If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
They did not rewrite the entire engine when adding in toddlers. We’re they a ton of work? Absolutely, especially since they did not have any work accomplished on them when the base game released, and had lots of DLC already released for the game that could potentially break. A complete rewrite of the engine would be for a brand new game.
I’m also going to somewhat disagree with the verbiage where you say they were planned as patch content “from the start” - could you possibly find where SGDrake said that? I find it weird that they would say that, because the omission of toddlers was originally blamed on a lack of time/staff - not as an intentional move. Do you think pools were also purposefully omitted and reserved as patch content? Ghosts? I think you might be misrepresenting what these gurus are actually saying.
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
They did not rewrite the entire engine when adding in toddlers. We’re they a ton of work? Absolutely, especially since they did not have any work accomplished on them when the base game released, and had lots of DLC already released for the game that could potentially break. A complete rewrite of the engine would be for a brand new game.
I’m also going to somewhat disagree with the verbiage where you say they were planned as patch content “from the start” - could you possibly find where SGDrake said that? I find it weird that they would say that, because the omission of toddlers was originally blamed on a lack of time/staff - not as an intentional move. Do you think pools were also purposefully omitted and reserved as patch content? Ghosts? I think you might be misrepresenting what these gurus are actually saying.
They’re not saying they “intentionally” left them out to be patched later, but they knew that when The Sims 4 launched without them, they would be added for free.
SimGuruRachel even said specifically Pools and Toddlers wouldn’t be available “at launch” so it seems they were on the development cards before we’d even see any Sims 4 live gameplay.
EA originally was given a March 2014 release date, and only got a 6 month extension.
It was clear that The Sims 4 was always going to have Ghosts and Pools, they just hadn’t finished them. There’s no way they had no intention of working on them, the coding was already in the game at launch. The problem with EA at the time was they were known to put out games unfinished because EA were setting Devs unrealistic deadlines, so they worked on finishing the stuff that couldn’t be added later and left the stuff that could be.
It was bad but I’m glad EA seemed to change in 2015. There was a huge shift around the release of Get Together and beyond.
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
I know that the gurus tried to avoid telling us directly when the decision to make the toddlers was made and they likely were happy that nobody asked them more directly because people just were happy that they had been released. But I am quite sure anyway that both the decision to omit them and the later decision to make them anyway were taken higher up in EA and that the gurus just didn’t want to tell us more about this.
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
You buy everything way too easily. TS4’s game engine would have been a complete disaster if it really made it so extremely difficult to just add things like the toddlers and the CAS update when all other games can add much more in just about a month. You sound like you know nothing about programming or other games. But I am actually educated as a computer scientist on a university where we studied all about different types of computer languages and computers and I have played hundreds of games for many years too. So I don’t believe that EA ever would use an engine that made it so extremely difficult just to add a little to the game and toddlers and CAS aren’t such huge things which you seem to think that they are. EA could almost make a whole new big Sims game in those 2 yrs and 4 months that EA used just to make the toddlers
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
I know that the gurus tried to avoid telling us directly when the decision to make the toddlers was made and they likely were happy that nobody asked them more directly because people just were happy that they had been released. But I am quite sure anyway that both the decision to omit them and the later decision to make them anyway were taken higher up in EA and that the gurus just didn’t want to tell us more about this.
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
You buy everything way too easily. TS4’s game engine would have been a complete disaster if it really made it so extremely difficult to just add things like the toddlers and the CAS update when all other games can add much more in just about a month. You sound like you know nothing about programming or other games. But I am actually educated as a computer scientist on a university where we studied all about different types of computer languages and computers and I have played hundreds of games for many years too. So I don’t believe that EA ever would use an engine that made it so extremely difficult just to add a little to the game and toddlers and CAS aren’t such huge things which you seem to think that they are. EA could almost make a whole new big Sims game in those 2 yrs and 4 months that EA used just to make the toddlers
I'm not going to try to debate with you if you refuse to listen to any of the facts and statements I've provided. You are free to disbelieve anything you want, I however cannot convince you if you refuse to listen.
