If something new is shown at EA Play regarding The Sims Franchise, what do you think it will be?

"Loanet;c-16372710" wrote:
I still don't see Sims 5 coming for years yet. I've looked up news and it's all hearsay at best.

It's all "I heard this" and "Sims games were released about every 4 years in the past so it's sure to be coming out soon." I've searched and there's nothing - NOTHING - even remotely official apart from the vague comments that they haven't written off Sims 5 happening eventually.

Look at https://www.polygon.com/2013/5/6/4305058/the-sims-4-announced and the comments down the page. EA suddenly announced TS4 in May 2013 and told us that TS4 was in development. Then EA released it 16 months later in September 2014. So we usually don’t even know that a new basegame is in development earlier than 15-16 months before it is released even though it has been in development for years. The reason why EA doesn’t want to tell us before that clearly is that in the earlier stages everything can change and EA doesn’t want us to be angry or disappointed when features are changed or removed for the game again later.

Also in both 2012 and in 2013 EA even released 3 big EPs every year - and EA was still able to make TS4 anyway and surprise us by announcing it in May 2013!

Personally I don't think EA will make a Sims 5. Games take about 4 years to make and are expensive - and lately they've been focusing on porting Sims 4 to every other console, so they wouldn't have the inclination to hire a team to work on a whole new Sims 5 when these ports are making them money hand-over-fist. Why rush? EA doesn't NEED to make a Sims 5 game to milk it.

The console game is just a port of the PC game and mainly made in Finland. EA didn’t make it before this option became possible and much cheaper than EA had expected.

Yes EA needs a new basegame because about half of the simmers who bought the Sims 4 basegame back in 2014 most likely don’t play it anymore and EA therefore needs new simmers (mainly the now youngest teens) to start playing too to compensate. But the new young teens are less likely to buy an old basegame and even worse: they will usually prefer to only buy old discounted packs instead of more expensive new ones! So to get sales numbers up to the maximal again EA just badly needs to release a new basegame in 2019. Otherwise sales numbers will just continue to go down even further and become very low in a few years!

Some people make the argument that Sims 5 could take advantage of stronger computers. Well it's weird, but that's actually what Cats&Dogs just did - up the specs significantly so that you need a more powerful computer. MID-GAME. So future packs are already suddenly capable of taking advantage of higher specs.

They'll probably promote a new port and tell us which EP/GP we'll get next with teaser pictures.

I agree that EA doesn’t need a new basegame for newer and stronger computers. But EA still needs a new basegame to get the youngest generations of simmers interested in buying the new packs again too. EA is a company that will do anything to get as high sales numbers as possible to squeeze as much money out of us as possible! So EA will most likely release a new basegame late in 2019 and soon announce it - but let it again be so different from TS4 that as many customers as possible will want to buy both games! (But still make the packs for TS5 small and cheap anyway like EA did for TS4 too.)

Even though I don't think it will happen I hope its Sims 5 announcement Sims 4 has some great features but with the shortcuts like teen-adults bassinet-babies no CAW and cars still missing I'm ready for it to end.

"ChadSims2;c-16373958" wrote:
Even though I don't think it will happen I hope its Sims 5 announcement Sims 4 has some great features but with the shortcuts like teen-adults bassinet-babies no CAW and cars still missing I'm ready for it to end.

I won’t be surprised if EA announces both Seasons to be released later in 2018 and TS5 to be released about a year later in the autumn of 2019.

"DcD2510;c-16347175" wrote:

"TS1299;c-16347159" wrote:
The next Expansion Pack. I doubt it woll be The Sims 5, do it amd backlash will start to rise again.

Hmm, maybe best to wait until 2019 then.

