Instead of sims 5, double sims 4’s life span

I wish I shared your enthusiasm. The developers have also confirmed that they intend to double this iteration's lifespan (Grant revealed that he sees at least another 3 years for The Sims 4 - sadly in my opinion).

The developers are not going to be able to rewrite the code. They can make small fixes and slightly larger additions as they release more packs and updates but they're not going to be able to change what The Sims 4 is at its core. EA will also continue to give The Sims 4 smaller budgets than previous iterations. The Sims 4 base game obviously launched with a bunch of missing features and while some of the biggest ones have been added back, there are still a great number missing and some that are never coming back (Create A Style and Open World, confirmed by the developers).

Every expansion pack has also had limited features compared to previous comparable ones. EA / Maxis have tried to distract away from this by introducing one big new feature so the missing content is less obvious. Get to Work has elements of Open for Business and Ambitions but lacks Open for Business's restaurants, home businesses and ticket machines while also only including 3 professions as opposed to the 7 (plus self-employed careers) that were added for Ambitions. They distracted people by bringing back businesses after their absence from The Sims 3 while also combining it with active professions but the active professions essentially recycled the system used for group outings, parties and dates.

Get Together added the very welcome and nicely customisable clubs but barely added anything extra barring a café, DJ set and a few basic bar games. Compare that to the bowling alleys, hot tubs, celebrity systems, cars, pool tables and various instruments that were released in similar themed packs.

City Living gave us a greater number of outfits to showcase diversity, which was great, but with more limited festivals than The Sims 3: Seasons and basically a bunch of nice aesthetics. Apartments were more limited than they've ever been than any previous Sims game confined to one world and elevators are not functional items that we're able to use in Build Mode anymore for the first time since elevators were introduced in the series.

Cats and Dogs again tried to distract us with its aesthetically pleasing looking pets and great number of breeds and more accessible pet customisation but cut horses, the ability for kids to walk dogs, the ability to control or even view your pets' needs, the ability for pets to sleep on beds and couldn't even bring back pet houses for the My First Pet's Stuff because they wanted to focus their resources on creating cheaper content by re-skinning existing objects in the game. Not to mention the complete lack of small pets, which we probably won't get any beyond fish and rodents now (all previous iterations have always had birds and reptiles). This is due to the whole release fiasco with My First Pet Stuff.

And while people are delighted that Seasons is bringing much need atmosphere into the game, there are still cut corners here with them being unable to use the resources to include hail, sunburn, tanning or snow-depth, things which have been included in every other seasons pack from before (sun-tanning and sunburn was introduced in The Sims 2: Seasons and was also available in The Sims 2: Bon Voyage). We won't see these return but they'll try to distract us by including custom holidays (a great much appreciated feature by the way but one which uses a similar system to the club system and tries to distract us from the cut corners in other parts of the game).

I believe that The Sims 4 is a very limited game, given a much lower budget by EA than previous games in the franchise because EA knows that there's no other game in the vein of The Sims in the market and the fans feel compelled to buy and defend it, as they have no other choice. This is why they can release a lower budget game and release content in a piecemeal way. The developers will try to fix what they can, defend their inability to fix or introduce certain features by momentarily distracting the fans with a shiny new feature until the next one comes along.

I'm not saying people are lying if they enjoy the game and The Sims 4 has introduced some very nice features, that I hope will see carried forward. It's certainly the most intuitive when it comes to customising characters, building and online features (but one of the least intuitive in terms of actual gameplay - by a long shot - in my opinion).

I can only hope that EA are seeing the more negative reception to The Sims 4 and are prepared to put the resources back into Maxis so they can release a proper triple AA game and not repeat the same mistakes they made with this game and Sim City. A longer lifespan will allow those who enjoy The Sims 4 to invest more time in a game they've poured so much time into buying content for while those of us who are bitterly disappointed with The Sims 4 can hope the extra development time for The Sims 5 will bring some spark back to the series.

One word in reaction to the title: no. Please start developing Sims 5 right now if you haven't already. Take all the time you need and make it good.

No.
TS5 needs to happen eventually.
It needs to be made without the mistakes that were made in previous versions.
TS4 can not be fixed, as many of the problems are caused at root.

Sims 4 has already has been said to have at least 3 more years by that time I'll be ready for Sims 5. The only thing that could change my mind and want to make Sims 4 last even longer is if they can give us the basics such as CAW, unleashed babies, preteens and cars... tired of not having such simple things this far in.

"Lauri_Anton;d-945695" wrote:
Sims 4 has amazing graphics. They will look great even after multiple years, but the clunky game needs to be rewritten (yes, from scratch pretty much), if it wants to be remembered as the best Sims game so far (and yes, it is a possibility).

