Over the past few days, the topic of The Sims 5 has jumped back into headlines — courtesy of us as well — and the conversation has returned to whether or not dropping development (for now) is the right move.
Well, in the interest of fairness, we’re going to look at it a bit closer. More specifically I am, as I dig into why dropping The Sims 5 may backfire for EA.
Sims 4tigue
The Sims 4 is over a decade old by now, and undoubtedly the longest-serving member of The Sims ‘family.’ However, it’s also bloated with dozens of expansions, packs and kits. This leaves EA in a bit of a sticky situation when it comes to going forward.
How do they handle future expansions? And what about the investment people have already made?
On the one hand, they can try and go for The Sims 5 and risk alienating fans who’ve bought heavily into The Sims 4. Or, on the other hand, they can stick with the venerable title and try to keep going forward, which means they’re at the mercy of an aging platform and an audience getting just a bit tired of new expansions at $20-$30 a pop.
Too many expansions
Which, I think we’d all agree, is the core problem. While you can debate the quality of the expansions that The Sims 4 has been receiving, you can undoubtedly see that the variety of them has by now eclipsed The Sims 1, 2 and 3; standing at 19 (not counting game packs) compared to 11 for the third entry.
And with some cool stuff (remember future worlds?) still missing, it feels dizzying as a veteran — let alone a new fan — to understand what to pick and why.
A major issue with the expansions is the fact that, as many people point out and I just mentioned, a lot of the mechanics are those that really should’ve been in the base game to begin with.
Obviously, many are hoping that the lessons learned when creating The Sims 4 would be taken forward into a new entry, and that The Sims 5 would be a true next-gen successor without the shaky first steps The Sims 4 had.
When did the bloat begin?
The argument about when expansion bloat began to take hold is a complex one. But there’s a few we can point to as the main issues, which would be Back to Work and Life & Death. They represent a culmination of the main issues already present; that being reinserting features already present in previous releases, and the tremendous gap between expansions that addressed these.
Back to Work, of course, reintroduced many of the job features missing in The Sims 4 at launch while in fairness also adding many new additions. And while a comprehensive redux of these missing features — which in fairness, were first introduced as an expansion in The Sims 3 — it also presented a core problem going forward of charging for what was already missing. But it’s the more recent Life & Death I feel is looking into closer.
While a more complicated case study, it’s worth pointing out that one of the features reintroduced in Life & Death, funerals, was of course already part of The Sims 3. However, funerals were a sub-section of an existing feature, parties. In this way they weren’t ‘their own thing’ but worked into an existing set of systems that players would easily become familiar with.
In this way the ‘bloat’ isn’t just due to the fact that these expansions reinsert features, or even that there’s so many of them, it’s that they load new systems on top of one another. Something that’s complicated for users to explore, and for The Sims 4 to handle from a mechanical sense.
The issue then is not necessarily even related to whether each expansion has the necessary content to make it worth it. It’s that EA’s focus on them means that unless something is relegated to a smaller pack, there is an implicit need to add more ‘value for money,’ and expand features that could be worked into existing systems.
What’s next for The Sims 4 expansions?
Changing up their approach in the future may be an option. Perhaps pursuing more of a live service angle; something they’ve already moved towards by making the base game free. However, the next best move of making certain expansions free is even more treacherous. After all, would you like to be told you could’ve waited a few years not to have to drop $30?
While The Sims 4 is still going strong even after more than a few treacherous moments, The Sims 5 is what some fans have been hoping will reboot and revamp the series. And with the buy-in for The Sims 4 growing more byzantine (and expensive) with every expansion, it’s a case of whether or not we reach critical mass sooner rather than later.
Speaking of making expansions free- well, we’ll get to that.
