Increased budgets for packs?

It's to be expected, The Sims 4's fanbase has only continued to grow since launch with every monthly addition and now that console players can finally experience The Sims the way it was originally meant to be experienced would likely have upped their fanbase and profits by a fair amount.

If you notice, the budget for each pack seems to increase each year with packs getting slightly bigger than the last ones and having better quality and more long-lasting and day to day systems being added.

If their overall budget for packs has increased then they sure as hell should increase the budget for art assets. As it currently stands, the modeling and texturing of the objects is just awful. The washing machine from Laundry Day for example, very blurry textures and way too low of a polycount. Does Maxis think we all play TS4 on a tiny 720p screen and thus wouldn’t notice?

Maybe now that toddlers are out, they have more staff to work on packs.

I'm actually really excited for the pack and even consider buying it now after watching the stream. I did say I wasn't gonna buy any more packs for the game but you know, gotta support them if they're actually putting out good stuff.

However

I'm still sceptical. The higher amount of detail and attention as well as content that went into Laundry Day Stuff is easily explained by it being a community driven SP. It was heavily shaped by community feedback, and just from a marketing standpoint it would've looked bad for them not to put a lot of effort into this one. Not only would the pack probably have been mediocre but it also would've shown a large disinterest in their players.
And well, Game Packs are the strongest packs TS4 has to offer so no surprises there.

I'm waiting for this year's EP to be released to see if the quality of those improved. If they actually have a bigger budget now and can finally do what they wanted to do from the start, I'm all here for it.

I was also thinking about the budget lately, although I was more of thinking that the budgets the sp and gp teams have seem to be large enough for what they are suppose to be while the ep budget seems to be limited for what it is suppose to be.

I don't know, personally this new vacation pack seems to be of similar quality to the last two gps released, I haven't seen anything that seems to put it far above the rest of them. If dine out was less buggy it seems like it would also be up there with Vampires/parenthood and potentially JA so I just think the gps are as strong as usual.

Laundry could very well have way more, I don't have any sp so I can't really tell, I feel like it was similar to bowling in terms of new stuff (or at least I get the sense and new skill/ & venue is roughly the same as extra new animations and several moodlets)

I think as the game has gone on things have become easier to make and the different pack teams are more aware with what kinds of things they are able to do and cover.
For instance for gps outdoor retreat was relatively limited especially compared to the scope of JA now (that much I think we can tell from the trailers already.) However at the point OR came out gps were a new thing and the studio still needed to figure out exactly how well they would sell and what level of content was needed to make them different from sp of ep.
JA also has an advantage because the coding for how vacations and rental properties work was already written for OR, that means the gp team could put more into other things, like coding an extra skill for instance.
JA also was able to use pre-existing code from CL for the vendors at the cantina, again allowing them to work more on other things, a new type of collectible perhaps.

So yeah I think the budget is similar to what it was before, the teams just have more systems to build on and play with now so it is easier and cheaper to make a pack.

@BeJaWa I’d say you are on the right track. Looking at the new GP there are several parallels with other packs in regards to the selection of offerings. OR implemented the vacation system that all future vacation packs will basically use - so that frees up a lot of development resources. The market place type area seems to be using a system that’s derived from the market place in CL. The Cantina is a modified bar lot.

I don’t think they have a bigger budget, I think they are just getting better at reusing what they have without making it super obvious that it’s a revision. Now that isn’t a bad thing in this case, because it clearly allowed them to use the development budget on other areas of the pack.

"imhappy;c-16327846" wrote:
Maybe now that toddlers are out, they have more staff to work on packs.

I think they did borrow a few devs from each team to help work on toddlers; I seem to recall Sarah mentioned it in her blog about the toddler development process. When you consider how much stuff we got (for free!) along with the toddlers it was practically an SP worth of content (furniture, skill items, CASsets, etc.) plus the work of reprogramming existing objects to work for toddlers (like the dollhouses and toybox toys).

With the toddler project completed and launched, that may have freed up some budget money that could be spread out between the other teams. I think the current staff of devs also have a good knowledge of the potentials and limitations of the game engine; you can look at the difference between Outdoor Retreat and the Jungle Pack just to tell the difference. I wonder if it would be possible to go back and modify OR to add some more features?

"ChadSims2;c-16328251" wrote:

"BeJaWa;c-16328130" wrote:
So yeah I think the budget is similar to what it was before, the teams just have more systems to build on and play with now so it is easier and cheaper to make a pack.

I agree they are just using systems in place reusing content in past packs as "new"

It acutally makes sense if they have a system in place to adapt it for new packs -- that way they have more time and money to develop actual new content. With Jungle Pack, they can reuse the rental system developed for OR in the housing system for the Jungle Adventure, so they could devote time to developing the various traps and such to enable access to the ruins. The food cart and selling tables are adapted from CL so they don't have to establish a new system. I mean, if you've got something in place, why re-invent the wheel?

I actually like that they reuse certain systems already in place and spend their time on new gameplay and conten instead. The market place here also makes me hopeful they'll include one with the witches GP ^^

I think what also ironically could've helped them attain a bigger budget was the fact that C&D was the highest-grossing EP for the whole game, and since EA/Maxis definitely took notice in that, they gave them a nice pat on the head and increased their development budget for all teams. That, combined with the toddler redemption may well have given them enough breathing room to give us consumers a lot more of what we want. Although I cannot agree with how EA/Maxis has run things, recognizing that Sims 4 is still churning out ample profit and rewarding them with a bigger budget would be a good move to do.

"jackjack_k;d-935126" wrote:

Maybe I'm just not looking at this right, but Laundry Stuff literally had 4 unique Gameplay items (if we include Washers and Dryers as the same item) and probably has the biggest system we've seen in a Stuff Pack to date by quite a bit.

And now Jungle Adventure has come out, with a world that's 3x as big as the what we got with Vampires and much bigger than Outdoor Retreat, and there's more skills, gameplay items and overall animations than what we've seen for a GP so far by quite a significant chunk (Vampires seemed to be the most Animation heavy so far and I'd say this eclipses it by a fair amount).

I'm thinking maybe with the console release confirmed, they've been able to up the budget for the packs because they know the audience has increased?

What do you guys think?

We'll see. I'm not going to say it's a definitely yes until I see the next EP. No shade to the EP team but EP's have been kind of terrible and underwhelming on TS4. To me the best are the first two and still, somethings could have been done much better (either by having extra time, or extra budget) but I really don't know the reason as to why. It's clear though that EP's spend a lot of budget on working for new TS4 assets and then end up by not being able to deliver on the gameplay aspect. It only leads me to believe making new assets for this game is more expensive than they planned. To me the perfect examples of this are C&D and CL.

CL barely has any new gameplay or even interactions and it uses more BG stuff on the festivals and on the lot traits than anything else. It's clear they spent a lot just to add up to the TS4 world system with the neighborhood icons, higher res back drops, camera tweaks and spawners for festivals. The apartment gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, karaoke bars are boring, unnecessary use of the singing skill, no roomate service etc.

C&D spent a lot on adding cats and dogs themselves and reworking CAS features but then gameplay wise there's not a lot at all. Not even actual pet contests with dedicated NPC's and venue, recycling both Dine Out and GTW for the vet career. It honestly feels like only 70% of the EP was completed in comparison to previous pet EP's.