To your point about them adding things we can all equally partake in, I agree with that also and I do appreciate EA trying to be more inclusive, but this game still just feels half-finished. I know they talk about how much work they put into these packs and I believe that, and I appreciate the free content, but as a consumer I just can’t in good faith recommend this game to anyone. It is overall extremely underdeveloped.

Actual cultural expansions are a really awesome idea, but making them not be Rasta Homer would require redesigning the game in the most fundamental way possible. I absolutely believe Grant & Pals are eminently qualified to accomplish such a monumental task, they are truly the best asbestos we deserve. An expansion re-visioning the Sims from an actual Soviet perspective could be epic, Ushanka’s and hammer’n’sickle flag T shirts would be beyond lame.

One thing I’ve found extremely troubling lately is the subtle, probably unconscious drift with contemporary US values. Keeping out the hard C words was never a real possibility for a US company, but I noticed we now have menorahs and kinaras too, while witches and magic are strangely absent and never directly acknowledged. Traditionally, the sims teams tried to maintain some level of unreality by dealing with such things indirectly. Maybe it’s just the quality development team we have today giving us all the content we request and maintaining the standards we expect from our Sims franchise, but something has been nudging me toward a cold corporate calculus of increasingly conservative domestic US values among the target demographic.

And of course, as this is an “Asian” content release in February, there’s always the fun issue of how exactly a US corporation explains say girichoco to their tweenage princess customers. I’d almost pay just to see Kate try to tackle that.

Bella in a cheongsam isn’t Chinese Sims 4, it’s Bella in a cheongsam.

would be cool to have australia represented oh well happy simming
🙂