This all comes down to the Sims 4 obviously being rushed out. The code was incomplete and lacked many essential features (that now literally every player yearns desperately for), yet it was released. Now devs can’t implement cars, swimming in lakes, story progression, smart sims & other necessities without rewriting the code.

Now that Sims 4 is selling better than ever, I hope EA realizes that Sims 4 is actually worth investing in and gives it the budget it deserved from the beginning. If the code was rewritten the life span of sims 4 would grow vastly, because people wouldn’t need to get sims 5 to be what sims 4 wanted to be - yet failed.

This wouldn’t lead to any lower incomes to EA due to several reasons. First of all, there’s the fact that many simmers still haven’t bought sims 4 as they wait for Sims 5 to arrive with proper base coding. These players won’t buy Sims 4, not even after the 3 years of promised content, if the game lacks the features they require. After 3 years they might not even buy the Sims 5, as they may have forgotten the whole game during the 7+ years of wait for a proper Sims game.

Another great income related reason to rewrite the code is that players will be more willing to spend money on dlc as they know what the game won’t die off soon. Also, more years of dlc to Sims 4 with proper code could mean that Sims 4 could end up with loads of dlc, way more than the previous titles, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Sims 4 could grow it’s playerbase vastly if it had plethora of content for all types of players. In addition, the players that buy all dlc no matter what would still buy all the dlc, even more happily so, because the game would be the best Sims title ever.

Last but not least, rewriting Sims 4 is way cheaper than developing Sims 5. Sims 4 already has a lot of amazing assets that can be reused (such as graphics, sounds, dlc and plans). In a nutshell, give Sims 4 the budget it requires to rewrite the game for more $$$ and happier players. The developers for sure already know what needs to be implemented in the new code.

First thing: Its impossible for them to rewrite the base game code.
But, I've been arguing about this for some time now. Sims 2 used a bunch of content from Sims 1 Era (from Sims 1, Sims 1 console, Sims: Bustin out...). Most of those things were objects that they ported for the game. Want a proof? Do you remember the 2x2 table that the Newbies had in their house? You can easily find it in Sims 2.
A huge amount of games are maded using its predecessor. Those sports games that have a new iteration released every year are the ones that most use this tool to make their games cheapear and quickier to produce.
Sims 5 should start a new era in the game development for the sims franchise. Instead of restarting everything from 0 they could just port the game in a better/less bugged environment, rewrite the code correcting errors that can not be fixed during the life of the game, port objects/clothes and hairstyles to add a bigger variety of those instead of just recolouring the same objects for all the packs.
This would make the game faster to produce, including more content in each pack, including less bugs, and many of us that are playing the game since forever would also feel more nostalgic while playing it. Sometimes a miss some objects, interactions and other things from previous games, and unfortunatelly i know that i will never have that in Sims 4 (like pretending throwing a stick for my dog like just to laugh of how cute he reacts to being fooled in sims 2).
Imagine if Sims 4 Cats and Dogs were actually Sims 3: Pets, but including mroe content and being priced the same as we ever paid.
Yes, they cant just rewrite the game and release that as a update for those who have bought it, but they can port the game for a better graphics and better developed game.
They have to stop throwing the entire game to the trash and starting over again, this is extremely dumb.

"SeanT346;c-16647750" wrote:
I wish I shared your enthusiasm. The developers have also confirmed that they intend to double this iteration's lifespan (Grant revealed that he sees at least another 3 years for The Sims 4 - sadly in my opinion).

The developers are not going to be able to rewrite the code. They can make small fixes and slightly larger additions as they release more packs and updates but they're not going to be able to change what The Sims 4 is at its core. EA will also continue to give The Sims 4 smaller budgets than previous iterations. The Sims 4 base game obviously launched with a bunch of missing features and while some of the biggest ones have been added back, there are still a great number missing and some that are never coming back (Create A Style and Open World, confirmed by the developers).

Every expansion pack has also had limited features compared to previous comparable ones. EA / Maxis have tried to distract away from this by introducing one big new feature so the missing content is less obvious. Get to Work has elements of Open for Business and Ambitions but lacks Open for Business's restaurants, home businesses and ticket machines while also only including 3 professions as opposed to the 7 (plus self-employed careers) that were added for Ambitions. They distracted people by bringing back businesses after their absence from The Sims 3 while also combining it with active professions but the active professions essentially recycled the system used for group outings, parties and dates.

Get Together added the very welcome and nicely customisable clubs but barely added anything extra barring a café, DJ set and a few basic bar games. Compare that to the bowling alleys, hot tubs, celebrity systems, cars, pool tables and various instruments that were released in similar themed packs.

City Living gave us a greater number of outfits to showcase diversity, which was great, but with more limited festivals than The Sims 3: Seasons and basically a bunch of nice aesthetics. Apartments were more limited than they've ever been than any previous Sims game confined to one world and elevators are not functional items that we're able to use in Build Mode anymore for the first time since elevators were introduced in the series.

