With The Sims 4’s 10th anniversary firmly in the rearview, it’s easy to wonder what the franchise’s next steps will be. We already know that The Sims 5 isn’t coming any time soon. If we aren’t expecting the life sims’ next generation, it opens up questions about what’s on the cards next.
A recent interview has shed a little light on a couple of directions the game could be heading in. When speaking to Variety, EA Entertainment president Laura Miele shared a little look behind the scenes about one of the game company’s “biggest growth opportunities”: a multiplayer platform for The Sims.
Miele said that the Sims team is “hard at work” developing exactly what this platform will look like. Despite that, the interview doesn’t spill the beans on exactly what it would entail or how it would be implemented. However, it does reaffirm that co-op dollhouses are on the horizon. It also confirms that there will be different “modes of play” added as the technology is updated, refreshed, and upgraded.
The Sims has a history of multiplayer modes in non-mainline titles
Perhaps surprisingly, The Sims has a strong history of multiplayer games. Throughout the 2000s, many of the spin-off titles made for consoles actually had multiplayer modes. The Urbz‘s couch co-op mode allowed two players to galavant around a metropolitan paradise befriending The Black Eyed Peas together. The console versions of The Sims: Bustin’ Out also offered a similar multiplayer experience (sans Fergie, of course).
Similarly, The Sims and The Sims 2 on console both offered multiplayer modes, so you could buddy up with a friend to take control of two Sims at a time. This wasn’t the only major platform difference when comparing The Sims and The Sims 2 with their PC equivalents, either. The simulators took on totally new looks and switched out game mechanics when taking the leap from desktops to TVs.
Presumably, these big changes were to suit the technical capabilities of older generation consoles in comparison to PCs. Even when accounting for the computing abilities of yesteryear, the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube all had different capabilities than a desktop computer.
In the years since, as consoles have advanced, each release of The Sims has largely caught up with one another. When you play The Sims 4 on one platform, it’s basically the same experience as on the other.
But, in Miele’s interview with Variety, The Sims was described as a “significant ecosystem,” with “a universe of multiple ‘Sims’ experiences that [we] have to build on.” Maybe we can expect a multiplayer take on the dollhouse game to look pretty different from the version of The Sims we currently know; more like the varying co-op takes on the franchise of the 2000s?
