The Sims 4 will continue into 2018!

"Erpe;c-16236830" wrote:

"Scobre;c-16236801" wrote:

"jackjack_k;c-16235737" wrote:


I’m almost certain the game Patrick Kelly worked on isn’t even The Sims 4.

Patrick Kelly said EA were working on two games, Olympus and Icarus. He said he worked on Olympus.

On the Honeywell interview, he admits they went with an entirely new engine for The Sims 4, rather than the one he worked on (Olympus). Which if they were working on 2 games, leaves Icarus.

However, everyone seems to ignore this HUGE detail, just because Olympus is referenced in the game files.



Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that a massive MMO hosting hundreds of players was supposed to fit inside Willow Creek and Oasis Springs.

Which I find a little hard to believe.

I don't. I heard otherwise that Sims 4 was going to be an online game at one time early on in development. I don't know why Maxis is holding back, but it doesn't seem like the Sims 4 origins will be clear to the main public from what I gather until its development ends. It actually isn't that hard to believe. SimCity worlds are very similar in size to the Sims 4 neighborhoods. There are actually screenshots of Sims Olympus in the Sims 4 game files too it seems: http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Olympus Sims games always take a lot of years of development, so I doubt that Maxis would have dumped all their assets they worked on so far to release the Sims 4 in time. It would be silly to do so. I actually asked some of the Gurus about some of the screenshots and some of them were testing the Sims 4 in an Unity engine like the rock with the grass.

The thing that should make it clear for everybody that Olympus wasn’t intended to be Sims 4 is the screenshots which clearly shows so simplified and poor graphics that Olympus must have been intended for another platform and most likely Facebook. Also TS4 can’t have been intended to have been a free online game with updates instead of expansions just like the Sims Freeplay is.

But Olympus and Icarus were two different projects and they could both have been about TS4. Just with Olympus as an online version of TS4 for another platform and Icarus intended as the PC version. We can guess all we want. But we will never know all the details anyway. People just want Olympus to be the reason why the basegame for TS4 got simplified, babies, no toddlers, simplified teens and no open world when the truth clearly is that EA just wanted TS4 to be a different type of Sims game with focus on multitasking, happiness and partying and also wanted to save money by cutting down on everything that wasn’t about that. Besides that the open world was omitted to make multitasking possible and still to have so low minimum requirements that all simmers could buy and play the game.

You obviously didn’t play the most recent SimCity. It also has extremely low poly models, because it was built as an online game - as was Sims 4 originally which is why they look like that in those screenshots. PK also says since they switched to offline they would probably add more detail to the models, which they clearly did but they are still low poly.

The Sims 4 was originally planned to be an online multiplayer game. In addition to those early screenshots there is a promotional video that leaked clearly advertising The Sims 4 as an online multiplayer product.

https://youtu.be/MAPuMqOmBzY

"drake_mccarty;c-16236869" wrote:

"Erpe;c-16236830" wrote:

"Scobre;c-16236801" wrote:

"jackjack_k;c-16235737" wrote:


I’m almost certain the game Patrick Kelly worked on isn’t even The Sims 4.

Patrick Kelly said EA were working on two games, Olympus and Icarus. He said he worked on Olympus.

On the Honeywell interview, he admits they went with an entirely new engine for The Sims 4, rather than the one he worked on (Olympus). Which if they were working on 2 games, leaves Icarus.

However, everyone seems to ignore this HUGE detail, just because Olympus is referenced in the game files.



Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that a massive MMO hosting hundreds of players was supposed to fit inside Willow Creek and Oasis Springs.

Which I find a little hard to believe.

I don't. I heard otherwise that Sims 4 was going to be an online game at one time early on in development. I don't know why Maxis is holding back, but it doesn't seem like the Sims 4 origins will be clear to the main public from what I gather until its development ends. It actually isn't that hard to believe. SimCity worlds are very similar in size to the Sims 4 neighborhoods. There are actually screenshots of Sims Olympus in the Sims 4 game files too it seems: http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Olympus Sims games always take a lot of years of development, so I doubt that Maxis would have dumped all their assets they worked on so far to release the Sims 4 in time. It would be silly to do so. I actually asked some of the Gurus about some of the screenshots and some of them were testing the Sims 4 in an Unity engine like the rock with the grass.

