The Sims 2 Open For Business Preview

Open For Business, when it was announced, was pretty easy to take in: a tycoon-style graft onto the existing Sims base. But as with the other expansions there's a strong focus on new interactions, giving players more tools to diversify environments and give their sims more life and, in this instance, ways to create. "People loved the easel," says Letourneau; "the idea of their sims painting something and hanging it on the wall."

That's how it began, as an idea of giving sims more creative outlets, and then it grew into something else. "That's really how this happens - they morph. It's some kernel of an idea that players really seem to like, and it grows." What it grew into was a game about running a range of businesses, like an X360 knock-off shop, apparently. On a basic level there are three possible shop types - pay-per-item, pay-per-service, and pay-per-time - and from these you get florists, delis, art shops, spas, salons, toy shops, you name it, where the sims spend their time minding stock, buying from wholesale and building up their own inventory using the toy and robot-making stations, managing staff and so on.

That would look terrible on you.

But it's about having your sims experience these things, and you through them, rather than simply doing it all yourself. "It's not purely a god game in that respect," says Letourneau. To that end, there's real care and attention in the details. The devs loved showing me things like sims misbehaving. Hiring and firing is a key thing, obviously - you need to bring in the right people based on their skills, pay them accordingly and get your other sims to motivate them, and you also have to crack down on miscreants. One shop-hand, Andy, would leap into sales situations and try sales techniques he was awful at, putting customers off completely, and then reject what the other staff were saying. The final straw was when he jumped into a 'dazzle' - one of the top-ranking staffers had her hand on a customer's shoulder, painting a picture of joy in the air, when Andy waltzed in and started doing a ventriloquist routine with a teddy. Bosh. Fired. We hired some female customer to replace him, and she did better immediately.

It's things like this that makes The Sims so ideal for continuation, says Letourneau. "You start telling those stories in your head, so it's very easy for us to think of potential places to have The Sims go, and it's not about science fiction; it's not about 'The Sims Go To The Moon'; it's stuff that people can imagine for themselves.

"This is a game that's as much played in a player's head as it is on the screen," he says. "You're going to embellish and you're going to start telling stories. You're going to have projected outcomes based on your own personal experiences and that's where a lot of the humour comes from - there are these ironic twists that you just don't anticipate, like Robot Wars in the backyard [at one point in our demo, a robot went haywire and we employed another one to race around tidying up after it as it went doolally splashing water everywhere]. I didn't sit and think it'd be funny to do, but all of a sudden the humour in that comes out."

If you wait until Friday, the flowers they sell at Pimlico station are dead cheap. A girl told me.

Maxis also wants what you do in business to benefit your sims at home. The most obvious benefit is financial, of course, but a successful business also ranks you up in five key areas - Connections, Perceptions, Cash, Wholesale and Motivation - each of which affects things in and out of the store. Connections, for example, mean that you can overcome the initial stumbling steps of home relationships with other sims through mutual recognition.

And of course you can dress up in a knight's helmet. Adding items to expansions is enough to tempt players into buying them anyway, according to Maxis. This one has 125 new objects and items. "There's that sort of collector mentality that goes along with it; taking away all of the gameplay and just thinking of it as a creativity tool," says Letourneau. "Every expansion pack, taking away the gameplay, has another value proposition which is that I'm going to get a bunch more stuff. It's kind of like saying to an artist, hey, here's 60 colours or 125 colours that you don't have already that you can add to your palette, and so it opens up that creativity that much more - that's what I mean by that collectible attribute." There's almost an ouroboros thing at work here - the pack started as crafts, became about selling them, and now your actions feed back into being able to afford the tools to create more things.

The range of new items is partly fun and partly functional - conical roofing, awnings and split-level flooring were things that fans wanted, as were elevators, and robots that tidy up after you just make sense. Water-wheels, jack-in-the-boxes, and robots going berserk are just there to entertain. It's fun watching how the sims react to their new toys and activities - particularly when you doll up some ordinary bloke in braids and face paint at the salon and he tips you extra.

Another Bruce Campbell cameo?

At work, Maxis "certainly wanted it to feel like there was a business strategy and a win state," and so there are definitely ways to work up the business ladder and play it like a regular game. Talent badges, for instance, are earned through repetition of tasks. Earn a gold badge in making teddies, for example, and they'll cost less to do, but doing robots without badges will cost loads and take longer. These also affect things like your ability to do motivational speeches. A sim giving a decent pep talk to a colleague can up that sim to bronze level across the board for a limited time. You also get to fiddle with prices on a slider bar - gradually ramping up as your sims become better at selling stuff to punters. You can set automatic restocking from catalogue or your own inventory of manufactured goods, and there's customer loyalty to work out too, which comes about through various factors. As you apply sales techniques, you can watch the customer-sim's 'buy bar' go up and down.

