About The Sims 5 and Freezing The Sims 4

EA recently announced they won’t be making The Sims 5 because “that would be unfair to the players.” Translation: there’s no reason to risk a new game when the current one can be milked indefinitely.

This led me and the actual owner of our copy of The Sims 4 to rethink things. For her, the game became too bloated and complicated after Cottage Living. She hasn’t actually played since then, buying new packs only to keep a “complete collection” at first, and lately just because I use them for work. But with the collection now endless and the game overwhelming, there’s no reason for her to keep purchasing packs she won’t use.

The big problem is that as long as they keep adding content, the situation cannot improve. The game is already a mess of half-baked and poorly integrated features that need proper reworking — like the fear system, which is interesting in theory but a mess in practice. It could be improved by making fear gain incremental, for example: three degrees that escalate depending on how many times the fear triggers, with the first degree lasting a week and the last becoming a lifelong trauma. I was waiting for EA to finally move on so I could get serious about these kinds of fixes, but their constant push for patches and content doesn’t give enough time to work on anything. If they’re not going to stop, I’ll stop it myself so I can finally put into practice the ideas my wife and I have been building for a while.

I’m not interested in new content either. I only use the game for writing and modding, so we’ve decided to freeze her installation of the game at its current state (Enchanted by Nature), turn off updates and deliveries, and give her a stable version she can actually play — while I fix the things she dislikes without being interrupted by patches.

The only complication is the modding side. I’m only involved in that for the income, so I’ve set up a second installation of the game that I will keep patched to extract tunings and keep mods updated for players who want the latest version.

My main focus, however, will be on fixing and refining content up to Enchanted by Nature and not beyond.