The Sims

Following on from my earlier post about EA Land - The Sims Online, the service is to close on August 1st, 2008. I assumed there were problems, as the service was getting progressively worse, but this will be a major disappointment to anyone who’s invested some time with it.

The official reason appears to be “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.”.

See Techcrunch for further details.

Aspyr have announced that Sims Castaway - the standalone Sims "episode" - has been released for the Mac:

This time your Sims have washed up on a tropical island!

Help them make a new life in an unexplored paradise in this easy-to-play, laptop-friendly version of The Sims. The Sims Castaway Stories features two great ways to play. In the new and engaging directed Story mode, fulfill goals as you explore the island, build a shelter, learn to find food, and make your Sims’ lives as fun and comfortable as possible. You even unlock rewards along the way as you achieve set goals.

In open-ended Free play mode, you create your Sims and determine how they’ll evolve on their new island home. In an environment where anything-or anyone-can wash up on the beach, you decide how their stories unfold.

worthplaying.com has an interesting post with some further details relating to the upcoming Sims 3:

My name is Ben and I’m an Executive Producer on The Sims 3. The last few years have been exciting for me personally. Since joining The Sims Label at EA, I’ve had the opportunity to work on dream projects such as The Sims 2 Pets, and The Sims 2 Castaway. However, things are about to get very exciting and I’m so happy to be sharing this news with you.

Ben goes on to say

The first thing you’ll notice about The Sims 3 is that the Sims now live in a completely seamless, living neighborhood. This means that they can walk next door, walk down the street, drive to the center of town, stroll through the park, and explore everything without ever encountering a load screen. Wherever you go in your town, you will see other Sims going about their daily lives. You’ll discover new things about the community that your Sims live in, and you will have the chance to participate whenever and wherever you like. As a player, this is an incredible innovation for me because now I can see what my neighbors are up to all of the time and go interact with them. Or if I am feeling devious I can peek through the window and spy on their every move. I can even shoot across town to see what the other families in my town are doing, any time of day or night. It’s an entirely new way to play with your Sims!

This sounds like a significant and welcome addition. I always felt pretty isolated (game wise) being confined the way I was whilst playing.

You can read the full post here.

Electronic Arts has rebranded Sims Online - it’s now known as EA-Land - and, perhaps more importantly, have removed the pricing model, making it completely free to use.

This must now be seen as a direct competitor to Second Life.

I would like to introduce you to EA-Land, a world that is free-to-play, and based on a re-engineered The Sims Online architecture. Yes, free.

The Sims Online (TSO) was made of 12 different cities (AlphaVille, Blazing Falls, etc..) and we are moving all of those cities inside EA-Land (this is called ‘the merge’ by the users!). We have a huge new map: it is 100 times bigger than the previous size of any city. We had to add a whole new zoom level to let users see it. The internet is faster now than when TSO was launched, so we have been able to let each house have more simultaneous visitors. A lot of new users are constantly joining us and we expect more. If you played TSO before, I think that you ought to own your lot in this new land, and I want you to have the ability to grab the best location before we open the gates. As an EA-Land subscriber, you will be able to have several Sims in the same “city” unlike in TSO where you were limited to one Sim per city.

This really is a major announcement. With new content, a new economy system, the introduction of web services and social networking, I can see the former Sims Online now taking off and hitting the big time.

ShackNews is reporting on an announcement from Electronic Arts relating to a number of new Sims titles on the way, including:

• SimCity Creator
• MySims Kingdom
• MySims Party
• SimAnimals
• Sims Next-Gen

Most of the titles are for consoles (Wii, DS etc), but it looks like a new PC version will be available in about a years time.

You can read the full story over on ShackNews.