With the exception of 2008’s Spore, Maxis has largely been focused on The Sims and SimCity for as long as it’s been around, while in recent years, with The Sims 4’s post-launch support being a priority of the studio, they haven’t really put out any major new games. However, that might be about to change soon.

Several job listings for various positions at Maxis have gone up at EA’s careers website, and several of them make it abundantly clear that the studio is working on something new. “We are gearing up for our next big production and we need some passionate teammates to collaborate with to bring our new project to life,” reads the listing for VFX Artist.

“Maxis Texas, EA’s newest Maxis studio, is looking for a visionary Art Director to lead our art team in the creation of a new, unannounced title,” the ad for Art Director reads. “We’re looking for candidates with a unique vision and the ability to promote that vision, providing stunning visuals at the highest levels of execution.”

Meanwhile, listings for both, Senior Character Artist and Senior Server Software Engineer also make mention of a new unannounced IP.

Of course, there’s no telling what this project is. Looking at Maxis’ track record, it would be easy to assume that they’re working on another new simulation IP, but there’s every chance that they’re doing something completely different this time. Here’s hoping we hear more about whatever this project is in the near future.

In what is now a trend for EA, another classic, long time influential studio has been shuttered by them today. Maxis, the studio that was originally formed by WillW right (Wright left Maxis and EA a few years ago), and is behind such classics as SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, is officially being closed.

“Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location,” an EA representative said in a statement.

Personally, this announcement has left me feeling completely heartbroken- like so many others, I too grew up playing SimCity and The Sims. These were very important games to me, and to see their developer gutted like this… it’s depressing.

EA, of course, has a history of buying studios, and then shutting them down like this. Other past notable examples like this include Origin, Black Box, Mythic, Bullfrog, Westwood, and Pandemic.

In this case, however, EA has assured us that the Maxis label will ‘live on.’

Fat lot of good will that do.

Earlier we had reported that The Sims 4 was announced and now we have some more details regarding Maxis’s new simulation game.

“The Sims 4 celebrates the heart and soul of the Sims themselves, giving players a deeper connection with the most expressive, surprising and charming Sims ever in this single-player offline experience,” this confirms the existence of offline play for The Sims 4 according to the PR readings.

“The Sims 4 encourages players to personalize their world with new and intuitive tools while offering them the ability to effortlessly share their creativity with friends and fans,” PR adds.

In June 2009, The Sims 3 was released on PC and Mac, and eventually the title became available on consoles and smartphones in October 2010.

According to EA more than 150 million copies of The Sims series have been sold worldwide.

What are your thoughts on The Sims 4, have you been impatiently waiting for a new entry in the franchise? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Stay tuned on GamingBolt for more news regarding The Sims 4 in the coming months.

As of now, no further details have been provided, but EA will provide more information as the day goes on. The last title to be released in the franchise was The Sims 3, released in 2009 for PC and Mac.

Maxis has since been busy working on SimCity, a reboot of the popular city building simulator that included social features and a brand new art style. It also included some incredibly restrictive DRM that required players to be online at all times, else they’d be unable to play the game or save their progress.

Guess how that worked out for them?

Hopefully the publisher has learned its lesson, as more details for The Sims 4 make their way out. Stay tuned.

Bioware is a consistent user of sliding-scale morality charts. While they’re not quite as simple as Fable’s Good and Evil orientations, the result is, generally, the same. Knights of the Old Republic has the Light and Dark side scales, and Jade Empire offers the ways of the Closed Fist or Open Palm. While the ethics of each side are supposedly deeper than simple good and bad, the result is that charitable, helpful acts are rewarded with Light Side/Open Palm points and violent or apathetic acts are awarded Dark Side/Closed Fist. It can be aggravating, especially when trying to follow, for instance, the Way of the Closed Fist from the perspective of it being a pragmatic, fight-oriented philosophy (several of the Closed Fist NPCs tell you that it goes beyond simple good guy/bad guy stuff), and waffling around somewhere in between because the game doesn’t emulate the writing. Choices are presented in simplistic, polaric terms: the character can help a villager pay off some debt, or the character can murder the villager. Far too few of the encounters in Jade Empire offer the kind of interesting dichotomy that the dialogue seems to present.

The same can be said for following the Dark Side; though characters in-game constantly talk about a deeper thread than simple acts of douchebaggery (especially with Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic II), you can’t seem to be a true follower of the Dark Side without being as stupidly and ignorantly violent as the game allows you to be. It’s disappointing, then, that the nuance of the writing doesn’t exactly reflect in the nuance of the mechanics.  Mass Effect does a better job of it, but it’s still not quite perfect. Paragon or Renegade are the options as presented, and while it is a bit more clever than previous Bioware installments, it still boils down to Renegade = Asshole, Paragon = Annoyingly Kind.  Bioware has always been strong in writing, and though the plodding morality hasn’t improved much in terms of character nuance, the choices that you make based on your alignment deeply affect the game itself. It serves to underscore the idea of action manifesting itself in consequence. But if you think about it, if actions inherently carry unforeseen consequences, why the need for a morality bar at all? It seems rather redundant and arbitrary then, whether you decide to charm people or intimidate them, if the actions themselves carry much more cathartic weight.

