@king_of_simcity7 Agreed on both things.
Forcing Sims players online would be a massive misstep and hopefully, the SimCity experience taught the devs that.
SimCity also fell (iirc) partly on the fact that the servers simply couldn't deal with the number of players. The stability of any online feature has to be a must, as well as the accessibility of servers for a big amount of potential players at all times. We've seen enough downtime of the existing online features (Origin, gallery, forums, etc) that this needs to be a big concern when it comes to development.
If the regular and online Sims are separate (however potentially connectable) games, it will absolutely come up that one is getting more or sooner. We see it with Freeplay vs TS4, not always in a reasonable way - they're made by different studios, require different coding, have been out for different amounts of time, have different upsides and downsides - where FP is brought up as "why don't we have this in TS4 yet?".
We also see it with the differences between PC/Mac and consoles. The latter have been way behind on so many things, including base game release, but the team has progressed now to where the releases are almost parallel, which gives me hope for other similar issues that might crop up.
I think there's a way to bring some form of multiplayer to the franchise but without question, it needs to be optional and secondary to the single-player core.
(while they're at the musing over online features, I'd love to see them bring back to TS4, preferably without a time limit, the live quests that many players missed out on. But that's off-topic to this thread)
