Re: Suggestion - Sims 4 - Sims with Disabilities
@Unicorngirluk26, I understand many people want the Sims 4 to reflect their real lives, and that disabilities are a real life experience for many. 😢 @RaichiSims gave some very good reasons why disabilities probably won't be added to the Sims 4. But there are even some more reasons:
1) To make wheelchairs, crutches, blind people walking realistically (with or without a cane for the blind & also with or without a seeing-eye dog) etc, would require a bunch of new animations for all instances of life! This would take an incredible amount of time, resources, and money.
2) Some people want realistic gameplay -- but other want fantasy gameplay. The Sims has always been a mix of both. Realistic gameplay lovers are why the Laundry Day SP was created! But fantasy gameplay lovers are why we also have the Vampires GP and the Realm of Magic GP! Yes, a disability pack would fall in the realistic gameplay category... but it is only realistic for a small portion of the population. Comparing it to Laundry Day, everyone in the real world does laundry or has it done for them. (Personally, I'd rather make stories about the difficulty of living with a disability than try to make a story about doing laundry because a laundry story would be super boring! But not everyone plays the Sims in order to create stories.
3) @RaichiSims touched on this earlier, but no matter how many disabilities EA would put into the pack, there will always be some disability left out. 🤭 So by trying to be more inclusive, EA would actually end up excluding somebody! 😞 I've seen requests for not only wheelchairs, crutches, blind Sims, deaf Sims (with sing language), asthma, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, missing arms, multiple sclerosis, and even more! An endeavor like this would probably need to be in its own separate game, not crammed into one pack. And you would still have a lot of disabilities not being represented . 😞
4) Many people with disabilities don't want to play a game that highlights their disability... they play the Sims 4 to escape for a little while the difficulty that is in their lives. I do understand that especially for younger people with disabilities that they just want to feel understood, loved, and respected! ❤️ But there are a lot of older people with disabilities who play this game too, and most of them don't want disabilities in the game. Some of them have dealt with their disabilities all their lives, and they realize that most of these conditions would not make for fun gameplay. ☹️
5) Which brings us to the most important reason. Many people with disabilities wouldn't want their conditions to be trivialized.😢 That is all to easy to happen in a game. One of the Sim Gurus a couple of years ago has stated that they were looking into having disabilities in the game, but they wanted to talk with actual people who had those disabilities to figure out if this would be a good thing to put into the game or not. If EA were to try this, it could go horribly wrong and hurt the very people they were trying to represent! I can also see a lot of mean people harming their disabled Sims just for "fun" 🤒😠😢 I think this is why we haven't seen disabilities in the game.
