Firaxis Veteran Jake Solomon Talks Creating A Player-Driven Life Simulator To Compete With The Sims

Jake Solomon is a name that carries weight in gaming communities, especially for fans of XCOM and the legendary strategy-focused studio Firaxis. After 23 years, Solomon departed his dream studio, saying “My brain is on fire with a new dream.” Today, that new dream was revealed with the announcement of Midsummer Studios, a collaboration between Solomon, a couple of fellow Firaxis veterans and some new faces, too. The new dream? To create a different kind of life simulation game, one that’s completely geared towards player-driven stories and self-created narratives.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Solomon to discuss his departure from Firaxis, his new studio, why he chose the life sim genre and the current troubling state of the games industry.

A New Venture

Solomon is beloved among the Firaxis faithful, having played a massive part in the recent successes of the XCOM series, and in the creation of the cult classic Marvel’s Midnight Suns. However, after these long development cycles, how excited was he to work on another turn-based strategy game? The genre that Firaxis is known for. The answer? Not very.

“Firaxis was evolving as a studio and some long-time people were leaving,” Solomon begins. “If I’m going to do this, this isn’t a Firaxis game that I’m thinking about, this really feels like it’s time to leave and start my own thing.”

It was a childhood dream of Solomon’s to work on a Marvel game, and he adores Midnight Suns. However, while working on that title, he realised how much he loved the emergent elements of XCOM. The player’s ability to customise their soldiers, and create personal narratives. This realisation had his designer brain firing on all cylinders.

“All of the games I made previously at Firaxis were not as scripted, they’re more systems-based,” Solomon says. “I got an idea in my head, what if we doubled down on player-driven narratives?”

It’s something I understand completely. Whenever I play XCOM 2, I name all of the soldiers after my friends and family, just because of the humour it adds, and seeing which of your loved ones rise through the ranks and survive against all the odds is fun, “How much of a stage can we build where the player can’t help but write a story just by playing the game? They end up making decisions and have drama injected, which translates into every player writing interesting, unique stories,” Solomon says, excitedly.

This was never going to be a Firaxis game, there was no scope for Solomon to build this game under the banner of his old studio. He built a team, including names like Will Miller and Ryan Meier, and recruited some of the expertise he needed, such as Grant Rodiek, a veteran producer who worked on The Sims for 18 years. Midsummer Studios was born. Perhaps poetically, Midsummer is based 3 miles from Firaxis, in the company’s previous office.

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This team has built very successful systems-heavy games before, but only a couple have worked on a life sim. However, for Solomon, the life simulation genre was a natural choice for a game all about player-driven narratives.

“I really wanted it to be about emergent stories – to create a sort of playground,” he opens. “The idea is that it’s set in a small town, and you can change everything. We’ve staffed it with characters, but players can change those characters in any way they want. You’re guiding your character through their small-town life, we’re injecting the small drama of life… you know your roommate is in a bad mood, or you’re about to go on a date. All of those things are dramatic and fun but we want the big drama too, like ‘Hey, your estranged father is back in town’. You, as the player, get to decide, is he back here because he wants to reconcile with you, or maybe he’s getting married to someone you don’t like, or he’s here because he’s fighting with your brother and you have to get involved.”

Solomon gives a lot of examples of the wacky and dramatic emergent events that can take place within the systems of Midsummer’s game. The drama of modern life is often more intense than what you see in fictional media. “Everything you do in life is a story, it’s dramatic and you’re making choices,” Solomon remarks. “I’ve always talked about making a game about high school – because it was a really dramatic, charged environment. It’s a small community, everyone knows each other and everything feels high stakes. This is a version of that.”

Solomon continuously expresses that player agency will be at the heart of this title. At the beginning of the simulation, you can feed the game information about what you’re looking for with this character. If you’re looking for a romantic plot, you can express that and the game will respond, pre-seeding your character with relationships that could blossom into romance.

