BlackGarden had the opportunity to interview SimGuruGraham behind closed doors at this year’s Gamescom. Have a read at the new info!
Heather: So, tell me a bit about yourself and your role in The Sims Team!
Graham: I’m Graham Nardone, I’m one of the producers on The Sims 3, and we’re working on The Sims 3 Pets right now.
H: You’re very active in the community, you’re in the forums a lot, and I know the community really appreciates that you take the time to talk to them.
G: It’s great being able to go out there and communicate with our fans, that’s something I’ve been getting more involved in recently, and I do really enjoy the opportunity to go and talk directly to them, to be able to hear from players and get that kind of feedback. There’s an interesting back and forth and a dialogue between everyone. We do listen to people and we do really want to incorporate their feedback so we really do take all that into consideration.
H: And you’re on Twitter a lot as well…
G: Yeah, I started the Twitter thing probably about four months ago. Lots of people do talk to me on Twitter, I love answering questions on there, I try and respond to everybody. Again, it’s nice to interact with our fans.
H: We saw pets in The Sims 1 and 2, so what’s new in The Sims 3?
G: The really big thing is that you get to live life as a pet. You can totally control your pet, check out their needs, their wishes, their motives. The other big thing of course is that there are horses. People have been asking us to bring back pets for so long now, and when they talk about pets, horses are one of the top requested features. So we’re so thrilled to have these now and it’s so great to watch Sims interact with the horses.
H: And they’re a method of transportation as well now?
G: Absolutely, you can totally ride the horses around town!
H: Anyone who follows you on Twitter will know you have two adorable little kittens, has any of their behaviour inspired the behaviour of cats in the game?
G: Yeah absolutely, I’ve been pointing out this one interaction where the Sims pull out a laser pointer and point it at the kitten or whatever, and it’s so funny watching it in game and I’m so glad we got it in there, because my cats absolutely freak out over laser pointers.
That’s the cool thing about this expansion – we’ve been working with animals, we’ve done a lot of research on how they behave, and of course everybody has their own experiences with animals – growing up with a pet, having their beloved childhood pet or whatever, and we wanted to bring those experiences into the game and make it a personal thing for players, we wanted players to have that kind of emotional connection with their animals.
H: Speaking of having a pet as a child, will children in the game maybe have more wishes about having pets than adults?
G: It’s not really a wish that’s driven in that manner. There certainly will be desires to bring pets into the house, but it’s really about the Sims and what their traits are. So if you have a Sim who’s a dog person, and they don’t have a dog, they’re going to want to bring a dog into the house.
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