Toggle individual worlds on/off
As we all know, the number of worlds in Sims 4 has been increasing with every game or expansion pack, and unlike in previous Sims games all worlds you have available to you are active in every save. While this gives players with a large number of packs installed a lot of (figurative and literal) real estate to work with, it's also problematic:
- The sheer amount of lots can be paralyzing for players who want everything in their save to be just so.
- Without mods, there are no guardrails on where Sims can visit from or invite your Sim to, which hampers immersion for some players.
- Most importantly, every new world increases the amount of lots and Sims in every save file. Large save games are known to have problems with potentially game-ending corruption; we're already at the threshold where it's easy to push the game past the limit just by installing a specific pack (For Rent), and it's only going to get worse the more worlds EA piles on. Large saves are also slower to load. It's currently possible to mitigate this by bulldozing worlds you don't intend to play in, but doing so is a slow and tedious process that requires loading into Build Mode for each lot one by one.
It's obviously too late for EA to go back and go "maybe we should have fewer but larger and more-fleshed-out worlds," no matter how much I wish they would have. But there's still a potential solution that could prevent longtime players from having to uninstall or avoid downloading packs just to keep the game from breaking under its own weight.
I'm suggesting adding the ability to toggle individual worlds on and off in each save file's game options. Toggled-off worlds would be deleted from that save, hidden or grayed-out on the world select screen, with local events such as festivals occurring in that world disabled.
This has the benefit both of managing save file bloat/preventing corruption, and of giving players finer control over their game.
The only potential pitfall I can think of is packs whose core feature requires traveling to/living in their specific world, namely Discover University and High School Years. Mods already exist to allow the High School and Auditorium lots to be built and used outside of Copperdale, so presumably if this feature were implemented EA could do the same without much trouble. Uni is harder though, since a lot of university gameplay is tied to off-lot parts of Britechester. That makes me think it might not be possible to make all playable worlds possible to turn off. (And I picture hidden "worlds" like the GTW career zone and Magic Realm being exempt, of course.) But even having the option for most worlds would be a positive change.
I urge EA to consider adding this feature or something like it sooner rather than later, because if they're going to continue adding new worlds, the problem is only going to get worse.
