• What does a future Utopia look like in The Sims 3 in your mind ? How would you imagine the environment, buildings, and other visual parts of the world to look?

For the style of the buildings: tallness, whiteness, glass, a little iron (but in a classy and clean way), reflecting daylight inside and outside, plants on walls, floors and roofs, artificial fountains and waterfalls, discreet technology everywhere. Everything is eco-friendly. Recycling is automatic. And flying cars, the self-driving or UFO kind. Plus, easy ways to travel outside of the planet. Sims could live in the underground as well (with false windows projecting synthetic light). The houses should be full of hidden electronics that automatically switches stuff on (oven, music…), but there is a lot of space, especially for nature. One last thing : this Utopia has not to be on Earth, or any planet at all, for that matter. Surrounded by space, this city could very well take place in a Huge space vessel (town-size). Maybe the one which landed later on Lunar Lakes, or an ever bigger one.

• If your Sim is hanging out in the future, where would they spend most of their time ?

On other colonized planets, in zero-gravitation swimming pools, and holographic arcade games, or funny and non-dangerous laser-games.

• If there were robots in the future and they could be part of your household, what would you like them to do?

They would first respects Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics (and never hurt any human). Then, we could use them as gardeners, baby-sitters, cooks, drivers, domestics, etc. but we could as well woo-hoo with them. These robots wouldn’t be the Simbots we already know from TS3 ambitions. They would be humanoids, with little physical clues aiming to their real nature. They would have super-brains and learn everything by just downloading it, except for art skills, since it is too human for them. They can hack objects and always defend human Sims.

• Name a few of the new careers you’d most enjoy for your Sims in a future setting.

Jobs that have to do with robot creation and maintenance, planet colonization, and nanotechnology programming.

• In the future setting, what activities would you like your Sims to partake in?

Playing holographic video-games, going to fights of robots vs. robots, racing in the air, robot programming, swimming in gravitation-less pools, exploring foreign planets, telekinesis teaching (to animate objects without physically touching them)…

• Name a few objects you’d love to see in a Sims’ future.

Humanoid robots (if we consider them as “objects”), holograms, flying UFOs, teleportation cabins, one-day-clone-generators (to make them go to work for us), object-duplicator (with possible self-destructing side effects), etc. But with all those robots around them, Sims would be threatened by massive lazyness…

• Are there any existing objects that you’d envision transforming in the future and if so, which ones ?

Flying cars of course, but TVs and Computers as well, all of these screens should go 3D and holographic. Even if it’s not really a transformation, I would really love the arrival of a new home pet, an alien one. Something really important that should evolve is doors. They should slip into the wall or slip above. Chairs and tables without “feet” should float in the air. Zero-gravity beds that satisfy very fast the sleep and comfort need. And as futuristic elevators, a zero-gravity column to float up or down to the next level.

• How would you expect your Sim’s lives to be affected by traveling back and forth to the future?

Even if my point of view is not the most popular, I’m not a huge fan of the butterfly effect. I don’t think a single action of a single individual would completely change the face of the world in the future. So instead of that, I only think present Sims would profit from the anachronic use of the advanced technology (and humanoid robots) they bring home. An option to help them win the lottery once or twice (through the gambling skill, for example) would be welcome as well. Besides, I don’t think Sims should know who are their descendents if they are single, because the dramatic threat of them dying before they should would hang above their grand-children (English is not my mother language, sorry if my sentences are strange).

I do wish they hadn’t scrapped the past idea for this, since having future only feels a bit empty, in my opinion. It would be brilliant if we were surprised and given both, but I doubt that, sadly.

Either way, I just hope EA will give this idea some much-needed beefing up and try to add in stuff that will reach a variety of players (and age groups — not just talking about customers for this either, since I know I’d love a whole family to be in on the future instead of just my adult sims) and give them what it needs.

It would also be really nice if you could connect this to the inventing skill from Ambitions, if the future is reached by time machines. A lot of the time, I wish EA would pay more attention to linking new EPs to past ones; I’m always pleased to see when they do, especially when I can dust off one of my old save files and be able to jump into the new EP just as easily as if I start a new one.

And then finally, I’m with those who believe that in the long run, it can always be modded to some degree to compensate for lack-lustre parts of the game. And the glitches. Oh, those glitches.

Oh, and sorry for my bad english, grammar and long post xD