The Sims Online

The Sims Online was a 2002 massively multiplayer online game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows. The game was a subscription-based online multiplayer version of the 2000 Maxis game The Sims, in which players could interact with others on virtual user-made lots, buy and customise properties, and make in-game money by taking on jobs. The Sims Online was the project of Maxis founder and Sims creator Will Wright, who sought to create an open-ended online game based on social interaction, with ambitions for the game to be a platform for emergent gameplay and the creation of virtual societies and politics. In line with these ambitions and the prior commercial success of The Sims, The Sims Online received considerable pre-release coverage, with expectations that it would be successful and break new ground for online multiplayer games.
Released following a two-month public beta, The Sims Online was met with mixed reviews from critics. Reviewers generally praised the game's social features, but found the game to lack the depth and appeal of The Sims, with many describing it as similar to a chat room. The overemphasis of jobs and money-making in the game was particularly critiqued due to the limited, repetitive and time-consuming nature of these activities in overall gameplay. The game similarly fared poorly commercially, underperforming press, industry and publisher expectations for the success of the game. The game also courted controversy, with its open-ended approach to social interaction leading to organised player harassment and simulated cybersex. The player count of The Sims Online peaked at slightly over 100,000 players in 2003, a modest number compared to other popular multiplayer games of the time. In March 2007, EA announced that the product would be re-branded as EA-Land, introducing several major enhancements to the game. Within several weeks, EA announced the game would shut down, and closed the servers on August 1, 2008. The Sims Online has retrospectively been viewed as a failed experiment, with its failure attributed to its limited features, repetitive gameplay and subscription fee. A free fan-made reimplementation of The Sims Online, titled FreeSO, was available from 2017 to 2024.

Gameplay

Similar to The Sims, The Sims Online is an open-ended game that allows players to create and control virtual people, named Sims, with other player and non-player characters, in a virtual neighborhood where they can make money to buy objects and build homes and venues to live in and to interact with other Sims.

Sim and neighborhood setup

Players setup the game by selecting a city and creating a sim. Cities represent persistent servers with different players; each player may have one sim per city with a total of three sims. Creating a sim is similar to The Sims, with control over name, gender, and appearance. Once the sim is created, a player enters the city view of the selected city, divided into neighborhoods which feature a grid of properties. Players can use a search, browser and map filters to locate existing properties, including by attributes including their popularity and category. As in The Sims, players are required to manage their sim's needs whilst on a lot by keeping their eight individual motive levels high, which include hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social, and room. The Sims Online features a similar skill progression system to The Sims, with some modifications. Skills improve players' ability to generate an income using skill objects. Skill progression is accelerated by the number of people progressing the same skill at the same time in a lot. Skills also degrade over time based on the total number of skill points earned.

Social interaction

The Sims Online integrates social features that allow players to interact with others. Players can search, bookmark, and locate other players in their neighborhood by name in the city view. This view also provides a top 100 list of the most successful sims and properties in the neighborhood by various categories. The relationships between players are visually depicted in a friendship web, which depicts the player's network of friends, enemies and acquaintances. These statuses are manually set by players.
Relationships are indirectly measured by a relationship score that increases and decreases along with the daily and lifetime interactions a player has with another. Players have also several modes of social interaction inside and outside of properties. Messages can be sent through the user interface to specific players, which turns into a real-time chat if both players are online. If both players are on the same property, they can interact using an open text chat creating speech bubbles to nearby players. Players can also select animated gestures and interactions, with more earned by progressing skills above a certain level or having a higher relationship score. Some gestures and interactions are mutual and require both players to accept before proceeding. Players can manage unwanted behaviour by ignoring the player, removing their text in chat, or banning them from the lot if owned by the player.

Making money and managing property

Simoleans are the main commodity in The Sims Online, used to purchase lots and objects and design buildings. There are several other sources of income for players. Passive sources of income include a daily 'visitor bonus' based on the number of minutes that visitors spend in the lot, and an 'achievement bonus' for being on the game's top ranking lists. Players with properties also can set several items that allow others to pay them an income, including tip jars, fees for vending machines and pay-to-enter doors. The primary source of income for players is using job objects, some job objects produce items of value accumulated at a rate based on the player's skill level and number of other players simultaneously producing items which can be traded or sold for a profit. These objects are based upon a single skill requirement. Other job objects require multiple players to participate, and feature minigames with a payout based on the efficiency of the players, including games to navigate mazes, guess the correct letters in a code, and create a pizza with the largest variation in ingredients. These objects often have multiple skill requirements at different levels, requiring players to find others with compatible skills.
Players purchase and manage properties in a different manner to The Sims. Players select a vacant lot located in a neighborhood, with property values affected by the location and size. Players that own a property can invite roommates to inhabit them. Roommates have the ability to add or remove their own objects and manage visitors, but can't manage the inhabitants or the size of the property. The owner's user interface provides additional pages that allow them to manage inhabitants, such as lists of admitted and banned users. Property pages in the game's city view provide key information of a property, including its residents and property type.

Development and release

The Sims Online was conceived by Maxis lead designer and creator of The Sims, Will Wright, who envisioned future games would be online as the "norm rather than the exception", and proposed the concept of an online Sims game to Maxis in 2000. Delivering a keynote speech at the 2001 Game Developers Conference, Wright revealed initial concepts and screenshots for The Sims Online, outlining an aim for the game to imitate and represent real-life social networks as "an interactive exploration of the emerging social web" and based upon the "social topography" created and explored by players. Wright also attributed conversations with author Neal Stephenson and his 1992 novel Snow Crash as inspiration for the game, with its notion of a metaverse also emerging as a comparison point for publishers and reviewers. To reinforce the idea of an open-ended virtual environment, Wright conceived the game would be "thematically empty" upon release, with its settings and social dynamics to be created by players with minimal guidance from the game.
To realise Wright's concept, the development team aimed to create an online game with The Sims engine that encouraged interaction between players, and provide a broader business and economic simulation built from this premise. Initially pitched as a smaller matchmaking client where players could visit each other's houses, suggestions by EA and Maxis to focus the game on a subscription model led to development of a larger online game. The team, which initially had little to no experience creating massively multiplayer online games, encountered challenges and delays in creating and scaling tools and processes from a game originally intended as a single-player experience. Ultima Online developer Gordon Walton joined Maxis to provide experience on designing online games. The team also featured a larger representation of women for the time reflecting the majority female audience of The Sims franchise, commended by the ELSPA as a "success story" for the female games industry workforce. The undisclosed development budget for The Sims Online was estimated by industry insiders to be $25 million. EA announced the release of a public beta in October 2002.
Prior to release, The Sims Online received significant pre-release coverage and high expectations as a potential commercial and cultural phenomenon, following the showcase of the game at E3 in May 2002. Featured as a cover article on Newsweek, the game was hailed as a "step forward for online games" and an emerging "forum for social interaction". Lev Grossman of Time described the upcoming title as a "daring collective social experiment" to simulate a "vast virtual society" and "sandbox where we can play out our fantasies and confront our fears about what America might become". Some noted the novelty of an MMO that did not feature a fantasy theme in contrast to popular MMO games of the time, including EverQuest and Ultima Online, with speculation that its general appeal could "bring multiplayer online gaming to the masses". Others expressed caution about the game's high expectations, with Chris Morris of CNN noting the commercial risk due to the poor performance of previous EA online games Motor City Online and Majestic, and the "looming question of whether casual gamers will be willing to pay a monthly fee". The Sims Online was launched on 17 December 2002 to coincide with the Christmas period. The release was accompanied by a kitsch-themed launch party organized by EA and held in New York at the Altman Building.