
They’re all characters who nobly-or maybe not so nobly-serve the realm and help you fulfill your quests and finish your ambition. Other structures let you create and control wizards, spies, blacksmiths, knights, merchants and bards.

Build a church, for instance, and you get a priest. New buildings, however, bring with them the possibility of new heroes. Decorating with a new throne, a roaring fireplace or a few tapestries are about all the architectural dabbling you’ll be doing. New prefab buildings and towers can be added-and no degrees in building are required this time around. And each finished quest opens the castle gate to several more, earning experience points that allow you to expand the kingdom.

Voilà, you’re one step closer to a secure domain. You can actually better the entire kingdom when you choose to pursue one of 12 possible “ambitions” that interact with well-being, security, culture or knowledge, and eventually lead to “winning” the game.įor instance, a monarch may hear of a fearsome cave-dwelling Crab Monster that could very well be persuaded by new clothes, a little mustache wax and several well-prepared meals to help protect the realm. Regular miniquests of eating and resting, along with other scheduled kingly duties such as passing edicts or perhaps killing a rampaging bear, do more than just expand the family wardrobe here. Instead, things begin with the building of a single male or female monarch whose job it is to govern and rule. But the goal here isn’t to build families and watch them do their daily chores and attend to their various bodily needs. Fear not though, fair gamer, you’ll still be in the character-creation biz. Play begins with a brief narration and gameplay tutorial that makes it crystal clear just how different things will be. This new build-a-hero experiment moves the action from a typical sim suburb and plunks gamers down in a Sims version of a quest-filled role-playing game. The Sims Medieval is much more than that. Is, then, this newest sim-er, with its king and castle cover, essentially just another expansion pack with a Renaissance Faire twist? No. With The Sims games, players wield the power to create little virtual people called sims, prod their lives to and fro, and watch what they do. For 10 years now-whether on a PC, a gaming console or even on a touch screen smartphone-people have been having a blast playing god.
