Lately, the communication barrier has been weakening with the direct correlation of Sim Gurus offering more information about the behind the scenes of The Sims 4. It’s taken place in many forums and tweets across the board.
On April 7th, SimGuruGraham attempted to debunk some theories across the forums, stating that comparing mods and official content from Maxis is a common misconception. He goes on to explain that most content being created for The Sims 4 is intended to a set of standards, including effective multitasking. According to the rather long post, he explains that each pack has a certain amount of workload capacity and sometimes the choices to select features can come down to productivity.
“Let’s look at lounge chairs as an example. If the question is… “Are lounge chairs a compelling enough feature to spend X% of time of a Stuff Pack’s overall capacity to implement them?” then the answer we’ve reached is “No.” In this case, the work required to implement lounge chairs would mean that they might be the only new functional object in that pack, if they even fit within scope at all. Numerous players have expressed that something along the lines of new sitting animations doesn’t qualify as new gameplay in their minds, which reinforces our decision that a lounge chair probably isn’t the right choice to focus a stuff pack around. In a Game Pack or Expansion Pack which has a larger overall bucket of time/development resources to fill, a lounge chair represents a much smaller percentage of that overall capacity, and the argument for their inclusion becomes more compelling.” -SimGuruGraham
Continuing on the topic, SimGuruGraham explained that animation was allowed the most time towards a stuff pack’s production so that it can have high quality, support multi-tasking, work well with emotions, and support for different ages. He reminds players that stuff packs are meant to feel self-contained and focus on niche areas that a larger audience of players wouldn’t necessarily enjoy.
On a final note, his tweet about World Adventures concerned many players. He responds to their outcry by confirming that while he did enjoy the expansion pack for The Sims 3, he feels that it is a ‘divisive pack’ among the community. “Some people loved it for being different, others didn’t click with it because it was so different,” he explains.
When I say that I think it’s unlikely that there will be a direct successor to World Adventures, it isn’t in any way a condemnation of what we did in that pack. There’s much to appreciate from it, and some great features that are likely to return in future Sims titles. Themes that incorporate traveling to foreign lands and exploring their cultures are exciting and certainly relevant to The Sims. I would be surprised if we made another expansion that focused on exploring tombs and solving puzzles to unlock hidden treasures. I don’t think that’s the type of feature you’d expect to return in each iteration of the Sims, unlike something with broad appeal such as Pets or Seasons.
While he doesn’t see a repetition of the tomb raiding, he does state that a vacation or destination pack does sound ‘fun and highly relatable’ for The Sims 4. Do you agree with SimGuruGraham’s opinion? What type of destination worlds would you like to see?
