Pre-E3 2004

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:The Sims 2 (Windows).

April#

04/01/04 Chat#

Held on April 1, 2004, with Lucy Bradshaw. (No joke!)

• It is confirmed that Alien Abductions and Alien Pregnancy will appear.
• Neighborhood indexes are confirmed.
• It is confirmed in the UI, that playable Sims are displayed on the left.
• It was stated that foliage can be customized with Design Mode, but no such feature appears in the final.
• Olive and Ophelia Specter are confirmed to be in the game.
• It was stated that Teen Sims can move out, but they cannot do so in the final game without a guardian.
• The Aspiration feature is confirmed to appear in the game, along with the respective unlockable items.
• It's confirmed that Children Sims cannot put on make-up, but in the final they can wear face paints.
• Party Scenarios, with the whole scoring system are confirmed, along with the Limo appearing after having a Good Wedding Party.
• When asked about weather glitches (in response to a previous chat), they were trying to find a workaround in the form of a simple implementation plan.
• When asked about Blind dates, Lucy responded with talking to Sims over the computer. The feature would come to fruition in Nightlife.
• Asking if there would be NPCs like "Aliens and elves", Lucy responded with a "maybe". Alien NPCs were confirmed for the game, but no elf NPCs ever make an appearance in later expansions.
• When asked about development status, Lucy explained that half of the team spent their time fixing bugs and overall polish, while the other spent time adding special stuff and flair in other places.
• Sims could originally have scars and tattoos, but scars don't appear in the final. Tattoos would appear on several outfits for Sims in the base game and were even planned to be in Nightlife separately. Customizable Tattoos would appear in The Sims 3: Ambitions.

Early-Mid April Build#

Welcome to The Sims 2! Part 23#

On April 10, 2004, new images were posted.¹

• A car and a driveway can be seen, where ownable vehicles were originally going to appear in the basegame, before eventually being moved to the Nightlife and Freetime expansions.

Press Kit Images#

Images from a later press kit, dated April 17-19, 2004. The second image, though dated on April 22, matches up with the first. They all notably represent Aspirations.

Videos#

To do: There's another trailer that shows off building parts (featured on gamekings.nl), but I can't find it...

Oddly enough, the first two videos released at E3 2004 appears to compile gameplay footage from the images above, implying it was originally made at that time.

• The game font now matches the final.
• The bevel colors of the HUD were inverted.

Late April Build#

Images from April 22, 2004², where the rest except for the first was uploaded later on as usual.

Late April Images#

Images dated April 22-24, 2004. The second and fourth one is uploaded later, but matches the build of the previous images.

Welcome to The Sims 2! Part 25#

Posted on April 24, 2004.³ Veronaville is also shown off for the very first time.

Late April Build#

Images uploaded on April 28 and 29, 2004 respectively that clearly aren't unsorted images from earlier builds.

• The Lot from Strangetown is oddly inhabited in this build.
• The fabled driveway and car can be seen.

Sneaky Single Sim#

To do: This was mirrored from vk.com, in semi-compressed quality. Replace with a better one.

Teased on April 29, 2004 but would later be officially uploaded on May 8, 2004.

May#

Welcome to The Sims 2! Part 26#

A musical montage of the in-game Radio Music was uploaded on May 1, 2004.⁴. The songs in order are DJ Funktronic, Dance the Dawn, Shicka Zhicka Soom, Shun Me Out, Show Me the Way and an unidentified song that may have been intended for the scrapped Bluegrass Station.

Early May Builds#

Five new images were uploaded on May 8, 2004, on IGN.⁵ Notably a huge chunk of these images would not be released until later on, despite having the old Sims 2 logo watermark at the bottom-right.

Screenshots#

Exclusive Outfit Reveal#

Six exclusive screenshots were posted to FilePlanet and GameSpot, showing off exclusive downloadable outfits, on May 11, 2004.

Other#

The first two images are from the SimInsider Newsletter, released on May 11, 2004, while the third was officially released on May 13, 2004. Four of the images are taken from this article⁶

• The third image shows the Curious household for the first time, confirming that four-story houses have been implemented at this point.

Early May Blooper Image#

A blooper image that dates to early May, as briefly seen by the "multi-age" Live Mode icon on the bottom left.

Videos#

Quite possibly the very last build before the one shown at E3 made its debut. The other one is a commercial that aired on VH1 later in August, featuring in-game footage of the screeenshots above.

• The sky color in Create-A-Sim was bluer.

The third one is a blooper and is likely from around that time due to the mailbox position being different and having wallpaper/flooring not in the final.

Late-Development Personality Adjustments#

Matt Brown, technical director and lead designer of the game, revealed that the game's extreme personality behaviors were implemented late in development. Intended to differentiate the Sims further and address the lack of significant behavioral evolution from The Sims, this 'strike team' project served as a prototype for the trait-based personality system later introduced in The Sims 3.

The more extreme personality expressions in Sims 2 were something we added extremely late in development as a way to make Sims appear more unique and just generally distinct from one another.

When we realized that Sims' behavior hadn't really evolved all that much between Sims 1 and what we were about to ship, there was a bit of a freak out.

It was far too late in development for us to change the way the personality axes (nice/mean, neat/sloppy, etc.) worked overall, but we pulled together a little "strike team" of animators and gameplay engineers for several months to design and implement what we felt were some high-impact behaviors that reflected specific extremes or milestones along those personality axes, as sort of a baby step. In the end that turned out to really be a prototype for or a precursor to the more discrete personality traits that ended up in Sims 3.

I felt good about what we'd crammed in at the end of Sims 2 development, but I really wanted to embrace that chunky, descriptive, evocative way that people describe themselves and the people around them. In the end, sliders and positive/negative point restrictions felt too limiting and obfuscated when describing your annoying roommate :).

— Source (Reddit)

References#