The thing that should make it clear for everybody that Olympus wasn’t intended to be Sims 4 is the screenshots which clearly shows so simplified and poor graphics that Olympus must have been intended for another platform and most likely Facebook. Also TS4 can’t have been intended to have been a free online game with updates instead of expansions just like the Sims Freeplay is.

But Olympus and Icarus were two different projects and they could both have been about TS4. Just with Olympus as an online version of TS4 for another platform and Icarus intended as the PC version. We can guess all we want. But we will never know all the details anyway. People just want Olympus to be the reason why the basegame for TS4 got simplified, babies, no toddlers, simplified teens and no open world when the truth clearly is that EA just wanted TS4 to be a different type of Sims game with focus on multitasking, happiness and partying and also wanted to save money by cutting down on everything that wasn’t about that. Besides that the open world was omitted to make multitasking possible and still to have so low minimum requirements that all simmers could buy and play the game.

You obviously didn’t play the most recent SimCity. It also has extremely low poly models, because it was built as an online game - as was Sims 4 originally which is why they look like that in those screenshots. PK also says since they switched to offline they would probably add more detail to the models, which they clearly did but they are still low poly.

The Sims 4 was originally planned to be an online multiplayer game. In addition to those early screenshots there is a promotional video that leaked clearly advertising The Sims 4 as an online multiplayer product.

https://youtu.be/MAPuMqOmBzY

I don’t disagree that TS4 originally also was intended to have online options which then was one of the many early ideas which didn’t make it to the final PC game.

You are right that I didn’t play the most recent SimCity game (except SimCity BuildIt a couple of years ago). But the games aren’t compatible because the houses in SimCity serve another purpose. There are many more houses but no sims.

The leaked videos from Olympus are a mystery because they look like something from an at least 10 years ago mobile game or Facebook game and surely not like anything that within reason could have been intended for a big PC game like TS4. But we all know that EA earlier also made versions of TS2 and TS3 for several other platforms and that those versions were very different from the PC versions. Therefore I don’t find it unlikely if Olympus also was intended to be a version of TS4 for such a platform and sharing some of the engine with the PC game.

I can’t believe that TS4 ever was intended to instead have become something like a PC version of the Sims Freeplay for several reasons:
1. It then would have been much easier just to tell EA Firemonkeys to make such a versions instead (which EA instead has avoided because EA fears that such a version could steal customers from TS4).
2. TS4 as a pure MMO game would have made it impossible for EA to sell all those expansions every year and therefore have cost EA hundreds of millions of dollars.
3. TS4 as a MMO game would have needed much less detailed graphics or the load times would have become so huge that nobody would have played the game. But such less detailed graphics would have been a disaster for the sales numbers to people who like their big PC screens and the high resolution on such screens.

So I am quite sure that EA only considered to give TS4 a little more online options than what we see in the current game. Even so the idea was dropped because of the problems which mainly were:
1. TS4 is based on expansions which means that not everybody have the same game. But visiting other simmers who have objects or even worlds that you don’t have yourselves would mean that all this should be downloaded which would take many minutes. But who would like to wait many minutes just to let one of the sims visit a house played by another simmer?
2. Graphics would have to become too simplified for it to work in a reasonable way.
3. The game would have to be playable offline too and many simmers wouldn’t have played online anyway.

So the disadvantages would have become much bigger than the advantages. I am sure that EA is still working on the idea though. But for it to work EA still needs people to get even much faster internet and to find a better way to make the (next?) game become playable online too.

Sims Freeplay is a mobile game. Who said anything about making Sims 4 like freeplay? They were going online, that was EA’s focus for awhile - always online.

