The Sims 4 Lovestruck compiles some of The Sims 2's greatest hits, and it's making me wonder if The Sims 5 will come sooner than we think
Jul. 25, 2024Opinion | The new Sims pack is a blast from the past, but does that mean the ideas well has run dry?
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The Sims 4has been going strong for ten years now, and love is finally back in the air. New pack Lovestruck feels like a revamped version of perhaps the best Sims era: The Sims 2. Specifically, theSims 2’s Nightlife expansion. As well as thumping club music, vampirism, and stretch limousines, Nightlife introduced the Chemistry system, allowing players to set their Sims' romantic Turn Offs and Turn Ons to make dating and creating stories that much more interactive.
That’s what Lovestruck’s new Attraction system seeks to emulate, on top of championinggreater dating diversityand more dynamic outings with your would-be beaus. If it all sounds familiar, that’s because I suspect EA is drawing inspiration from the past to chart The Sims' future – a move that is pushing it closer and closer to its next generation.
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A long legacy means great expectations, and The Sims 4 has had its work cut out to meet them. The road was rocky at first. It took EA three years to add toddlers to the base game, its Cats and Dogs expansion featured far fewer animals to adopt than in The Sims 2 and 3’s respective Pets expansions, and even stuff as mundane as laundry room equipment can only be acquired through paid kit packs. And yet, I paid up.
Adding content through paid expansions has always been the name of the Simming game, but whenever I feel that new content should have been implemented as a free update, I’ve been known to get the grumps. I’m not grumpy that Lovestruck’s more detailed romance systems cost money – I’ve played a fair few hours of it myself, and there’s a lot more to it than retching in disgust after checking out your neighbor. However, I am wondering why EA has gone as far back as Sims 2 to mine for content. With something as seemingly basic as a romance system being introduced at this late stage in The Sims 4’s life cycle, my spidey senses are tingling.
As a fan, my immediate reaction is to shout my thanks from the rooftops and ready myself for a Simlish Love Island spectacular set on the glittering shores of Sulani. From an analytical standpoint, maybe EA is just running out of ideas, and the only way to go forward is to look back.
It almost feels like when your mother asks you to check your backpack for anything else you need before heading off to school. Laptop? Check. Charger? Check. Autonomous date invites from NPC admirers? Double check. By picking through the past iterations of the Sims, whether it be City Living’s apartments drawn from The Sims 2 Apartment Life or the werewolves of Sims 3 Supernatural, EA is effectively ensuring it hasn’t missed anything before moving swiftly on.
I’m almost hoping that EA’s trip down memory lane with Lovestruck signals a clean slate is coming.
It’s financially viable for EA, but the problem with this model is that by the time each Sims game has caught up with the last, and added more to it besides, the series starts all over again with a new generation. Consequently, that next generation Sims game will have a whole lot of expectation behind it to innovate with new systems, but bring back renewed iterations of all the fan favorites that came before.
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The fact is that the more content we get for The Sims 4, the more EA will have to shoulder next time, and next time, and the time after that. Just how viable is this going to be in the long run, for players and for the publisher?
The Sims 4 now has a veritable treasure trove of expansions under its belt, more than double that of its predecessor, which also featured twice as many packs asitspredecessor. I’m almost scared to imagine what The Sims 5 would even look like if that expectation persists, and to make it easier on both the developer and my future wallet, I’m almost hoping that EA’s trip down memory lane with Lovestruck signals a clean slate is coming, and that perhaps its learned a lesson or two along the way.
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