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
They did not rewrite the entire engine when adding in toddlers. We’re they a ton of work? Absolutely, especially since they did not have any work accomplished on them when the base game released, and had lots of DLC already released for the game that could potentially break. A complete rewrite of the engine would be for a brand new game.
I’m also going to somewhat disagree with the verbiage where you say they were planned as patch content “from the start” - could you possibly find where SGDrake said that? I find it weird that they would say that, because the omission of toddlers was originally blamed on a lack of time/staff - not as an intentional move. Do you think pools were also purposefully omitted and reserved as patch content? Ghosts? I think you might be misrepresenting what these gurus are actually saying.
I promise you this is what was said. I will go back and dig it up, I believe it was around January, so it might take a few. Once I find it I will edit this comment with the quote.
AS @jackjack_k has said, they did not leave them out on purpose, but after they were forced to leave them out, they knew they would add them back at some point.
EDIT: The post history seems wonky, I can't find some of Drake's quotes for some reason. Someone was commenting that negative feedback is what caused us to get toddlers, and I believe SimguruDrake stated something along the lines of "That's not true, we always knew we were going to patch in toddlers, and we wanted to do it for free. Your feedback definitely helped shape them however"
But it's okay because I found another source stating it.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING ON TODDLERS IN THE SIMS 4? WHAT INITIATED THE TEAM TO BEGIN DEVELOPMENT?
We’ve talked about Toddlers on LOT on the Development team, and we’ve talked about them for a long time. What we’d like to do with them, what the community would like to see, what they might look like, how they might act. We always knew we were going to add Toddlers to The Sims 4 at some point, we just weren’t sure when.
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
They did not rewrite the entire engine when adding in toddlers. We’re they a ton of work? Absolutely, especially since they did not have any work accomplished on them when the base game released, and had lots of DLC already released for the game that could potentially break. A complete rewrite of the engine would be for a brand new game.
I’m also going to somewhat disagree with the verbiage where you say they were planned as patch content “from the start” - could you possibly find where SGDrake said that? I find it weird that they would say that, because the omission of toddlers was originally blamed on a lack of time/staff - not as an intentional move. Do you think pools were also purposefully omitted and reserved as patch content? Ghosts? I think you might be misrepresenting what these gurus are actually saying.
I promise you this is what was said. I will go back and dig it up, I believe it was around January, so it might take a few. Once I find it I will edit this comment with the quote.
AS @jackjack_k has said, they did not leave them out on purpose, but after they were forced to leave them out, they knew they would add them back at some point.
EDIT: The post history seems wonky, I can't find some of Drake's quotes for some reason. Someone was commenting that negative feedback is what caused us to get toddlers, and I believe SimguruDrake stated something along the lines of "That's not true, we always knew we were going to patch in toddlers, and we wanted to do it for free. Your feedback definitely helped shape them however"
But it's okay because I found another source stating it.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING ON TODDLERS IN THE SIMS 4? WHAT INITIATED THE TEAM TO BEGIN DEVELOPMENT?
We’ve talked about Toddlers on LOT on the Development team, and we’ve talked about them for a long time. What we’d like to do with them, what the community would like to see, what they might look like, how they might act. We always knew we were going to add Toddlers to The Sims 4 at some point, we just weren’t sure when.
Neither what they said, or what you said corroborates your post. “We knew we were going to add them, we just weren’t sure when” does not equate to “they were planned as patch content from the very start” such a quote would imply that toddlers were axed from the beginning of the game’s development. I’m not disagreeing on the facts, they wanted them - couldn’t make them in time, so they didn’t make them in favor of other things. They were then trapped in limbo while the developers decided on what they wanted to make and where toddlers fell on that list. That isn’t what you said, and that isn’t what you said SGDrake said, which she clearly didn’t say since you can’t actually find the quote.
You were misrepresenting what was said. The quotes you provided just show that.
If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5!
