The announcement of Rod Humble’s promotion to Boss Of EA’s Sims division pushed me to take a look at the Sims 3 site. The first video emphasizes the open world nature of the game before moving on to shots of employees being turned into motion captured Sims, a discussion of the personality matrix and underlining how much customization you will have.

One of the things about the open world worries me. Your Sim’s relationships and opportunities will, supposedly, be connected to the actions of other Sims, all of whom will be living their lives without your interference. So, it will be a living breathing neighborhood. If this means that my teenage sweetheart will age with me and live a college life without me dictating her every move, great.

But one of the rules of strategy/simulation games is that people need to know why something is happening. If, all of a sudden, I find out that a friend hates me, I’d like to know what is going on. Is another Sim gossiping about me? Did I steal his girlfriend? To what extent is this still a game about playing a single Sim or Sim Family’s life cycle and to what extent is it a larger scale dollhouse?

I’m very excited about Sims 3. I have concerns about the hardware requirements. This is a mass audience game that will have a lot of stuff going on.

It will be released next February, when I will be already neck deep in Empire: Total War.