Will Wright Speaks Simlish (great interview)

[chanon]

Will Wright interviews are always an great read:
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-sims-2/591767p1.html
He talks about how The Sims was created and about open ended games, creating games with emergent gameplay, working with EA etc.

It does show that EA is pretty smart.

[svero]

Really? I thought EA tried to cancel the sims several times before it was first released... is that not true?

[svero]

"We [Maxis and EA] went over all the projects we were working on, and when they saw The Sims the EA execs were much more enthusiastic about it. After EA bought Maxis all of a sudden I never had to argue again about getting resources on the project, because they were totally behind it."

Well i guess that answers the question. Good for EA. That's twice now they've been maligned unfairly on these boards. Once for stealing the bee game (they didnt) and once by me in my previous post for trying to cancel the sims (they didnt).

- S

[princec]

I'll malign them some more then.
I've not bought an EA game since the days of the Amiga. Primarily because I think they're all boring as hell.
There, I feel better now.

Cas :)

[Savant]

People complain about EA, but it's not luck that got them to the position they're in.

Yes, they have some evil elements - ea_spouse is not a fairy tale - but on the whole, they have smart people making smart decisions.

[GBGames]

That was a great interview. It was insightful to see how they try to create emergent gameplay through iterative development to get around the fact that you can't engineer it.

[svero]

I thought it was interesting that he goes into the "player created goals" rather than game imposed goals discussion we got into in another thread on the board here just a week or so ago.