Electronic Arts has backed themselves into a corner with it. It had a bad launch and is built on a ricketey foundation from 2014 that lacks a lot of the personality of the earlier games. Some years back they tried working on a Sims 5 and mobile/online Sims spinoffs but all of them languished in development hell, so they have been stuck pumping out more and more content in the form of $150 of DLC a year, and now the game is too big and the player base has a big sunk cost. EA’s failures in other parts of their business makes them too risk averse to try to reboot this cash cow and deal with the inevitable backlash. They have been trying to fix the game through DLC by adding things like “better interpersonal conflict options” or “better child raising” or “better romance” but given that the DLC packs can’t have dependencies on each other, everything is very silo’ed and it’s a weird experience to play.
However, it’s nice to build houses and do interior decorating, so I’ll jump in once or twice a year. Don’t care about dust & vacuum cleaner mechanics though.
But if you’re asking what it is, as in,
The Sims 1 was Will Wright’s conceptual idea about simulating the act of creating a household
The Sims 2 was extended into being a Doll House where you can customize the lives of your digital avatars
The Sims 3 was an open world gamification of the Doll House idea
The Sims 4 would be the “Horizon Worlds Metaverse” extension of that. It has no big idea or concept that creatives are trying to do with it. It’s just content.
I played a lot of sims 1 and 2. It’s the more recent iterations that I don’t understand the point of. Your explanation makes perfect sense however. Sunk cost in both time and money can keep a fan base while repelling others that only want to dip their toe in.
Will the backlash get so intense that they are forced to make a sims 5? Will they have burned all their goodwill by the time they do? Will the sims 5 just fall into the same trap? I’ll stay tuned to find out.
Mine and probably a lot of people’s big dream with the sims is that sim city and to a lesser degree sim earth would be merged into one game. You have sims that you know and manage their life but you are also managing the city. Maybe your sims have a part in that in their vocations like sanitation to building to politics to god or something. That was a big dream when I believed that big dreams in games were possible.
I’m trying to make a list of games with baddies as protagonists. I’m thinking of third person action games with badass female protagonists, mostly from the late 90’s thorugh the early 10’s, that are more sons of Tomb Raider than precursors to Bayonetta. My girlfriend is a huge fan of these, so we’re always in the hunt for more:
WET
Blades of Time
Bloodrayne
Bullet Witch (Despite the similarities, it’s not a Bayonetta)
Going to get Luigi’s Mansion 1-3 out of the way, but also raising the Magic Vacuum in Aria of Sorrow & Dawn of Sorrow. Which excitingly has multiple powered-up versions.
There’s also Tumble Pop for arcade and Game Boy!
