AusGamers: So after seeing that brief demonstration, my first question would be is the game reasonably historically accurate or are there many fantasy elements? I know that you guys demonstrated the Wizards there, but are there things like dragons and trolls in the game?

Rachel Bernstein: Yeah, this is a thing we talk about for any kind of Sims game: What level of historical accuracy do we want, and what level of fantasy elements do we want to put into the game?. So with the medieval game, we've made it so that you can try to avoid the fantasy elements if you don't want to engage in them, but there are a lot of fantasy elements in the game; it's not particularly historically accurate. Yes there's wizards and magic; there's dragons to fight and there's dire-chinchillas of unusual size.

Also when you look at what the architecture is like, you see that we've spanned hundreds of years of the middle-ages and many different country's architecture is in there. So we're not really trying to be historically accurate, we're capturing a very broad pop-culture view of what the middle-ages was like.




AG: On that note, are there any elements that reflect the human hardships of medieval times? Like plagues, famine and slavery etc, or do you just try to keep to the more family friendly, romantic notion of the era?

Rachel: We try to keep family-friendly although there are definitely going to be plagues and diseases. We thought religious conflict was and important part of the middle-ages too, which is why we have two religions – if you want to play with them – that compete. Execution seems to have been an important part of being a monarch in the middle-ages – being able to have someone executed. We don't have their heads cut off or burned at the stake though, we have our own way of executing them. We throw them into a pit, where this fantasy type of beast lives.

Normally what happens is your king would send someone into the pit, then someone would come and arrest them and force them to jump in. So we do have a lot of the dark things, but we take sort of a more humorous approach to it – more like Monty Python, it was dark, but it was funny.

AG: Now in terms of the actual engine technology, has there been any improvements in that regard since The Sims 3, or is it running on the same tech?

Rachel: We started with the technology that we have in The Sims studio, but we've made a lot of changes to make it fit our game. Just like we've changed the feature-set to fit medieval, we've changed the tech to suit what we wanted to do. We've had a great deal of emphasis on a new art direction; you can see the way the lighting is done differently. We wanted buildings that look hand-made and to have very tall faces where the lighting passed evenly among the multiple stories.

So we've advanced and built on the tech to give the kind of look, lighting, shadows, colour and building options that we wanted to do in this game.




AG: Now you've given me the demonstration of how the game functions as a community, where you can control and command all the various different citizens you add, but are you able to just play as one single character and will the rest of the town just operate autonomously around you, or do you have to have that macro-management of the whole community?

Rachel: No, you're never managing the entire community at a time. The game flow goes like this: When you start the game, you only have one character, your king or your queen and that's the only character you're controlling so you can only pick quests that feature that character. During that quest you're controlling that character, their hunger, their energy, their job responsibilities and advancing the quest. Once you complete the quest, you earn resources. Resources let you bring in a new building and a new hero which unlocks a new quest that might feature a new hero. Let's say you brought in the wizard as your second hero, so now you might take a quest that features the wizard or maybe a quest that features both the wizard and the monarch.

If you're just doing the wizard, now you're playing as the wizard and the monarch you were previously controlling is working autonomously. As the game goes along, you'll end up running into characters who you have created and controlled on previous quests and now they're running themselves. So you're only managing the lives of the particular heroes that you're controlling on that quest.

AG: Ok gotcha. Do the quests continue coming if you just wanted to just keep playing as the wizard? Can you keep getting quests to just play with him and let the rest of the game go on autonomously? Or do you have to keep switching characters to be able to get new quests?

Rachel: You don't have to keep switching characters. There's definitely different play styles and some people would say "I'm really attached to this character", so I might bring in the other characters to have them in the world, but I want to keep building on this wizard – I've got a whole relationship built up and there's funny things he's doing so I'm going to stick with him. So then you would keep looking for quests that feature him.

We only show you ten quest options at a time, so it is possible that you might have a moment where there are no quests available for your wizard right at that second and you might have to go play another character. But usually you could stick with the same character if you wanted to.




AG: Ok, we're out of time, but thanks so much for your time today, that's terrific.

Rachel: Thank you.