I hope the sims 4 last several more years. There are so many things I want to see. Farms, farm animals like cows, chickens, pigs, sheep and goats, maybe some ducks for a pond, and koi for outside ponds/ fountains. More types of fruits, vegetables and grain. More types of small animals, lizards, snakes, Ferrets., rabbits, I know we have little rodents coming.... wish there were little mice as well as the larger rats, and hamsters.
Many people want horses too. I want to see winter vacation spots, summer vacation spots, cars, real apartments we can make ourselves, casino stuff, amusement park stuff, zoos/zoo animals. I want see the return of volley ball, pool tables. I want University, daycares, schools, and preteensi. I want to see theatres, skating, skateboarding, bikes, motorcycles, a superstar or acting expansion, swimming in oceans and many new active careers. There are just so many things they could add to this game, When they do add a sims 5, I hope they go back to buying clothes off of a rack, jewelry and makeup from a counter, instead of instantly put together outfits. Your sim should only be given one outfit, you should have to buy the rest. I also hope they bring the color wheel back for furniture and clothes.

"Zeldaboy180;c-16352156" wrote:

"Erpe;c-16351354" wrote:

"Zeldaboy180;c-16351284" wrote:

"Erpe;c-16347184" wrote:
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5! ;)

Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.

So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.

Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?

A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.

1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter

I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.

2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.

I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.

3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.

You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.

Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?

The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.


And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on pay

yes I saw that to

Probably an Expansion Pack reveal, if they were to give news of The Sims 5, especially after The Sims 4 has been receiving great quality dlc lately, I think there will be backlash and EA certainly doesn't need anymore of that after Mass Effect: Andromeda and Star Wars Battlefront 2. It will just make EA look excessively greedy, they should just focus on The Sims 4 as their main PC line and work on The Sims Mobile and Freeplay for their mobile line.

I hope it reveals seasons coming out because I will be so upset if Sims 5 is announced and they haven’t even put most things into Sims 4 yet. Here I’d be left with an unfinished game and I’m not willing to wait for all this stuff again in Sims 5. You can bet I wouldn’t be buying Sims 5 at all, unless it were a few years in and I could see it had great content. I think it would be a huge mistake to announce it now. But who knows. My speculation skills aren’t very good anymore as they concern this game. Some of the recent news and releases have puzzled me.

"keylimepiesims;c-16347238" wrote:

"TS1299;c-16347159" wrote:
The next Expansion Pack. I doubt it woll be The Sims 5, do it amd backlash will start to rise again.

They’ve never announced an EP at EAPlay before, and you’d think Cats & Dogs would have been the first, if they were to ever do so.
No I don’t think it will be a pack announcement, it’s either a teaser for TS5, or nothing. No EP is big enough or important enough to break the trend of ‘no announcement at EAPlay.’

I think the announcement might have more to do with Sims 4 Console rather than PC -- maybe an announcement about the next planned content release. Does Console have Cats & Dogs yet?

I also doubt that it would be Sims 5 -- that would immediately kill Sims 4 sales as people would start saving up their Simoleons for Sims 5.

"FreezerBunnyCowplant;c-16348748" wrote:
If they reveal The Sims 5, it better has pools, toddlers, ghosts, a Color Wheel and more open worlds from the beginning or I'm going to be mad

I'd settle for open neighborhoods with loading screens going between neighborhoods/worlds. I don't want to go back to being stuck in the same world for entire generations, or moving to another world but losing all your existing family/friend relationships like in Sims 3.

Not to speak ill of the departed, but it feels like the game did take a turn for the better with the change in management, meaning when Rachel Franklin left and we got Lyndsey Pearson who is a Sim veteran. The Sims is a unique game -- unlike games where you have a definitive end, the Sims are endless. Even if your original Sim dies, you can pick up and go one with any other Sim in the game. Barring save corruption, you can play the same save for years; I'm sure there are players who have been playing the same save since September 2014 when the game released. (not me, I've got too short an attention sp...oh look, shiny!). I think that takes a certain perspective and attitude that can't be easily found in the game industry.

Okay I'm going too throw my guess into this juggernaut of speculation.. It will be open neighborhoods as a free update, EP will be seasons and a GP with tweens in it.

Edit. P.s. I forgot cars