships, Discover University also allows you to build robots… and with that in mind players were definitely eager to find out if you could, well, take things a little further.
“The Sims is a strange place,” Duke said. “And we allow for strange things to happen. The day our reveal trailer went out for Discover University I think within 5 or 10 minutes, one of the comments was, ‘But can you WooHoo the robot?’ There we go, we were right to assume some of our players out there would like to know if that is possible, and I’m happy to report that yes, you can.”
Discover University — the latest expansion pack for The Sims 4 — launches 15 November 2019 on PC, and next month for Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
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