EA continues to be rather confusing about what the future of The Sims looks like, but one thing remains clear: The Sims 5 ain’t happening, and the series as we know it now is going to become something very different.
As spotted by GamesRadar, EA president Laura Miele hammered home the point in an interview with Variety and honestly? As a lifelong Simmer, it’s all looking and sounding a little bleak.
The short answer is: The studio is still going all-in on its ‘The Sims Universe’ idea—which continues to be a fairly confusing concept in itself—and multiplayer gameplay. Miele said the team is “hard at work and feverishly developing what this platform is going to be.” Does she offer up any further explanation? Eh, sorta.
“What we’re doing is upgrading and refreshing all this technology, and we’ll be adding modes of play—but we are also going to be creating and updating the base technology and the base user experience on the core game,” she told Variety. “So you’re going to have this life simulation, you’re going to have multiplayer capabilities, we are going to have mobile expressions of this.”
Okay, there’s a lot of corpo speak to unpack here. For the most part, Miele is pretty much telling Variety the exact same thing she told investors in September last year: The Sims 4 is going to continue to serve as the foundation for the series for the foreseeable future, with EA putting resources into ironing out bug fixes and prepping the game to withstand the weight of an extra several years’ worth of DLC.
We’ve been aware of the multiplayer component as well, which seems to be the direction EA is taking with Project Rene. The developer’s already done some playtesting—which has been pretty hush-hush bar a couple of leaks—and is also likely what Miele is referring to with “mobile expressions,” since it’s pretty clear at this point that Project Rene is taking a more cellular approach.
While some players (myself included) have still clung onto some small hope that The Sims 5 will happen, Miele believes starting over fresh serves nobody.
“What I wouldn’t want to have happen is you have to start from day zero and start from scratch and give up all of the things that you have created, give up all of the content that you’ve purchased over the years,” she said. “We put out over 85 content packs over the last 10 years on The Sims 4, and so resetting that is not player friendly and not a good idea for our community.”
I can kind of see where Miele is coming from here, in a roundabout way. Each new Sims release has essentially stripped years of content and then served it straight back to us packaged up in various expansion, game, and stuff packs. Going from dozens of niche DLC choices to a barebones base game does suck.
At the same time, I’d argue that EA simply does not have to do that. Perhaps 85 content packs in a decade is a touch too many. Perhaps folding in some of these long-standing features—like pets, university, the weather—into the base game and then introducing more experimental ideas through paid packs would be better. Too ambitious of me?
I just continue to worry about EA shoving so many different plugs into a busted-up extension cord. The Sims 4 is spaghetti code patched up with sludge, and I fear the rope bridge is fraying with every new $5 kit that dares to walk across it. Even with a dedicated team tackling a never-ending laundry list of bugs, I’m not sure if piling more stuff on top in the process will ever help truly fix things. Especially if EA wants it to form the bedrock of the series for years to come.