6/28 New Blog Post: Playtesting the Next Generation of The Sims

Looks like we've still got a ways to go.

Now, understand that Project Rene is still in the very early stages of development but even at this early stage, the lessons learned have been extremely valuable.

There is so much work remaining for Project Rene, though,” Grant says. “We still haven’t shared our Simulation experiences or character and clothing customization—not to mention new versions of apartment customization and additional social play experiences. All of this will be slowly stood up, shared, tested, tweaked, enhanced, reduced. And we intend to develop it hand-in-hand alongside our players.”

What do they mean by "And we intend to develop it hand-in-hand alongside our players." I have yet to see any meaningful community involvement just more so look at what we have done.

Maybe it's more future-looking. That more playtests will come - although doing playtests of 7 people at a time is a tiny sample size.

How will they recruit players across a diverse representation of ages and playstyles? Will they reach out to wants-based rotational players for feedback? Importantly, will they reach out to players who do not play the Sims 4 but actively play the other Sims games?

A good place for The Sims team to start is interviewing thought leaders on Zoom - influential Sims 2 and 3 modder LazyDuchess (https://twitter.com/lazyduchess?lang=en) or Youtubers like PleasantSims (https://www.youtube.com/@PleasantSims). Or how about digital storyteller Asmara who made a 50-minute long video essay with constructive feedback for the Sims that has hundreds of thousands of views (https://www.youtube.com/@AsmaraTV/videos)?

Screening off of the EA Playtesting website is going half the distance.

"simgirl1010;c-18283233" wrote:
Looks like we've still got a ways to go.

Now, understand that Project Rene is still in the very early stages of development but even at this early stage, the lessons learned have been extremely valuable.

There is so much work remaining for Project Rene, though,” Grant says. “We still haven’t shared our Simulation experiences or character and clothing customization—not to mention new versions of apartment customization and additional social play experiences. All of this will be slowly stood up, shared, tested, tweaked, enhanced, reduced. And we intend to develop it hand-in-hand alongside our players.”

Yes. The info that's come out in the last couple of days, which I really appreciate, seems to show that the game is still multiple years away. That's fine. I like their new attempt at being open.

Thanks for posting this. I reread all this to see if I could glean anything exciting for myself. Nope. Apartment collaboration decorating? It seems they are taking a lot of time and expense on collaboration features. With much more of that type of thing to come. It still makes me wonder how much of the actual game will suffer to fund all of these multi player collaboration type activities in TS5? It sounds very complicated across many different platforms and considering they say just pick up where a player left off and play anywhere, that's a lot of tech talk for expensive programming time. I have a feeling this stuff has to work right on the first day, so yeah, how much is dropped by the wayside to make all types of different collaborations work like that. I can see how EA can make money on that though, as more people don't want to be left out and will join in and then there is posting on Instagram and Youtube etc. Yeah, it sounds like a huge money-making collaboration game. ETA: It just came into my mind why this game was listed on PS5's future game lists, before its release.

"Cinebar;c-18288518" wrote:
Thanks for posting this. I reread all this to see if I could glean anything exciting for myself. Nope. Apartment collaboration decorating? It seems they are taking a lot of time and expense on collaboration features. With much more of that type of thing to come. It still makes me wonder how much of the actual game will suffer to fund all of these multi player collaboration type activities in TS5? It sounds very complicated across many different platforms and considering they say just pick up where a player left off and play anywhere, that's a lot of tech talk for expensive programming time. I have a feeling this stuff has to work right on the first day, so yeah, how much is dropped by the wayside to make all types of different collaborations work like that. I can see how EA can make money on that though, as more people don't want to be left out and will join in and then there is posting on Instagram and Youtube etc. Yeah, it sounds like a huge money-making collaboration game. ETA: It just came into my mind why this game was listed on PS5's future game lists, before its release.

Yes hopefully we can get more official information on this one day, but not holding my breath for new info anytime soon. I hope this won't be another Sims Mobile type game with super expensive microtransactions…