Cats and Dogs again tried to distract us with its aesthetically pleasing looking pets and great number of breeds and more accessible pet customisation but cut horses, the ability for kids to walk dogs, the ability to control or even view your pets' needs, the ability for pets to sleep on beds and couldn't even bring back pet houses for the My First Pet's Stuff because they wanted to focus their resources on creating cheaper content by re-skinning existing objects in the game. Not to mention the complete lack of small pets, which we probably won't get any beyond fish and rodents now (all previous iterations have always had birds and reptiles). This is due to the whole release fiasco with My First Pet Stuff.

And while people are delighted that Seasons is bringing much need atmosphere into the game, there are still cut corners here with them being unable to use the resources to include hail, sunburn, tanning or snow-depth, things which have been included in every other seasons pack from before (sun-tanning and sunburn was introduced in The Sims 2: Seasons and was also available in The Sims 2: Bon Voyage). We won't see these return but they'll try to distract us by including custom holidays (a great much appreciated feature by the way but one which uses a similar system to the club system and tries to distract us from the cut corners in other parts of the game).

I believe that The Sims 4 is a very limited game, given a much lower budget by EA than previous games in the franchise because EA knows that there's no other game in the vein of The Sims in the market and the fans feel compelled to buy and defend it, as they have no other choice. This is why they can release a lower budget game and release content in a piecemeal way. The developers will try to fix what they can, defend their inability to fix or introduce certain features by momentarily distracting the fans with a shiny new feature until the next one comes along.

I'm not saying people are lying if they enjoy the game and The Sims 4 has introduced some very nice features, that I hope will see carried forward. It's certainly the most intuitive when it comes to customising characters, building and online features (but one of the least intuitive in terms of actual gameplay - by a long shot - in my opinion).

I can only hope that EA are seeing the more negative reception to The Sims 4 and are prepared to put the resources back into Maxis so they can release a proper triple AA game and not repeat the same mistakes they made with this game and Sim City. A longer lifespan will allow those who enjoy The Sims 4 to invest more time in a game they've poured so much time into buying content for while those of us who are bitterly disappointed with The Sims 4 can hope the extra development time for The Sims 5 will bring some spark back to the series.

The SIms is a franchise of high fame (one of the most sold in the world), but is being treated with such disrespect having so little money invested in its production, that if it continues like this, Sims 5 will be even worse.
Luckily the same Cities producer: Skylines should be getting ready to compete with The SIms, because that's what EA needs to learn to value their fans.
And, Sims 3 took all Sims 2 lifespan to be developed, and SIms 4 also took all Sims 3 lifespan to be developed, but it was revealed last year that TS5 is not being produced. Maybe they were producing it in secret and didnt want Sims 4 to suffer if they revealed that, and will have more production time then all the other sims games had, or they started its production just this year, but... yes, i agree with you. Sims 5 need the extra development time.
Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo's most respected video game developer and he once said: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad!".

"JoAnne65;c-16647759" wrote:
One word in reaction to the title: no. Please start developing Sims 5 right now if you haven't already. Take all the time you need and make it good.

I’m pretty sure sims 5 will be lacking the same features as sims 4, or maybe it will lack in graphics or cas, but I doubt that they will be able to do anything better for it. Also my point is that I don’t understand how could they let this game stay as the flop that we currently know it as.

"Lauri_Anton;c-16648496" wrote:

"JoAnne65;c-16647759" wrote:
One word in reaction to the title: no. Please start developing Sims 5 right now if you haven't already. Take all the time you need and make it good.

I’m pretty sure sims 5 will be lacking the same features as sims 4, or maybe it will lack in graphics or cas, but I doubt that they will be able to do anything better for it. Also my point is that I don’t understand how could they let this game stay as the flop that we currently know it as.

I share your pessimism but you never know... All I know is that my pessimism over Sims 4’s future in relation to myself is even darker because that game has shortcomings that hinder me in really embracing it. I sort of enjoy it, that’s as far as it apparently is able to take me and it’s not enough to be interested in a years long future for the game for me. I also want to be tickled and triggered and challenged by the game, next to enjoying it.

Since the same company will do Sims 5 (if it ever happens) I wouldn't have high hopes. As a long-time fan of the franchise since Sims 1, I'm extremely disappointed in EA. Especially now that I play many other games by other gaming companies - EA's faults are glaring and very, very hard to justify.

"JoAnne65;c-16647759" wrote:
One word in reaction to the title: no. Please start developing Sims 5 right now if you haven't already. Take all the time you need and make it good.

I'm hoping this is why TS4 has such a protracted schedule.

If they're doing preliminary planning or already working on TS5, more power to them and godspeed!