Ever since its release early last year, The Sims has had powerful and lasting appeal. Whether it's the lure of manipulating a family of artificial people, building homes, or managing all the aspects of a career and lifestyle at your own pace, the Sims has that special quality that has garnered millions of fans. The beauty of the game that Will Wright created, though, is that it emulates real life, meaning it has an endless base of possibilities to draw from for future expansions, and it is also modular in design, meaning it's fairly easy for the designers to plug in new components to enrich the game.

One of the new NPCs is the lovelorn guitarist.

The Sims has had two expansion packs so far, and now Maxis is producing a third one. Maxis says that it is always considering what the fans want and is always looking to dig deeper into places it hasn't yet explored. In this new expansion, Hot Date, the designers are now delving into one aspect that Sims fans have clamored for from the beginning--the opportunity to manage and manipulate romantic human relationships in greater depth than was previously available in the original game. After all, now that you can have a career and throw a party, what about dating and romance? With Hot Date, Maxis is now giving lonely Sims fans a love life.

A new facet of The Sims: the Downtown area.

We recently visited the Maxis offices in Walnut Creek, California, and got a chance to see Hot Date, which has been in development for a little more than a month and is slated for release sometime in October or November. Maxis says that when considering Hot Date, there were two things it wanted to play with: social one-on-one interaction between Sims and letting players go to someone else's house. The first objective would be easy to achieve; however, the second was determined to be too difficult. That is because each house in The Sims is a saved game, so you can't visit and interact with someone else's house without messing up his or her saved game. Thus, it was decided that a compromise could be reached by creating an entirely new location where social interactions could take place. Enter Downtown.

Downtown is a neutral location, so to speak, where dates happen. Hot Date is about being in Downtown with your date. Just like you can with a house, but on a larger scale, you'll be able to build Downtown into whatever you want, creating different parks, restaurants, clubs, shops, and other venues. Downtown will look very different from your original neighborhood--picture a street of small boutique shops and restaurants--and will also have its own nonplayer characters (NPCs). Many of the components are new and fit into the style of a downtown district but can also be added to your homes if you wish.