In a video released by EA recently, SimCity series creator, Will Wright and the creative director of the new SimCity Ocean Quigley sat down to chat about the design, gameplay and emotional drives of the new simulation game.
"One of the things I wanted to do with it was to make you feel more responsibility for the the little people that lived there, because you can do all the these horrible things to them," says Quigley. "You can poison them, their houses burn down and because of your crappy economic decisions they go homeless.
"So when that happened to them, you would have this guilt, you would feel this twinge of emotion about your responsibility for the life opportunities for these people in this world that you created."
"You made SimCity a guilt driven experience," Wright joked.
"I think that guilt is an underexploited emotion in video games," Quigley quipped back.
Wright went on to say that guilt is an emotion reserved for video games, it isn't an emotion that is evoked by reading a book or watching a movie.
"As I was playing, I was not just immersing myself in these areas and neighborhoods, I was imagining myself living the lives of these people," Wright said.
The first SimCity was designed by Will Wright and was released in 1989. It has seen numerous releases and spin-offs across multiple platforms since its conception.
SimCity will release for Windows PC in U.S. on March 5 and internationally on March 7. The Mac version is still in development and will launch sometime in the near future. SimCity will feature cross-platform mulitplayer.
For more information about the upcoming game, read Polygon's in-depth interview with Quigley here.