If anything Sims 4 would have been similar to SimCity (not Build it, that is a completely different game). Low poly models, small environments, and a heavy emphasis on social connectivity between players. EA could have continued to sell expansions, game packs, and stuff packs. Online would, and clearly did (EP’s now are tiny compared to previous games), change the makeup of those packs - but it wouldn’t prohibit DLC at all.

"drake_mccarty;c-16237048" wrote:
Sims Freeplay is a mobile game. Who said anything about making Sims 4 like freeplay? They were going online, that was EA’s focus for awhile - always online.

I play other games which are available in versions with identical gameplay both for PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Kindle. The idea that mobile games are different from PC games is obsolete and from a time where mobile devices had way too little memory and ram compared to PCs. But now also mobile devices have many GBs of both RAM and memory. The only difference is the size of PC hard drives and the memory in mobile devices where I “only” have 128 MB on my iPad. But this only means that I can’t install as many big games on my iPad Air 2 as I can on my PC.

If anything Sims 4 would have been similar to SimCity (not Build it, that is a completely different game). Low poly models, small environments, and a heavy emphasis on social connectivity between players. EA could have continued to sell expansions, game packs, and stuff packs. Online would, and clearly did (EP’s now are tiny compared to previous games), change the makeup of those packs - but it wouldn’t prohibit DLC at all.

I have already commented on this. But I partly agree. The problem is though that TS4 couldn’t have become a real MMO game for several reasons - only a game that could be played offline and just a little online. But in the end EA removed the online options (except for Origin and the cloud) because they would have become too limited to be worth it anyway. I am just curious to see if EA has managed to add more online options to the next big Sims games and how much.

Thank goodness they never went through with making The Sims 4 an online only game! They can have fun online features like The Gallery and it works wonderfully but no need to take it all the way. Really makes you wonder how stupid they would be for even considering taking away the whole identity of a single-player creative experience that is the success of The Sims?! I am so happy it wasn't Sims that had the fiasco that was the latest SimCity. They had a successful series in Sims City games and destroyed it by changing its core identity as god single-player experience to constant online experience. Hope they really learned from that one! Leave my Simmy game alone! lol

"Erpe;c-16236796" wrote:

"jackjack_k;c-16235737" wrote:

"@Writin_Reg;c-16235704" wrote:

"Erpe;c-16235502" wrote:

"drake_mccarty;c-16235443" wrote:

"Erpe;c-16234191" wrote:

"drake_mccarty;c-16234165" wrote:

"TS1299;c-16234043" wrote:

"divine56;c-16233925" wrote:
> @TheGoodOldGamer said:
> The gurus have made it pretty clear they intend to support this game longer than any other in the series. Obviously other circumstances can come up to change those plans at some point, but part of the whole live service thing is to make updating easier n all that. The gallery has done a lot to promote creativity within the community as well.
>
> I get the feeling a lot of the doom n gloom is propagated by people not wanting/not liking the idea of further support, rather than any actual evidence to back up such claims.

The Sims 4 should end and they should revive the Sims 3, which is by far the best game of the serie. I don't know why it should be the longest game that they will support, it makes no sense!

Just because you don't want the game it doesn't mean they should end it. A lot of people bought The Sims 4 because they loved the game and and they are hoping for EA/Maxis to return the features they loves from previous games such as Seasons and Universities in the game. Scrap the game as soon as possible and market The Sims 5 will result to angry fans, and many will boycott the Sims 5 seeing that EA may not give a game that is expanded to its fullest. Add the controversy that the publisher had with Star Wars Battlefront II, Mass Effect Andromeda, and UFC 3, a lot are already boycotting EA, and if EA release Sims 5 without expanding Sims 4 to its fullest potential, angry fans will result to boycotting of Sims 5 which will result to the end of this franchise. It may be a waste of money for you but for others it wasn't.

If EA can release a rushed, sloppy offline game built in less than two years from an low quality online game why on earth would players boycott The Sims 5? Clearly you don’t understand how easily people are sold on Sims things.