“The character has an ex-lover and they’re actually your co-worker, this character is your neighbour and you dated them in high school, this character is your secret crush but they’re your business rival in the town…,” are examples that Solomon cites.

The player can also enter Creative Mode whenever they want, and change the appearance, relationships, traits and actions of anyone in the town. A story isn’t playing out how you’d imagined? Well, you can take a more heavy-handed approach to influence events. However, Solomon says they will actively reward players for making unpredictable decisions, making everyone’s stories more interesting.

“So what we try to do is reward the player for surprising behaviour, and say you could get a pretty big reward if you made something humorous happen, or you made something romantic happen, or if you made something very conflict-heavy happen, where the player steers themselves in a direction they don’t expect. You have to delight the player first, nobody else is going to be interested if the player isn’t interested in their own story,” Solomon outlines.

Though you can edit and change every person you interact with, this game is intended to centre on a main character. A difference from The Sims, however, is that these characters will involve the player in their own stories, too. “We want players and characters in the town to come to the player, with not just storylines involving you, but involving them. They’re saying ‘Oh my god, I’m so unhappy, my partner doesn’t appreciate me and I hate my job’, and we give the player the opportunity to help them or you know, sew chaos in this small town. Everyone is interconnected and we always want these things to come back to you,” Solomon adds, deviously.

Midsummer is already thinking about ways it can build and support a community. A player base that shares their interesting in-game experiences is vital for what Midsummer is trying to build. “We want to build a hub where people can share anything they create,” Solomon explains. “The idea being that if someone creates a character, they’ve had these experiences that shape them, they have this personality. We want a character pool of characters you’ve created or your friends have created, or characters you’ve downloaded from the community. There’ll be a big element of fan fiction there, building your town out with characters, environments you’ve built or customised, or even entire towns.”

He goes a step further, saying “You can create storylines, share a town with other players and say ‘I’ve set all of the characters to be like this’, I have these storylines going on.” It’s an interesting prospect, and there’s scope for full-blown custom campaigns or towns filled with bizarre people that the player has to socially navigate.

Competing With “The Juggernaut” Of The Sims

It’s a contrast to The Sims which is centred around simulating family life with everything else being a backdrop to that. Midsummer is targeting a similar market, and Maxis veteran Grant Rodiek believes The Sims community is looking for something more narrative-heavy and emergent.

“When Grant and I talked, he was really really excited,” Solomon recalls. “This was something he was really into, and we were really lucky he wanted to join us. He still wants to make life sims, but he would like to focus more on story. It’s something he feels like players of the Sims want. Let’s give them a life sim that helps them generate interesting stories.”

In terms of scale, Solomon is targeting the mid-premium or double-A. It’s an area we’ve seen big successes in recently, like Helldivers 2. “7 billion dollars, we’ll need the entire US defence budget,” he jokes. “A modern life-simulator that’s really story-based, we have to build a community around that, that’s our focus. So I think we’re aiming for that double-A space.”

He talks about the ongoing ‘squeeze’ we’re seeing in game development. The idea of what a triple-A can be is being pulled from both sides, you either have to go a step above and make a quadruple-A game like Sony’s single-player titles, or you have to step down and make a more emergent double-A game like Helldivers 2. The bar has been raised so much for triple-A that you need immense resources to match those titles, so a leaner, double-A experience is now a more sensible pursuit for smaller teams.

This untitled project is still in its infancy, and Solomon is pleased there’s no expectation from Midsummer’s venture capital investors until next year. Still, even though it’s a long-term project, he doesn’t want it to take too long. “I hope it isn’t as long as some of my past projects, some of them were a little too long. Midnight Suns took forever,” he laments. “That’s another reason to maybe shoot for something in the middle [AA]. Our plan right now is to build a prototype, build a demo, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”

When it comes to his legacy as a game designer, Solomon is interested to see how fans of his work will react to this new direction, “The reaction to me making Midnight Suns wasn’t universally popular when it was announced,” he says. “Just because there was hope for another XCOM, or that I was working on something else. I’m interested to see what the reaction to this is going to be.”

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