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something important about the world of
the Sims is the Sims cannot directly
hurt each other so it really has left
any sort of injurious interaction of the
player choosing to do something to the
sim and in most cases you cannot
directly you know smite a sim you have
to set up a situation in which they end
up having to meet the Grim Reaper in one
way or another where the reason it
existed in the first place is it really
was or it really is a game about all
these different aspects of life and
dying is part of life it is part of that
cycle in the original Sims because they
didn't age and time didn't pass death
was more accidental and it actually
provided a unpredictable push back to
your otherwise normal routine the I'm
making breakfast and now I'm on fire
who's sort of an unpredictable problem
to solve right as we introduced aging in
The Sims 2 it came a time pressure for
you to try and accomplish the objectives
or the aspirations that your Sims had
had for themselves and you'd say okay
your your sim is becoming an elder now
you really need to work to try and
achieve what they want to achieve before
their time has come and as we talked
about with money cheats there are cheats
to set length age lengths to longer or
turn off death there's features that let
you you know play a game of death to win
back your life there's lots of ways to
play with it and honestly it unlocks a
new type of gameplay where your sim
could be a ghost or your sim could have
friendship with the Grim Reaper or play
chess with him and so we tried to turn
it into like we took this dark notion of
the fact that people died and tried to
turn it into this kind of gamy mechanic
with a little more whimsy to it and why
are there so many ways to die it's just
funny it's just like they're not even
that normal half the time we have I mean
we let your sim die of old age and Sims
2 and your Sims can starve but it's
really hard to do honestly so most of
the other deaths are accidents
and it's being hit by a meteor or being
electrocuted when you're trying to pick
something or something that surprises
you and that really has more to do with
me kind of interrupting the flow of your
game and you're trying to do this and
then all of a sudden this crazy thing
happens and that what do you do
death cycle is pretty classic we made it
harder in Sims 3 when we let them to
climb out of the pool by themselves so
you just had to get a little more clever
and how you trap them you're like wow
we've introduced this very morbid notion
to a whole generation where did the Grim
Reaper come from originally well the way
things have normally appeared in The
Sims is we're trying to take what some
might call mundane concepts of going to
work having a job you know playing out
these boring parts of life and add
something a little bit whimsical or
caricature like on top of them so rather
than just having a symphony misc and
just die off in a dramatic way
introducing a character gives you
something to play off of you know if
you're playing a household with two sims
and one of them got electrocuted and the
Grim Reaper shows up that lets the other
sim have someone to interact with to say
hey hey actually I'm gonna bargain for
their life so it's a way to take this
kind of abstract idea and print it into
a character that you can then interact
with it can do funny things it really
was to try and make something that was
otherwise pretty devastating especially
with the character you spent a lot of
time with but now he's just gone try and
give it a little bit of light-hearted
humor to make it feel gamey rather than
like punishing
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