Live from San Francisco, I can give you the latest news about The Sims 2. Together with about 20 other webmasters from the Sims community we’ve attended "The Sims 2 University" today, where we got to see a demo of the game, CaSIE (the official name of Create A Sim, which will be released before Christmas), and we even got some hands-on play time on the game. Of course we’ve also been able to ask a lot of questions to the developers of the game, including Will Wright. It was a great day and a special about it will follow soon, but I’m giving you some information right now already. Read on for more...
When you start the game, you'll immediately see the neighborhood like in The Sims 1. The major difference is that you can even customise the neighborhood as much as you want, if you have SimCity 4. Creating a 64x64 city will be enough. The Sims 2 will import the terrain, roads (only with straight corners - diagonal roads won’t be imported) and bridges from the city. Once you're done importing the city, you can 'plop' objects, like rainbows and hot air balloons, on the hood. At the moment that’s done with cheats, and it’s not yet determined if there will be buttons to place those objects, or if those objects will even be in the final version of the game.Once you're done customising your neighborhood, you can start creating families and lots. You can pick the size of a lot, choose if you want a residential or community lot, and place it anywhere you want. Once you entered the lot, you can change the terrain to anything you want. If you want a snow or a desert, it’s up to you. Across the street you'll no longer see some boring gray area, but instead you’ll see the terrain. However, you won’t see the houses next door there.
Another difference you'll notice is that neighborhoods are now identified by names. At the moment the directory structure still uses numbers, but even then the amount of neighborhoods is still virtually unlimited. In the final version it's possible that the neighborhoods will also be placed in directories using their names.
Another thing you'll see as well is that as soon as you view the info of a lot (which is done by clicking it once, instead of hovering the mouse over the lot), you'll immediately see the friendship relations with other Sims in the neighborhood, indicated with green lines.
As I said, there's a lot more to talk about, and there’s a lot more information. However, it's too much to give at once. You'll be getting more information in the form of a special soon, right here at The Sims Zone. Expect a lot of info about The Sims, CaSIE and custom content for The Sims 2 soon. Stay tuned...
Written at 07:47 on Saturday, 15 November 2003 by ChEeTaH.
