If you’re a fan of the Sims genre, you’ve probably noticed by now, but The Sims 4 has been around for a while. long time. Just four years later, the original Sims gave way to The Sims 2. “The Sims 2” lost to “The Sims 3” after five games; and there was a gap of five years between “The Sims 3” and “The Sims 4”.
But today, The Sims 4 celebrates not only 10 years since its release, but also the game’s active development: the game’s latest expansion was released just five weeks ago, and EA has also announced plans for about a dozen more updates – Includes free and paid DLC — until the end of 2024.
If you had told us a decade ago that The Sims 4 would still be the latest iteration of the series on its 10th birthday, I doubt many of us would have believed you. Not only was EA’s release cycle for the series pretty well established by that point, but choosing to shut down production despite having the best intentions in the world is an odd place in The Sims’ history.
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The game got off to a rocky start with both critics and players, likely due to a major overhaul that removed key features from the 2013 reboot of SimCity in just 18 months before release. features, which proved to be highly unpopular. While it wasn’t exactly a disaster, the initial reviews did represent the low point of the series’ slow decline from its heyday, with The Sims and The Sims 2 easily earning average review scores in the ’90s, and The Sims Life 3 dropped some of the average score to around the 80s, and The Sims 4’s average score was in the mid-70s, but it wasn’t spectacular.
Of course, if you start playing The Sims 4 today, the Sims 4 you download will be a very different experience than it was at launch—even if you ignore a decade of regular paid DLC releases and just focus on the basics game. Despite the increasingly eye-watering price tags for full products, you have to admit that The Sims 4 is the first Sims game to give away anything of substance for free — including the base game itself, which is available on all platforms It’s all free in 2022, and the game just celebrates its eighth anniversary.
As of this writing, there have been 167 updates to the base game (slightly more than one per month since launch), tweaks and twists on the original version to make it still recognizably The Sims 4 from September 2014 》 game, but more detailed and complex, in fact, its look and feel has changed quite a bit.
I suspect these significant changes over time and the game’s surprising longevity all share a common underlying reason: the way games are sold, delivered, and monetized has changed significantly over the past decade and a half, and ” The Sims 4 is the first game in the series to understand the market it’s entering, where most players will be constantly connected to the Internet as a matter of course. The Sims 3 realized this a few years after its launch, becoming the first game in the series to introduce purely digital premium DLC, and the add-ons were indeed a bit overpriced. The Sims 4 may have toned down its worst excesses, such as paying $5 off in-game currency that can be exchanged for real-world currency. But it still speaks to its creators’ awareness that it exists in an always-on, digital-first ecosystem that’s very different from the series’ roots.
Of course, there are positive and negative sides to this. Gone are the bad days when you had to wait six months and pay for another full-price expansion pack if you wanted to fix a bug that came with your game. final expansion pack. But it also takes the pressure off EA to release something that will at least work on the day it’s released – and, while I do think recency bias may partly explain why The Sims 4’s launch feels better than previous generations There are more questions, but I also think it’s sad that the QA team for DLC versions of The Sims has been drastically reduced over the past decade, from a few dozen for each new game to even a full-size expansion pack There are only six.
If The Sims 4 hadn’t taken advantage of the possibilities offered by live service adjacency, it would now feel not only shaky but also dated. The ability to modify the base game indefinitely allows developers to take a digital version of the franchise at launch and turn it into the first Sims game to feature gender and sexual orientation customization, as well as allowing for more realistic Black hair, white spots, and medical wearables, just to name a few examples of the changes Create-A-Sim has brought about over the past few years.
Even setting aside these worthwhile efforts to make this life-sim game feel more alive for everyone, The Sims 4 has had its moments of brilliance, though they’ve often been buried in the lackluster response to the series as a whole this generation. This is the first Sims game to allow for upcycling, for example, or social media as a career path – a unique reflection of ongoing social changes and shifting priorities over its longer-than-usual lifespan.
On a slightly more meta level, the recently launched Cupid’s Corner (a Tinder-inspired dating app included in the latest expansion, Lovestruck) was hailed as the series’ best use of multiplayer to date, thanks to Credit to the fact that other players’ creations sometimes unexpectedly show up in potential matches of Sims. This is a feature that EA did not promote in advance, but most players were pleasantly surprised to learn about Captain Jack Sparrow, Shrek, Super Squidward and others. Like everyone else, we are looking for love.
When The Sims 5 arrives, it will almost certainly feature multiplayer – likely more in the invite-a-friend style of Animal Crossing: New Horizons than an MMO. Still, it’s nice to see EA experimenting with the formula ahead of time in a non-intrusive way that most Sims 4 players seem to be able to keep up with.
Sadly, The Sims and The Sims 2 have now been effectively abandoned. While The Sims 3 remains fully supported by EA on the digital storefront, it has not received any content updates since 2014. 5) has been very quiet lately, and while rumors of its secret cancellation may be exaggerated, there does seem to be considerable chaos behind the scenes: Grant Rodiek, a longtime producer and original game director on The Sims, has The departure in January, and the leak of a large amount of early playtest data for The Sims in the spring.
As such, The Sims 4 has been the public face of the series for a full decade, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon — especially since, by all accounts, once Project Rene ” is finally released, The Sims 4 will not be retired, but the plan is to continue to play alongside it in some capacity. Once again, this seems like a missed opportunity for EA to put the most troubled mainline game on the franchise’s backlog to rest, draw a line under its consistently uneven reception, and try to move on. But it’s worth remembering that this is still a qualitative assessment, and the more than 70 million people who have played the game over the past decade tell a different story.
And, I remember well that The Sims 3 received a similar level of player backlash during its active development, but in hindsight became incredibly popular. I actually don’t think this will happen once The Sims 4 is eventually replaced by another game, whether it’s Project Rene or a competitor from another studio like inZOI or Paralives. But I would have said the same thing about The Sims 3 ten years ago.
In fact, it’s almost impossible to come to a satisfying conclusion looking back at a game that’s gone nowhere and is still in flux. The only thing that’s clear right now is that we’ll need further distance before we can properly assess The Sims 4’s legacy for the series and its community.
