Fans of The Sims will get the second major sequel to the PC game franchise in February 2009 with The Sims 3. Development of the game is entering the home stretch and Ben Bell, the game's executive producer offered GameDaily an exclusive demo at EA's headquarters in Redwood City, California.

With Will Wright now overseeing the development of Spore, Bell said a large contingent of developers from the original The Sims game team have remained at Maxis/EA.

These sure don't look like your average Sims.

"We have members of our design and graphics staff that have really grown up with the franchise, so this is very personal to us," said Bell. "Everybody on the team is a fan of the game. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that we've always wanted to do with the game that we were never allowed to explore due to time or technology."

Bell and his team set out to build a sequel that gives players more freedom to tell stories and Pleasant Valley is the setting for these stories.

"If you have a dream about your own life, you can make it happen in this game," said Bell. "Or if you have some type of devious story in your head, you can use this game to live that out without anything getting in your way."

The evolution between The Sims 2 and 3 is the dimension of space and the dimension of the player's story, according to Bell. The Sims 3 is set in a seamless neighborhood where the player can go anywhere they want. Similarly, the stories are seamless.

"The camera can be moved around freely and you can zoom in and out anywhere in the town," said Bell. "Everything you see in the town is alive. The Sims are either asleep or staying up late because they can't sleep. Some people will be sneaking around town doing things. It's an active world, which means while you play your household, everything in the town is totally alive."

This being The Sims, every aspect of this world and its 90-plus inhabitants can be fully customized by the player. There are literally tens of thousands of objects in the world to interact and build with. And Bell promises that the next Create-A-Sim editor will be the most robust tool ever assembled by the team.

"We're putting you in a position to make anyone you know in life or from Hollywood and place them in your story," said Bell. "There are a lot of quick presets for any type of modifications to every aspect of a character's face, body and clothing. Characters can gain and lose weight. You can use sliders to push them to extremes that weren't available before. Previously Sims were skinny or less skinny. There was no way to change the physique of your character."

Bell said that from a player's perspective, having different body types in the game is important. Since the game is played from a god-like view, the first thing players recognize about the Sims is the different skin tones and the different shapes.

In addition to fat and obese Sims (they'll actually get overweight if you feed them too much), Sims will age and acquire lines in their faces and stoops in their gait. But it's up to you to create your cast as you see fit. And the editor lets players manipulate every detail -- right down to the nip of a nose or the roots of the hair. Each player can control a household of up to eight Sims (and jump from one house to another by relinquishing control of the previous family) and create a cast of over 90 inhabitants in Pleasant Valley.

But beyond the way The Sims look, one of the key new features that Bell believes gives each Sim a soul is the ability to assign up to five traits to each character. "When you designed personalities in The Sims 2 you had sliders that could go between two extremes like sloppy and neat, for example," explained Bell. "There were five dimensions of The Sims personalities and you had a number of points, so everyone kind of set them in the middle. With The Sims 3, we have over 70 personality traits that you can combine for millions of combinations. From my perspective, this is one of the deepest character systems that I've ever played with."

Traits run the gamut from "party animal" (which is actually good for career politicians) to "clumsy" (which is just fun to watch). Each Sim has five personality trait slots and players can unlock new traits like fertility by playing the game. If your Sims have kids in the game, they'll have some traits passed down from their parents and then over the course of their lives players will be able to add other traits to them.

"You can use the traits to push the game in any direction you can imagine," said Bell. "I think it's pretty wild to be able to have these types of character traits that you can combine in the game. They'll give you skills and interactions and reveal different looks and animation in the game. They give each Sim a unique soul."

In terms of replay value, The Sims 3 offers robust toolsets that enable the creation of any type of Sim, clothing, buildings and furniture, players can shape the dreams and grant the wishes of their Sims like never before. While the graphics have certainly received an upgrade, it's the ability to more closely guide the lives of The Sims is likely to wow fans of this franchise.