Will it be open world

The open world was hyped so much with the launch of Sims 3, that everyone now believes the game wouldn't be playable without it.  I prefer the rotational gameplay style that was possible in The Sims 2.

The first thing people think of when they play a non open world is why can't my sims just walk down the street, or into the neighboring lot? It's right there. But this is superficial. Once you go down the street, there is nothing to do but come back. There is nothing on a community lot that you can't do at home with the purchase of an item. If you must go to a community lot, the Sims 2 had places you could go (with a loading screen, which I will get back to later), but again, these offered little additional gameplay. The Sims 3, for example, offered a gym to work out, a library to read books, and a park to play chess; or you could place a treadmill, a bookcase, and a chess set in your living room, and use them right away, instead of travelling 20 minutes to and from.

No loading screens? There may not be a loading screen while your sim is travelling, but there certainly is lag while the new lot loads up. The only difference is that the curtain is lifted, and you get to watch the messy preparations on stage. This makes it more frustrating, not less.

When confined to the home lot, it is possible to view all your sims on one screen, and see what they are all doing. If one of them runs out of queued actions, it is immediately apparent, and you can switch sims effortlessly (and without lag) to set up their next actions. It is a pleasant experience to watch multiple sims in the same family going about their business at home. In the later games, having the sims travel all over the map made it nearly impossible to focus on more than one sim at a time.

Indirectly, creating the open world meant that playing multiple households in a rotational style was no longer an option. Yes, it is still technically possible, but the game is no longer designed in such a way as to make it a fun experience. Let me explain: The original game was based on time management. The fun of the experience was in keeping your sims' motives full; when the hunger motive was low, you had the sim eat; when the hygiene motive was low, you had them take a shower, etc. A sim's chosen career had a series of levels you had to achieve. Advancing each level was contingent on going to work with full motive bars, and meeting a minimum standard of certain skills, and maybe social contacts. The goal, as I saw it, was to first, fill your sims' motives, and second, hone whatever extra skills they needed for their next promotion, while also timing everything so that your sim's motives would be full at the beginning of their work day. In the Sims 2, when you saved the game and exited the lot, the game file for that household would be paused, awaiting your return. With an open world, this is no longer the case, because the whole neighbourhood is in one save file. It doesn't have to be this way, but the development team did not deem it important to have nested save files, once they dreamed up the idea of the open world. In the later games, the motives are not preserved in a household, once you leave, so even if you play in a rotational style, your progress is not maintained, and each time you go back to a household, you have to regain your bearings.The developers and modders made some efforts to bring back the magic of The Sims 2 rotational play. They created toggles for aging and story progression, but they were never able to achieve motive preservation.

In the Sims 5, I implore you to bring back rotational style play the way it was meant to be. This means using nested save files for each household, within the larger neighbourhood file. It is important to understand which sim-related files should go in the world folder, and which should go in the household folder. This is what made Sims 2 work so well. Although I am not happy with the open world scenario for several other reasons, it is still possible to build a game with both an open world, and nested save files for rotational play.

@e048bf8gov8v , you have stated this beautifully! 🙌  I did not like the open world of TS3 either!  It was an empty world  because usually all the neighbor Sims would be inside their houses tending to their needs , or at work/school.  You wouldn't often see them walking around or at a community lot (park, nightclub, gym, museum, etc.). and when you did, they were often on their way home to replenish their needs, so you couldn't interact with them!  And if your Sim was the only Sim in the household and had late work hours, their only option for socialization was to meet other Sims, which was very difficult because nobody was out and about at midnight!  I found this painful to play with single Sims for this reason!  The only thing Ilike the open world for was to collect bugs, rocks, and look for unicorns! 🦄

And like you stated, you are still waiting for your Sim to arrive at the destination, whether there is a loading screen or not!  And after about a year and a half into the game, my game got so laggy, it would actually stop for several minutes, then start playing again, only to stop for several more minutes, over and over again, which would take waaaaay longer than a simple loading screen! And that is if the game didn't crash, which it often did!😖  My computer was supposed to be a mid level computer at the time, so it wasn't like I was trying to run the game on a potato. 