They could release a Sims 5 that was worse than 4 and people would still buy it, and some people would still defend the bad choices made for it.

If you only count the time from the first announcement of a new basegame to the actual release of the basegame then all the basegames for TS2, TS3 and TS4 were made in only 15 months for each basegame. So there isn’t anything new there ;)

But I think that we all know that each new basegame took longer time than this. So why didn’t EA announce them earlier? Well, I think that the reason always was that in the early stages the developers are mainly just experimenting and everything can therefore change. EA then likely doesn’t want to announce anything before EA at least knows some of the main new things to be included in the game.

Simmers wouldn’t likely buy the new game if it became too similar to one of the previous games. So EA just want the games to be as different as possible. But then most simmers just buy all the games and even all the cheap SPs out of curiosity. EA sure knows this :)

@Erpe I am not counting the months from announcement to release. Back when TS4 first launched, and the Guru’s used to hold Q&A sessions, one of them told us that The Sims 4 was in development for about a year and a half, two years max. That post is probably buried 10 feet deep by now, but that was in essence their way of admitting that the offline game was not in development for very long. A little nod to the fact that The Sims 4 spent most of its development time as a completely different game, leaving little time for big changes when they dropped online.

You also don’t need to post a timeline at all. No Sims game was completely developed in 1-2 years, even Sims 4. However their mention of 1.5-2 years was a nod to the game spending most of its development as an online game, which is something they have never been allowed to confirm directly. I know you have a hard time believing that, don’t know why, but it’s old news regardless.

According to http://honeywellsims4news.tumblr.com/post/63437610043/more-corroboration-for-patrick-kelly-the-sims-4 development on TS4 started already in 2008 and Patrick Kelley tells on this link that he only knew its development until 2012 where he stopped working on the game. So it seems that the development of TS4 even started before TS3 was released. I think that this tells better than anything else that EA plans quite exactly when each new basegame should be released many years before they tell us about it and that the basegames are planned to be released every 5 years.

Simmers seem to not understand this and to believe that the developers know exactly how to make the next Sims game even before they actually begin working on it. But I am quite sure that the opposite is true and that the reason a new basegame takes so many years to develop is that they don’t know anything when they start - except that the next big Sims game has to be very different from all previous released games and to have a new main focus. To obtain that they then have to make a lot of experiments and to come up with a lot of ideas which they then later can choose between. For the Sims 4 Olympus was just one of those ideas. But still an idea that they most likely dropped at an early stage of TS4’s development. (I just don’t think that EA’s top managers ever would have allowed them to drop something that they had worked so much on as most simmers seem to believe and even without firing some of the responsible producers!)

Erpe - PK was part of the team that worked on the original game engine - not the game itself by the way.

I’m almost certain the game Patrick Kelly worked on isn’t even The Sims 4.

Patrick Kelly said EA were working on two games, Olympus and Icarus. He said he worked on Olympus.

On the Honeywell interview, he admits they went with an entirely new engine for The Sims 4, rather than the one he worked on (Olympus). Which if they were working on 2 games, leaves Icarus.

However, everyone seems to ignore this HUGE detail, just because Olympus is referenced in the game files.



Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that a massive MMO hosting hundreds of players was supposed to fit inside Willow Creek and Oasis Springs.

Which I find a little hard to believe.

I agree. It seems more to me like EA was considering to also make a new Facebook Sims game or something like that. But we will never know because the game was never actually released anyway.

No - they weren't - EA had a fallout with Facebook (Games div.) and Zygna when they had their Sims Social and their other Sims game on there - so they pulled those games. The only thing they left on Facebook as far as Sims go was their various Facebook pages.

As for Icarus I heard that was for a version of Mirrors Edge - that EA owns. .. the Icarus Project.