Fable, of course, has its own wonderfully fun approach to good and evil. In this case, story and dialogue choices are left out of the mix, and the game relies on giving specific actions a moral weight. Theft, murder and other nefarious acts earn the player Evil points, and helping villages, taking Good quests from the Guild earns you Good points. Each of the hundreds of possible actions that you have carries with them a moral element that manifests itself on your character’s body. An evil player will grow horns, have red glowing eyes and scorches the earth underfoot, whereas a good player will develop a halo wreathed in butterflies, and a healthy glow to their skin. Your appearance, then, dictates how you’re treated by villagers, city officials, and guards. A player walking around in burnt-black plate armor with glowing eyes and horns will send villagers running for their lives, taking cover behind desks and boxes, and will cause guards to ominously warn you not to mind your manners, please. A Good player has the opposite effect, and will also cause little kids to follow you around. That element is perhaps Fable’s most clever addition, in that the NPCs don’t interact via stale, replayable dialogue options but rather in more natural ways. It subtly indicates the annoying, pestered nature of the Hero better than many other games, and it gives the player the option to sacrifice children to a diabolical devil-cult. It’s disappointing that the sequel didn’t carry this idea much farther. The core of the game is still there, with actions carrying a moral weight, but, unlike in Mass Effect, your previous character has a very stale, unchangeable impact on the world as a whole. Fable II also stretches your suspension of disbelief by giving the character, good or evil, the same rather flimsy main quest. It’s hard to believe that a character who would willingly murder every NPC in Bowerstone and a character who would go out of his way to help those same people with anything they need would have the same goal.

Not all games with an ethical lean contain a scale, however. The Witcher represents morality in a cold, pragmatic sort of way. Each action has a consequence, and those consequences manifest themselves in surprising ways. Geralt, the player character, is not rewarded for performing acts of heroism, nor is he necessarily punished for acts of wickedness. As the game progresses, in fact, it’s hard to tell at all what constitutes a heroic act over a wicked one, and as such, the game itself makes a stand on morality. There is no good, and there is no evil, there are just actions and consequences. The consequences are sometimes surprising and sometimes not, but no one can argue that they don’t have a deep effect on the story itself, in minor or major ways. Toward the beginning, Geralt is given the choice to fight off a group of Elven freedom-fighters (or terrorists, depending on which way you lean), or to allow them to take a load of weapons with them. Choose to leave them be and later on an underworld contact you must find has been killed by those very same Elves, who are now more efficiently armed and have become bolder. Fight them off, and you ruin the chance that another NPC has of making peace with them. It’s a complicated situation, and each action has its own justification. The Witcher abounds with these kinds of choices, which serves to make the player hyper-aware of their role within the boundaries of the world. Witchers themselves might be neutral, but when you’re faced with a friendly NPC of yours getting murdered in the streets because you didn’t intervene, it casts a new light on the cost of neutrality.

There are other games that don’t seem to deal with morality, but simply by allowing players certain choices, morality is thrust upon them. Strategy games like The Creative Assembly’s Total War series offer the player the chance to massacre or enslave the denizens of conquered towns, which turn even the most cheese-eating of sissies into Machiavellian dictators in a few turns. The Sims is another good example, with players undoubtedly turning to torturing some of the created people within hours of exploring the game. Building a pool around a very tiny square where the unfortunate Sim had been standing (the hapless Sim, of course, being deathly afraid of drowning), walling up another one inside a room with no doors, windows, or restroom, or manipulating neighbors into riotous feuds are all part and parcel of a Sim player’s common repertoire. No penalty is given in-game, no restrictions are levied against the player, they simply experiment with the freedom the game offers. Grand Theft Auto is an easy target (as are most of the open-world, sandbox type games that are the clones of Grand Theft Auto), because, while it doesn’t necessarily reward the player for perpetrating acts of extreme violence, it doesn’t necessarily penalize players, either. And there’s a certain catharsis from mowing down sidewalks full of civilians or causing a daisy-chain of explosions from the thirty-car pileup you’ve engineered. The achievements don’t hurt, either.

So what does it all mean? Are game designers out there trying to show us the error of our ways and tacitly tell us to go to church more often? Or is morality simply another element in a long line of developments that allow designers to tailor an experience to a specific player? Certainly, there’s an angle of replay value; gamers want to find everything that they can in a game, and if that means three or four replays then that means a player will be more open to the DLC when it comes out. But maybe there’s more to it than simple commercialism. It’s the kind of thing that, in the long term, help to elevate games as an artistic medium, rather than a simple module of brainless entertainment.

The Sims 3 will be releasing on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 later this year, while The Sims: Medieval will be releasing for PC and Mac next year.

Perhaps, EA will announce The Sims 4 next year? Who knows…