The issue with The Sims 4
I’m coming back to my Tumblr to discuss an ongoing topic - the sad state of The Sims 4. I’ll try and give my two cents on the “What and Why” of this situation and potentially provide an insight into the history of this downfall in very short points.
When SimCity (2013) came out, The Sims 4 was fully in last stages of development, as it was about to come out one year from then. However, SimCity ended up being a complete fiasco.
Meanwhile, The Sims 4 prototypes were leaked (look for Olympus screenshots in one of my older posts) - a multiplayer online game with simplified graphics and emotion-based interaction system.
SimCity failed, so they had to rework The Sims 4. Cue The Sims 4 release version: no children, object babies, teens young-adults adults and elders are the same model, no pools, no basements, only 2-3 floors to build up, closed world, small world. Especially the small-world divided in neighborhoods rings a bell to SimCity’s idea of interconnected neighborhoods in a single world where each player controls one.
The downfall of The Sims 4 started with the decision to scrap the original concept and scramble it into something to be sold as a next-gen game. However, you can’t polish a turd any further. The Sims 4 still lacks base game mechanics for developers to be able to build upon it.
No expansion pack will be fully realized (as it’s the case up until now), no gameplay will be up to the standards of TS2 and TS3 - not because development team is lazy, but because The Sims 4 wasn’t build for any of this and they keep reusing concepts and systems to push out new content.
I appreciate the effort into keeping The Sims 4 ongoing until the next generation of the game is out. It’s something that must be done to provide funding. Good for them. However, given the history of its development and events that have been happening since the release of the base game... it’s sad to have to witness it.
You could say they ruined The Sims 4 when they even started developing it as a multiplayer online game - but they didn’t know back then that SimCity would fail horribly. Maybe if they stuck with the concept it would have worked out somehow? I don’t know.
It’s all just.... a disappointment.