Big success is also possible. You can even elevate staff to management positions after a while so you can go off and set up other stores. Equally, your business can eventually plunge into the red and fail if you clutter the aisles, piss off your clientele or, I dunno, sell pictures of Xbox 360s instead of real ones. But then maybe that'd work; it's the sort of quirky thing you wouldn't put past the Maxis guys. And on the strength of what's in Open For Business, you can't really see their line of work drying up soon either.

As to how many more of these expansions we can expect, that, appropriately enough, depends on the business. "I think that as long as there's interest in expansion packs, and that people are still willing to buy them, that with each one we earn the right to do the next," says Letourneau. Cynical? Or not? "I think for us, it's just fun to continue to add to this world."

The Sims 2 Open For Business is due out later this year. Read on for more of our discussion with Tim Letourneau about The Sims in general.

Eurogamer: One of the things people often say about The Sims is that it's its own genre. Is that something you agree with?

Tim Letourneau: I think that the really unique thing about The Sims is that it's many, many games rolled into one. You could just do the people simulator part of it and a lot of people do, you could just do the building part of it and a lot of people do. We have players that never turn on the simulator; this is a creativity product to them, and they just build and create and share what they create with others.

Eurogamer: You made your recent Holiday Pack available through digital distribution. Do you see digital distribution playing a larger part in The Sims in future?

Tim Letourneau: I think it will play a larger part in the industry as a whole, I think we're moving towards that. Broadband's more available, and we already know that our community is online and they're downloading. The community still only represents a portion of our players and The Sims is such a mainstream product that I think we're always going to have a retail presence, but I think you'll see us doing more to make it available online. Not for this one, but possibly for future expansions. Part of it is EA is still getting its stuff together and the architecture in place to really support it properly, but we're definitely moving in that direction.

Eurogamer: The Sims 2 had quite a bit of inherited functionality from The Sims...

Tim Letourneau: Yeah, there were certain things we'd introduced in expansions that we didn't feel we could remove - the big one was the ability to leave the house - that had become cornerstones of the gameplay.

Eurogamer: Yeah, what I was getting at was that you inherited things like that, and I'm wondering if there's anything in the first three Sims 2 expansions that you feel you would want to take forward into another main Sims game?

Tim Letourneau: There are certain things where we've been surprised how popular they are. Specifically from University, the influence system - getting other sims to do things for them. Cars would be a hard thing not to include in a future version if we ever redid The Sims, because once we finally did them in Nightlife and you had a car and your household I couldn't imagine not having one. Certainly looking at Open For Business, more objects that allow the player to be creative. I think you have to take each version and each idea on its own merits and how it fits with the whole of what you're trying to achieve.

I'm really looking for a robot /army/, to be honest.

Eurogamer: Do you ever worry that it's going to get over-complicated?

Tim Letourneau: It's already pretty complicated. It's probably one of the hardest things about continuing to make The Sims expansions packs - that continual questioning of ourselves about whether it's too complex or too hard.

Eurogamer: Presumably you're ruining the learning curve for players every single time?

Tim Letourneau: It's the great challenge and I think our industry faces this challenge across the board any time there's a sequel. The reality is that if you take something like Sims 1, which was this product's purest presentation, it was tuned in such a way that everybody had to be able to figure it out. Even with Sims 2, as game-makers and players we're never going to have that same objectivity again, because everybody's going to come to it with a certain amount of knowledge. There's also this incredible expectation - I mean, you know this as a member of the press - to top what you did before and to add more of what made it successful.

Eurogamer: Indeed, sequel in its literal sense means a continuation, and that's not what they want is it? Maybe it's more like having to do Lucas-style special editions, where you feel you're adding content and making it better but in getting Greedo to shoot first you're offending thousands of people.

Tim Letourneau: Maybe we could have just done Sims 1 with wants and fears and people would have been able to figure that out, but there is that thing. "Well, this is just like the first on, but..." But then if you go and cut features that can be damaging too. I think every game developer faces that great challenge of trying to do more but not to go so far astray that new people can't pick it up. It's the hardest thing. Making Sims 2 was an incredible challenge.

It's a deal! What is? I don't know.

Eurogamer: There's a lot of discussion on the Internet about how The Sims is a cynical operation and quite calculating in its approach. How do you feel about that?

Tim Letourneau: It's really easy to think that it's just this money-making system that Electronic Arts and Maxis have come up with. It's a business, sure it's a business, but like I said, the fact that half of this pack is about making a bunch of toys that kids can play with... if we're just trying to sell, are we really going to invest time making sure that the in-game toddlers have more things to do? We do that because we know that it makes the game more fulfilling for the player, because for them this is about the human experience for these little people. And there are people out there creating movies, so we think about them as well and what we can add for them, and so it is a very wholesome game development environment.

If you talk to any of the developers, they absolutely love making the game for these consumers, and a lot of the things that get added weren't even designed a lot of the time. Conical roofs are a perfect example of something we kept being told were too hard to do, and one day the engineer who did the roofs just came over and said, look what I figured out how to do. He made these because he knew people wanted them desperately. That's pretty much how it works.