Les Sims 4 : Grandir ensemble, quid des nourrissons, du système de préférence et des étapes de vie ? Voici notre interview !

• To each of you, what is your link with this expansion pack? What kinds of tasks have you performed during its development? What are your responsibilities?

SD : My name is Scott Dai. I am the Lead Designer of The Sims 4 Growing Together, which means that I sort of oversaw a lot of the design decisions in terms of how we got the theme of the pack together into its feature set and then translated those features into player-facing decisions on what features our players would have and how they would experience them through the expansion pack. Leading a team of designers that also made individual kinds of decisions in terms of specific parts of those experiences like how our milestones might work, how many there would be and the design of our new world San Sequoia, and some of our social compatibility features and things.

GN : I am Graham Nardone. I am the Lead Producer on infants, and what that essentially means is overseeing the entire infants experience. So whether it is the free update that is coming to all of our players or all of the infants content in the expansion and depth of the additional gameplay that you will find with infants in Growing Together. I kind of oversee that, so that means working closely with our overdesign partners of course and other disciplines throughout the team but overseeing the efforts of the production group across those two “splits” of the project as well.

• During the press event, you offered a sneak peek of what milestones look like. Could you please explain how they will impact the gameplay? Are they some sort of memories like in the previous opuses?

GN: I am pretty excited about infant milestones because what we are trying to show in the demo the other day was really how different it makes the infant experience and how it makes it a bit unlike anything you have seen with any other ages in The Sims before. So if you just play with base game and you get the free infants update, you are going to get an infant whose abilities kind of match approximately an 8 month-old infant. But with the additional Growing Together, it is interesting because suddenly your infant starts out with the abilities of about a 2 month-old and over the span of that age, they actually gain additional abilities as they go until they have approximately a 12 month-old. And then they age up into a toddler. And the way that they do that is the milestones. So milestones for infants actually have very distinct tracks. There is gross motor, social, fine motor milestones, and within each of those, it is very equivalent to help parents kind of chart the growth of their infants in real life. They see these microdetails that suddenly their infant is doing for the first time and then rapidly that becomes new behavior that is repeated and built upon. So it is really exciting that come to life within the infant experience but they also have categories of firsts like the very first time they have a bubble bath, the very first time Grandma comes over for a visit, the very first time they have gone on a trip to the park and a lot of that continues on into our other ages. Scott will speak about those.

SD : After our Sims kind of grow up from infancy, we wanted milestones to have a kind of lasting in right throughout their entire lifetimes and to really give a sense of the full lives that our Sims can lead. So at that point, instead of being necessarily about the growth that they are experiencing in their kind of early years, milestones become a reflection of sort of their choices and experiences that they are having. And I think that the kind of really exciting things that does is, one, it allows the player to be able, potentially at the end of a Sim’s lifetime, to look back on all of the milestones that that Sim has acquired and kind of chart out at timeline of that Sim’s life in a way that I know our players really get attached to our Sims and gives them a way to sort of relive that Sim’s life through their milestones, which I think is really cool. But the other thing that it does is it lets us explore the different events that can happen to a Sim in their lifetime and gets at some of the adult drama that we were able to introduce with Growing Together. So having milestones that can be triggered by some of the additional features that we have added, like having a midlife crisis, or having to go through lay-offs at work, discovering a kind of new personality trait about yourself. We also have some milestones that, like in real life, give you an object to be able to decorate your house with and kind of look back on that memory later, things that a marriage certificate from the milestone “Getting married” or a child’s drawing from the first day of school. So being able to not only have those milestones be sort of this UI element but enter into really the Sims’ lives and a lot of their environment as well.

• We saw that likes and dislikes system has been enhanced with personality traits, which looks very exciting and will definitely add some depth to the gameplay and relationships between Sims. How about physical characteristics, like brown hair, blue eyes, etc.? Did you choose not to include them?

SD : Yeah, for Growing Together, we decided to kind of focus our social compatibility in a, I would say, more platonic way. And we thought that some of those characteristics leaned a little bit more toward, perhaps, our sense of attraction or our romance, so we didn’t do that for Growing Together.

• It seems that there are a lot of new features associated with the brand-new introduction of infants in the game. You have shown they can discover new quirks about them and new types of food that they like or dislike. Could you please tell us a bit more about those infants features? Also, as a young mother myself, I was wondering if adult Sims will be able to breastfeed them like the newborns.

GN : Yeah definitely, there is a couple of things to unpack there. […] When it comes to breastfeeding or bottle-feeding your infant, yes, you can certainly do both of those options very similar to what players were able to do previously with newborns. Of course, the addition this time around is that you can determine a feeding preference for your infant so that the player doesn’t have to go through and select that specifically every single time, or if they are allowing their Sims to behave autonomously, the adults choose the right option for their infant as well. […] I think one thing a lot of parents may recognize but, I don’t know I am not a parent myself may not know going into this, is that trying out different foods in the high chair isn’t necessarily about satisfying the infant’s hunger needs. It’s more about bonding time with your infant and letting them grow and explore and try new experiences and find out those real beginnings of what do I like, what do I dislike, what do I love. And it’s part of a bigger thing that is happening in the background where your caregivers are forming an attachment with their infants. And as they grow and build that attachment and bond together, it actually carries over into the next stages throughout the infant’s life.

So when they’d age up to a toddler, there is a few different reward traits that they could end up earning. And those core beginnings, those little seeds that you’re planting, that’s how to form a relationship with your infant. That controls, or at least it factors in how well they form a relationship, they maintain a relationship for the rest of their life, so that’s pretty fun as well. Now, when you talk about the behavioral quirks, so just to be really clear about those, there’s six personality traits that are coming with the free infant update for all players, but then for anybody who also gets The Sims 4 Growing Together, we’re layering a lot of additional kind of personality quirks. So for infants, there’s eighteen unique quirks. There’s actually an additional eighteen unique quirks that toddlers have, and something that we didn’t even mentioned in the demo the other day, is that our newborns also have four different personality types and, you know, previously with that age in game, they were all the exact same as each other. But now, you’ll start to get a sense of their personality and who they are going to grow into from the very early beginning stages and add a little more flavor to your gameplay. So, every single infant, toddler, they’ll each get three of those quirks. They’re kind of discoverable by the player as they engage and interact with their infant or toddler, and it just gives each one a little bit of additional personality that is fun to reveal.