EA_Mage said ''soon'' ! How ''soon'' ?

"Erpe;c-16423961" wrote:

"invisiblgirl;c-16423920" wrote:
> @Erpe said:
> @06Bon06 I can’t predict anything about TS5 except that I am quite sure that EA will attempt to make it as different from TS3 and TS4 as possible. Pets and other packs won’t be made in the same way again and we don’t even know yet what the main new idea in TS5 will be.
>
> Big EPs aren’t likely to return though because EA has clearly given them lower and lower priority. So my immediate guess would be only GPs and SPs as mentioned. But EA has also clearly been experimenting with different marketing strategies. So EA could of course also do yet another experiment with the Sims 5 packs. I just don’t believe that EA again will give EPs higher priority. But beside that I just don’t know what we may expect.

I think Seasons, if they do it (and I think they will) has to be an EP. There's just too much in the development to sell it for the price of a game pack. And no, I don't think they'll break it up, either, because of the basic engine for the change of seasons - it would be like selling cats in one game pack, and dogs in another. While each animal has its own characteristics, the creation of the pet life-form and all the interactions with various existing objects is where the real work was done, and not everyone would buy both packs. You don't want people paying $20 or $30 just to get cats when the development costs demand $60. (Breaking out small pets made more sense, because they're objects, so they don't need a whole lot of extra coding.)

You can't look at a pack just in terms of the number of objects. If Seasons only has three outerwear coats, people would be unhappy (and Llama forbid they try to make up for that by throwing in more coats with a stuff pack, because the coats will only work if you have Seasons). What actually costs money isn't the coats, but the coding for Sims to change into them when the weather is cold.

I do think it will be a holiday-season release, because it *is* so big, and they want maximum sales for the cost of development. I don't think we'll see another EP before that. Game packs and stuff packs, yes. (For all the brouhaha, My First Pet actually sold quite well.) In any event, I'm with everyone else, wanting a hint at what's coming next!

Seasons is mainly only about adding different kinds of weather and this is don’t even in free games like the Sims Freeplay. In Sims Freeplay the weather can be changed by issuing edicts or it changes automatically in some of the events. Adding spring, summer, autumn and winter is just another way to change the weather automatically.

New clothes is also very easy to add and is in Sims Freeplay mostly done for free as prices in the events even though some of it is also offered for high prices in the store. In a game like TS4 it could also either be added in free updates or in SPs.

So the different weather could even have been part of the basegame like EA already had planned for TS2. Or it could be added as part of a GP.

So why was Seasons even an EP in TS2 and TS3? There were no real reasons for this except that GPs hadn’t been invented yet. To justify Seasons as an EP EA then added more things like the plant sims in TS2 and the aliens in TS3. But such things could of course just as well be added in another GP for future Sims games.

Programming for weather is more complex than that, especially in a game like Sims 4 where you have multiple climates. Sims 3 may have been easier because each world was completely self-contained, but to do it right if it's snowing in Windenburg (northern climate) and you travel to Oasis Springs then you'd have only rain (desert climate), maybe lighter snow in Brindleton Bay or Newcrest and maybe just a heavy frost in Willow Creek. So you have to ensure the right weather shows up as the world is loading.

Then if you're going to have weather, you need to set the seasons properly so they make sense.

There are also the side effects of weather -- Sims dressing in the right type of clothing for the season, so you don't have them roasting in an Oasis Springs Summer, or freezing their rear end off in a Windenburg Winter. Probably will involve not just new CAS but also recoding existing CAS for the type of weather it's appropriate for (the ugly Christmas sweaters go into winterwear, for example, or the spaghetti strap tops for spring/summer. That's going to be a big job, probably on par with the gender patch.

Also will gardening be affected by the changing weather, with periods of time when plants are dormant unless you bring the plants inside somehow (using planter boxes/bowls). Finally, seasonal activities from snowball throwing in winter/water balloons in summer or if they'll tie in the current seasonal challenges into the game; it would be cool to have the Easter egg hunt activate in Spring, the PlantSims in Summer and the Dia de los Muertos in Autumn so there's no pressure to finish the collection in one season because you could work on it the next season.

So when you look at the pack as a whole, it's easy to see why it's big enough to require the budget (time and money) of an EP -- it's way too big for a GP.