"alan650111;c-16237606" wrote:
Thank goodness they never went through with making The Sims 4 an online only game! They can have fun online features like The Gallery and it works wonderfully but no need to take it all the way. Really makes you wonder how stupid they would be for even considering taking away the whole identity of a single-player creative experience that is the success of The Sims?! I am so happy it wasn't Sims that had the fiasco that was the latest SimCity. They had a successful series in Sims City games and destroyed it by changing its core identity as god single-player experience to constant online experience. Hope they really learned from that one! Leave my Simmy game alone! lol

They will go for online as much as they can (and especially for mobile games) because it has so many advantages for them. If the game is online then they can advertise for new content inside the game and also show adds from other companies. This gives them so much extra money that such games mostly are free because it is more important to get as many as possible to play them than it is to get a little money from selling the games.

But the problem with exactly the big Sims games is all the expansions, the high resolution and that everybody don’t buy the same expansions. Usually we can’t visit other players in MMO games if they haven’t installed all the same updates. But to require all simmers to have installed the same expansions is of course impossible unless EA changes all the expansions into free updates. But that would be way too expensive for EA.

So the PC Sims games can’t become online-only games where we can visit everybody’s houses. They will still have to be games which can be played offline too. Even so it is possible to let us visit eachother. But most likely only in a special neighborhood which is added to everybody’s games for that purpose. So I think that something like this could become one of the new things for the next big Sims game.

"alan650111;c-16237606" wrote:
Thank goodness they never went through with making The Sims 4 an online only game! They can have fun online features like The Gallery and it works wonderfully but no need to take it all the way. Really makes you wonder how stupid they would be for even considering taking away the whole identity of a single-player creative experience that is the success of The Sims?! I am so happy it wasn't Sims that had the fiasco that was the latest SimCity. They had a successful series in Sims City games and destroyed it by changing its core identity as god single-player experience to constant online experience. Hope they really learned from that one! Leave my Simmy game alone! lol

!00 per cent agree with this.

Many of us told them this very thing when we first got word Sims 4 was going online - as was Sim City and we started protesting in large numbers. Then when Sims City came out - they saw we meant business and even though we were all also Sims City fans - we would not buy and didn't. I think it opened their eyes finally - even when the years of Sims Onlines failure to attract us didn't- EA finally got the message when Sim City failed too. I hope they keep those memories in mind for future Sims series games.

I do not put the mobile type Sims games in the same league with the Sims for pc/Macs. They are not my concern, nor my interest - and they sort of have to be online. That's fine. My only concern is the real Sims series.

"Writin_Reg;c-16238256" wrote:

"alan650111;c-16237606" wrote:
Thank goodness they never went through with making The Sims 4 an online only game! They can have fun online features like The Gallery and it works wonderfully but no need to take it all the way. Really makes you wonder how stupid they would be for even considering taking away the whole identity of a single-player creative experience that is the success of The Sims?! I am so happy it wasn't Sims that had the fiasco that was the latest SimCity. They had a successful series in Sims City games and destroyed it by changing its core identity as god single-player experience to constant online experience. Hope they really learned from that one! Leave my Simmy game alone! lol

!00 per cent agree with this.

Many of us told them this very thing when we first got word Sims 4 was going online - as was Sim City and we started protesting in large numbers. Then when Sims City came out - they saw we meant business and even though we were all also Sims City fans - we would not buy and didn't. I think it opened their eyes finally - even when the years of Sims Onlines failure to attract us didn't- EA finally got the message when Sim City failed too. I hope they keep those memories in mind for future Sims series games.

I do not put the mobile type Sims games in the same league with the Sims for pc/Macs. They are not my concern, nor my interest - and they sort of have to be online. That's fine. My only concern is the real Sims series.

EA surely haven’t given up on turning almost all their games into subscription based online live services! Just read the interview on http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-11-14-ea-live-services-plus-subscriptions-equals-uncapped-monetisation ;)

We have been doing live service and subscriptions for a couple years now and it includes Sims 3 and 4. It is not like it used to be. Steam has been doing it for ages. I know I also play several Steam games and all are single player. No MMO's. You can pretty much play any game on Origin via this method. Things have changed and are no longer like WOW or Sims online. Even our own devs call Sims 4 part of the live service you know.