All you need to know about The Sims 4 and Asia: an interview with producer Graham Nardone

Are you hyped for The Sims 4? The life sim is the fourth installment in the popular Sims series, and promises a boatload of improvements, as well as some next-gen Sim behaviour and features. We sat down with associate producer Graham Nardone from EA Games to learn more about the game, and how Asia is going to be able to enjoy it.

In the beginning

The Sims 4 started production four years ago. With February 2015 looming as the 15th anniversary of The Sims games, the pressure was on to create something amazing. Nardone realized that though the development teams over the past 15 years had created an absolute wealth of content, the one constant in the game was the Sims themselves.

And so the development team for The Sims 4 looked at the Sims who populate these virtual worlds. They gave them their own personalities, gave them emotions and a sense of depth, and even gave them different ways with which to interact with other Sims. More body language and physical nuances have been added to this hugely popular life sim, giving the Sims new ways of moving and positioning themselves while chatting in groups.

“It was really important to rejuvenate everything about them,” Nardone said.

(See: 5 things that make a life sim game sink or swim)

Genesis 101

The Sims 4 is a much smaller game compared to the massive, resource-hog that was The Sims 3 if you think about the size of its world. A lot of the open-world experience The Sims 3 gave players has been pared away in this next iteration of the game.

Yet Nardone shares that The Sims 4 has more “pure content” than in any other Sims-based game.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the community about features in and out of the game, and I think that’s a very binary way of looking at it.

The base game for The Sims 4 is no exception to what Nardone and team have done for the franchise. It adds new features, and brings back many beloved ones from past games. Nardone says that some features didn’t make the cut simply because the team wanted to focus its efforts on things that were more important for the foundation of the new game, and stressed that feedback from fans helped greatly in deciding what should go in, and what shouldn’t.