So, I actually prefer The Sims 4 semi open world (even if I can't go next door without a loading screen) because it doesn't take long to travel, and when I get to a destination, there are always other Sims to interact with!🥳
  Even though I am mostly a family player, this has made playing Single Sims much more enjoyable than in the Sims 3.  🙌 Quick loading screens are always better than halted gameplay while you wait for the game to catch up and continue, or a game crashing and taking 20 minutes to reload! 

And like you stated, if you purchase a variety of objects for your Sims to use at home, then it is much quicker both for you and for your Sims to just pop over to the chess table, for a bit, then go to the bathroom, then paint a painting, then work out, etc. than it would be to do all that on a community lot! 

The rotational play in the Sims 2 was so wonderful because we never had to miss a moment of our Sim's lives! 

The Sims 2 was by far the most fun version of the game, in part for the reasons you stated!🥳  It was the most addictive game I have ever played!  🥰

even if it isn't open world, we need bigger worlds with a lot of lots, or stuff kinda like moonwood mill where there is lots, but there is a lot of open world stuff as well. 

@PugLove888I too often had empty lots. I think the game automatically chose the number of Sims per community lot based on the performance it perceived from the computer/device it was run on.
That is one factor that will add complication to development: To develop for a wide audience, they will be trying to design for a LOT of different devices with different specs. Device detection and device capacity detection are a big part of basic game functionality. Basic device detection is pretty simple: it is narrowed down by operating system. Then there are the flavors within each operating system.

PC/Windows: We are probably looking at support for Windows 10, 11, and 12, by the time it comes out. Consoles: They tend to be fixed in their operating system for the most part, as far as I know. Traditionally, you stuck your game cartridge in the console, and it just worked. Now, we add all the mobile devices to the mix. Tablets: Amazon Fire, Ipad, Ipad mini, Microsoft Surface, Chromebook (yep, far as I am concerned, that is just a large tablet). Phones: Android, iPhones. That is a LOT of operating systems to try to accommodate. The Sims (2000) only had PC and Mac to deal with. The Sims 2 only had PC, Mac, and consoles to deal with. The Sims Freeplay and Sims 3 Mobile was EA getting their feet wet testing the feasibility of Sims 3 on mobile. The Sims Social was a failed experiment in creating a Sims game based solely on social interaction and microtransactions.
Now that they have found a model that works better for microtransactions, ie Freeplay and Sims Mobile, they will probably start there for Sims 4 mobile version. I suspect the integrated mobile version will resemble the console version. Consoles don't support custom content since they don't have internal writable storage (with the exception of memory cards), and phones have very little internal storage available.

To be honest I think the phone version will have limited features, and the graphics/resolution will be different from the PC version.

We already know that buidling and decorating will be possible on mobile from the footage they’ve shown us. But I am not very concerned about it as I don’t intend to play on mobile. 
I would be happy enough if the whole world isn’t just scenario and is fully editable, and wouldn’t mind as well to focus on neighberhoods/districts without going through loading screens. 
Althoug I would say that the game will still take years to be released and by then the average PC’s being used will have better graphics/specs to run a full open world. 
Personally The Sims3  wasn’t lagging that much for me. Ok sometimes yes, but it was playable and not a very huge deal as many people complain about. And we are talking about 2009. So in my honest opinion there is no excuse nowadays to not enable and optimoze a full open world.

The fact, and this is a thing make me so angry, is technically the open world, or at least an open district mode, is possible even on the sims4, if you play with your sims, all the furniture of other lots (no matter if there are house, bar, park...) are loaded in the game, yes if you zoom to much on another house, it become a "rabbit hole" and you don't see anything, but if you see at a certain distance (or see in first person), not only the game load all the furniture of the home/lot you watch, but even the objects reflexed on a mirror, and all of this things are loaded at the highest graphic level (i mean, the highest graphic level you set for your game), but if you want visit the lot, bum, loading, and this is useless, if nothing except our house and the "community" space are loaded, i can understand a loading during the visiting to lot from another lot, but in this case, when everything is still loaded, everething is "ready", it don't make any sense, i see it only like a cut content, it's seems in the beginning they want to add the open world in sims 4, but they have a little bit problem to optimize it and said: "you know what? no open world for players", but leave the possibility for all the furniture of the district to be loaded in game, giving us a fantastic useless resource eater, because yes, even if you don't visit a specific lot/house, the game doesn't care and load everithing, and this is a useless "weight" for your pc. 

