Can people mod the open world for the Sims 4?

I don't think it's very possible. The game is made that way. You would have to change the coding of the game a lot to remove the loading screens. Only devs can make this possible (but, it could also be a lot of work for them). Modders usually take things that are already in the game and work around it.

I really don't think that would be possible because I don't think there's anything actually connecting all of the different areas together, someone would have to mod that in too and even IF someone was talented & dedicated enough to do that I think visually it would be quite jarring as well.

Modders are absolutely amazing people, but right now I don't think even the development team at EA can code back in the open world. They could probably make subsequent "zones" larger, but that'd probably be it.

OP your only option is to go back to TS3. Open world is not possible with TS4.
Playing many great open worlds recently made me understand how important this feature is and how it makes the gameplay very smooth provided the world is done very well.

Would open neighborhoods be possible? Not for modders but for the developers, as the "world" in Sims 4 consists of several different sections its impossible to have a completely open world.

Maybe it would be possible to open the world (in principle). But the open world was removed for a reason which was to avoid the same instability as TS3 had and to avoid the long initial loading screen. The open world made it nearly impossible to have subhoods in TS3 and it gave problems with big worlds (which we haven't seen in TS4 yet anyway).

So I don't think that opening the world would be the main problem. The real problem would be to avoid the game start freezing and crashing 50 times a minute. That problem would probably become impossible to solve.

EA had a another choice which they could have made instead of removing the open world though: They could have chosen instead to have made TS4 a 64bit game which also required more RAM and a much better computer to run. But EA didn't want to do that because EA thinks that it would have prohibited many customers from buying the game.

I still think that EA went too far though to avoid the instability problems from TS3 because it should have been enough just to have loading screens when we are traveling between neighborhoods or worlds. The game would have worked fine even if EA had omitted the loading screens when we enter other houses in the same neighborhood because TS4 neighborhoods are not that big.

@halimali1980 It isn't just a question about making an open world well and you can't compare this game with other games where the players (almost) can't modify houses or build them. The characters in such games also usually can't be modified to the same degree as the characters in TS4. Even so the minimum requirements are most often higher than for TS4 too. So in such games making a well working open world isn't a problem at all ;)

"Erpe;14116199" wrote:
Maybe it would be possible to open the world (in principle). But the open world was removed for a reason which was to avoid the same instability as TS3 had and to avoid the long initial loading screen. The open world made it nearly impossible to have subhoods in TS3 and it gave problems with big worlds (which we haven't seen in TS4 yet anyway).

So I don't think that opening the world would be the main problem. The real problem would be to avoid the game start freezing and crashing 50 times a minute. That problem would probably become impossible to solve.

EA had a another choice which they could have made instead of removing the open world though: They could have chosen instead to have made TS4 a 64bit game which also required more RAM and a much better computer to run. But EA didn't want to do that because EA thinks that it would have prohibited many customers from buying the game.

I still think that EA went too far though to avoid the instability problems from TS3 because it should have been enough just to have loading screens when we are traveling between neighborhoods or worlds. The game would have worked fine even if EA had omitted the loading screens when we enter other houses in the same neighborhood because TS4 neighborhoods are not that big.

@halimali1980 It isn't just a question about making an open world well and you can't compare this game with other games where the players (almost) can't modify houses or build them. The characters in such games also usually can't be modified to the same degree as the characters in TS4. Even so the minimum requirements are most often higher than for TS4 too. So in such games making a well working open world isn't a problem at all ;)

I disagree with your analogy of why there isn't an open world in this game. This game was built in 2013 and set to release in 2014 but delayed until late 2014. You can't build an open world in a year and make it work correctly. The TS4 Olympus is why you don't have open world in this game. EA spent three years building that game and then ditched it at the last minute right after the SC released (per Frank Gibeau they rethought the online/mmo turned it into a single player. Patrick Kelly said he worked on the MMO before they ditched. Also, they built a new engine for the TS4 as soon as they were told to drop the MMO. Which wasn't until 2013. You have a game that is the result of left over scraps of material they intended to use for the TS4 Olympus. It has nothing in the world to do with thinking about low end laptop users.

If EA wanted to build a game that needed a gaming pc, they would. And that's just one of many excuses for no open world.

Agree @Cinebar a lot of the assertions made I believe are just created to excuse the Olympus limitations.

If modders could fix a great deal of issues in TS3 there is no reason why the team couldn't learn from it and create better, not just remove.

Agree @Cinebar but EA did make the sims 4 for gaming pc. The games recommended requirements (minimum is just for base game only) is mid range gaming desktop and is the same specs to run the whole sims 3. The games are just programmed differently but require same PC specs to run both games as a complete game.

People thinking this game runs on a toaster are not looking at the requirements or coming in the tech threads to see how many are having issues on lower end computers as more gets added. It will only get worse as more gets added just like TS3

So since both games require same PC specs, There should be no excuse why we dont have open world. The bottom line is we got refurbished Olympus instead of them starting from scratch to make a true PC game. The game was not originally programmed for PC but it is now and Olympus was just designed very limited in game play.

@Cinebar It doesn't really make sense to claim that they planned to change another game into TS4 in about half a year because I don't believe that EA would ever attempt that. The talk about Olympus is mostly rumors which some some players used to "explain" some things about TS4. Some of the rumors are probably true. But I am sure that there are more to that story than we will ever know.

If it really was true that they attempted to develop TS4 in only about half a year then this would have meant that EA had given TS4 very low priority. But all the new content which they release each month contradicts that. Should they really have planned TS4 to be a cheap low budget game then this should have been caused by poor sales numbers and low profit for TS3. But to my knowledge this wasn't the case at all.

So I still think that the team just underestimated how time consuming it had been to develop especially the new build mode and the tricky multitasking which probably gave the team huge problems with the planned deadline. They therefore had to simplify much of the remaining work and even so postpone the deadline. This forced them to omit toddlers and make teens as high as adults to avoid the time it otherwise would have taken them to make extra clothes and extra interactions for toddlers and teens.

EA actually makes games which requires a gaming PC. But EA still seems to regard the Sims games as "games for casual gamers". Not that TS3 and TS4 really are casual games of course. But EA thinks that they often are the very first big games that are played by people who earlier only have played very small casual games (like the free games built into Windows by Microsoft). Therefore EA just won't increase the minimum requirement for the Sims games more than EA absolutely has to.

@Erpe @phoebebebe13 expertise is around the tech section. I think you should consider what she just said because it's something to carefully consider :)