The Sims Get Medieval

My WoW guild is collapsing. I’ll whine at length later, maybe, but the short answer is that after a brief spurt of searching for anything fun that remains – rolling on new servers, gearing different toons, putting up with dubious guildies and puggers, I was ready to spend an evening logged out, alternating between investigating these new medieval sims while taking care of my rabbit. He’s a very old rabbit who needs increasing amounts of care, which is also making me re-think my raid addict lifestyle. Hey, three years, it was fun, I learned things and quit smoking and met a bunch of people who for the most part can not have my RL contact information under any circumstances, and kept myself amused for a long time at bargain prices. Right now, I’d rather groom the bunny while listening to Moonlight Sonata. And playing a pause-able, stand-alone type game.

I was prepared to hate Medieval Sims for the same reasons I didn’t like the Sims 3 travel expansion. I envisioned the same elderly non-gaming suit(s) who thought making Sims more like Indiana Jones had decided to try making Sims more like World of Warcraft – put in some armor and quests and dragons! So I was expecting an experience sort of like visiting a bakery owned by diabetics, or a bar owned by Alcoholics Anonymous. “We would never, ever touch these terrible products but we decided to vent our hostility toward those of you who do by taking your money.”

But it’s not quite like that, despite the fact this game tries to mash together Sims, WoW and something resembling Civilization all at the same time.

After a longwinded preamble in which Captain Picard explains that you are a god, and after realizing that people suck, you decided to roll up your sleeves and lend them a helping hand, you get to create a royal person of your choosing. After playing through a rather invasive tutorial, your monarch unlocks various other kinds of buildings where you can install more player characters – priests, mages, warriors, rogues … I mean spies. You have neighboring kingdoms, which you can presumably subjugate, although I’m not at that stage yet. You can set various victory conditions, because unlike regular Sims, this game has an end, although you can disregard your quests and focus on things like breeding a castle full of princes and princesses if you feel like it.

The game engine is modified somewhat with medieval sims, with fewer personality traits to choose from, and a required “fatal flaw” negative trait that you can eventually get rid of by going on a quest. In fact, the whole game is simplified considerably. There is no building at all, and all the characters come with furnished homes, which you can upgrade if you want. I think one of the problematic directions Sims 3 was heading in had to do with too many customization options. Spending hours customizing your sims’ outfits and landscaping their lawns and decorating/furnishing their homes can be a chore, especially when the game’s own limitations discourage you from building a large populated neighborhood where all your creations can interact.

So yeah, you can’t build a castle. If you want to do that, you’ll have to go back to Sims 3, and risk exposing yourself to anachronisms like cell phones and hot tubs. And you don’t really need to build a castle, there’s a nice one all ready for you, complete with NPCs hanging around expecting you to adjudicate their goat ownership claims.

There are quests. These are long and involved, and sometimes have you playing multiple sims. You acquire extra sims when your monarch levels and adds new buildings, and you can customize them too (or be lazy and use pre-made characters). When I built my cathedral (per a request from the gravedigger), I got the option of a quest where my gluttonous yet eloquent ruler, Queen Madeleine, could work with the resident monk to minister to his subjects better, thus increasing his level. Yes, there is religion in this game, and your clergy can pray, and convert heathens, and deliver sermons – but the subject of their adoration is … you, which should confuse, confound or please people with opinions regarding religion in general. You get a choice between two different sects, which preliminarily look like a heavy-handed group of gloomy inquisitors and a more uplifting, Franciscan-style group that seems mainly involved with making people happy. My monk belongs to the latter and his quest involved interviewing all the townspeople to find out what they wanted in a religion, and then supplying it.

There is fighting, complete with health and stamina bars. And gear. Queen Madeleine has only had to get medieval on another sim once, when a poacher annoyed her in the forest while she was gathering wood and wildflowers; after summarily dispatching him with her sword she had him arrested and put in the stocks, where she joined with the townspeople in pelting him with eggs and tomatoes. If only WoW had that function. The fighting is more “push this button to invoke animations” than twitch based; as this is a zero-twitch-skill game suitable for the elderly, the uncoordinated, and people trying to play video games while grooming rabbits. (I note that rabbit meat is for sale in the village market, and I further note that Queen Madeleine will have you thrown in the pit if you try serving it at her palace.)

We Americans have a strange fascination with the medieval. I think it comes from the fact that so many of us had our histories revised and/or deleted or obscured due to the empiricist optimism of the last couple centuries. It’s probably different when you live down the street from historic monuments decorated with carvings of people who look like the ones you see at extended family get togethers. Instead, we have a wide array of tropes involving knights, dragons, bards, swords and etc. that figure heavily in videogames and pulp fiction. This game does a nice job of summoning all that without straying too far from history.

And speaking of departures from history … at one point, Queen Madeleine got a romantic quest which offered her a choice between a hunky bard … and a lady trader. I haven’t played it out yet, but I’m assuming that in this medieval society, you’re free to populate the kingdom with GLBT characters. And all I'm going to say about race is that it's wide open for player characters, NPCs include everything from gingers to Moors, and the name generating engine is loaded with diverse celt and gaul and iberian names that you might find in Shakespeare plays or history books, which doesn't stop you from overriding it and naming your people Raylene and Toranaga and xxloldeathknightxx.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of animosity that I was going to unleash on EA for basically trying to mash together several different games in a marketing-oriented way. I think I’ll save it for Blizzard, who lately is recreating the medieval experience mainly in the sense of “how would you like to work for a bunch of dim-witted, semi-literate, violent youths in a world before labor laws?” Sims Medieval exceeds my expectations. I’m not sure about replayability, but for now it seems like there are many hours of content to explore. Including the intriguing “parents were eaten by a whale” character trait, and of course, the dire chinchillas.