@userafw , yes, I can see how the game would have limited the amount of NPC;s on a given lot based on your computer's performance.  However, the worst was if you had a Sim that worked a late shift and wanted to socialize at night... there were even less people on public lots at night because the open world game had them all asleep, or else they were already in the process of going home and you couldn't interact with them. That wasn't as bad of a problem in the daytime, so the issue wasn't just computer performance (though that certainly played a big role), but just the design of the world.  If most Sims are asleep at night, then a Sim that works late doesn't have many Sims to socialize with because most will be asleep, or at the very least they will be home getting ready for bed, while this is realistic, it is still very frustrating for those Sims who have jobs that run into the late hours of the night! 😓

I love how people are talking like what was flawed in 2008 is automatically unworkable 15 years later.  I've seen seamless open world in action - it can exist.  It objectively does exist.  The question is whether EA would put in the resources to make it work or not.

The fact, Maxis studio "no longer exist", i remember i read an article about a large (and when i say large i mean at least 80%) cut of people on the studio, and i talk about 4-5 years ago, i don't know if EA assume people to work again in Maxis, or the works, are made by the people who doesn't cut off by the "Maxis purge" but for made an open world, you don't need only economic resource, you desperatly need human resources, and well, we all know how EA look this series, today The Sims is just a big sparkling cow, used to milk much money possible from our players, so, hope for the best, but be preared for the worst, because yeah, for EA the way is, less effort, much profit, and they do it for all they're game, it's suck? Yes, but or we hope for a serious competitor, or the way doesn't change.

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@kaze_____90 wrote:

The fact, Maxis studio "no longer exist", i remember i read an article about a large (and when i say large i mean at least 80%) cut of people on the studio, and i talk about 4-5 years ago, i don't know if EA assume people to work again in Maxis, or the works, are made by the people who doesn't cut off by the "Maxis purge" but for made an open world, you don't need only economic resource, you desperatly need human resources, and well, we all know how EA look this series, today The Sims is just a big sparkling cow, used to milk much money possible from our players, so, hope for the best, but be preared for the worst, because yeah, for EA the way is, less effort, much profit, and they do it for all they're game, it's suck? Yes, but or we hope for a serious competitor, or the way doesn't change.

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I don't know if we technically have a serious competitor.  Paralives is small, is trying to be more childlike than EA, and EA seems to have just replicated a lot of what they did.  Then there's Paradox's Life By You, but EA isn't a serious competitor to them.  They have designed their entire game around being open world, gave all their tools for making the game to every player so that modding is easy - literally Rod Humble is out there encouraging people to make their own saleable expansion packs if they want - and after they finish up their early access all updates will only be new code so no mods or CC will ever be broken by game updates.  All those things that EA made people pay for again between TS3 and TS4 - at least half of it is in LBY's base game.  TS5 won't hold a candle to them and they wouldn't think of matching the modding capabilities because that would ruin their business model of endless mediocre to bad expansions, game packs, and stuff packs.  Take then that these last 6 months are about improving the graphics, giving the game they've built 2023 graphics now - all TS5 has going for it is brand recognition and that brand is kinda toxic.

The game is full of small lots that blend seemlessly into the overall pattern.  You have like a 10x15 beach bathroom just sitting by the shore  where the beach doesn't need to be a lot - you can just go there and use it whenever.    Their AI is also fully functional, with every single character doing what you have to do - they go to work, you can see them work because there are no rabbit holes, they go home, take care of all those same needs you have to, fall in love, get married, have babies all on their own.  Compare that to TS4 where for the longest time sims would just freeze and you had to cheat to reset them which was only "fixed" by making them instead randomly go to an area in the house.  If you don't micromanage each sim in your household they end up will all their needs drained, lying on the floor passed out in their own filth with full autonomy on.  EA cannot compete with that and they have proven it time and again over the past decade.

So, with EA knocking out Paralives and Paradox knocking out EA we are potentially looking at another monopoly unless Paralives takes so long to enter the market and appeal to kids that EA has already abandoned TS5.