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
A lot of what you said just simply isn't true.
1: Sales aren't bad for the sims 4. They've posted almost every quarter that sims 4 is doing extremely well and grows each quarter
I never said that sales were bad. The reports aren’t too convincing though because they are without actual facts about the sales numbers. Saying that the total number of sales for TS4 grows every quarter is just saying something trivial. To judge anything we need to be able to compare the quarters instead. But I agree that sales numbers aren’t too bad because EA wouldn’t release more and more packs every year if they were.
2: Toddlers were planned from the beginning to be patched in as free content. This has been stated by multiple gurus.
I haven’t seen such statements? Anyway it doesn’t make any sense because then the toddlers would have been in the basegame and not released more than 2 years later. But yes, I believe that toddlers were planned originally. I just believe that they were omitted anyway because the developers got into time trouble and didn’t think that toddlers were so important. If they had planned to make them later and release them in a free patch then they would have done that within a few months. But instead they waited for years and only began to make them when all the reviews kept mentioning the missing toddlers even so long time after the release of the basegame.
3: It has also been stated that sims 4 is different, and will not follow the past sims series cycles. The guru's have said that they will keep making packs for sims 4 until it no longer makes sense to.
You seem to be twisting their statements again. Yes, Sims 4 is different and it doesn’t get 2-3 EPs each year like Sims 3 did because EA decided to replace half of the EPs with SPs and the new GPs. Also the structure of the developing teams and their sizes are different because the many small packs and the free stuff means that more small teams have to work at the same time. The focus on SPs also means that more artists and fewer programmers are generally needed. So they also move developers more around between the teams than they did earlier. All this just doesn’t mean that the reasons why EA always has released a new basegame after at most 5 years have changed because those reasons have always just been about marketing:
1. An old basegame with many packs released isn’t attractive to new simmers.
2. Some of the simmers stop playing after a couple of years.
3. Sales numbers for packs usually become lower and lower after some time.
4. Many simmers will begin to buy old discounted packs instead of buying the new packs.
5. A new basegame will get better sales numbers for both the basegame and packs again.
6. A new basegame means that bugs in the old one don’t matter anymore.
7. A new basegame can be designed better for the newer and stronger computers.
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
They did not rewrite the entire engine when adding in toddlers. We’re they a ton of work? Absolutely, especially since they did not have any work accomplished on them when the base game released, and had lots of DLC already released for the game that could potentially break. A complete rewrite of the engine would be for a brand new game.
I’m also going to somewhat disagree with the verbiage where you say they were planned as patch content “from the start” - could you possibly find where SGDrake said that? I find it weird that they would say that, because the omission of toddlers was originally blamed on a lack of time/staff - not as an intentional move. Do you think pools were also purposefully omitted and reserved as patch content? Ghosts? I think you might be misrepresenting what these gurus are actually saying.
I promise you this is what was said. I will go back and dig it up, I believe it was around January, so it might take a few. Once I find it I will edit this comment with the quote.
AS @jackjack_k has said, they did not leave them out on purpose, but after they were forced to leave them out, they knew they would add them back at some point.
EDIT: The post history seems wonky, I can't find some of Drake's quotes for some reason. Someone was commenting that negative feedback is what caused us to get toddlers, and I believe SimguruDrake stated something along the lines of "That's not true, we always knew we were going to patch in toddlers, and we wanted to do it for free. Your feedback definitely helped shape them however"
But it's okay because I found another source stating it.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING ON TODDLERS IN THE SIMS 4? WHAT INITIATED THE TEAM TO BEGIN DEVELOPMENT?
We’ve talked about Toddlers on LOT on the Development team, and we’ve talked about them for a long time. What we’d like to do with them, what the community would like to see, what they might look like, how they might act. We always knew we were going to add Toddlers to The Sims 4 at some point, we just weren’t sure when.
Neither what they said, or what you said corroborates your post. “We knew we were going to add them, we just weren’t sure when” does not equate to “they were planned as patch content from the very start” such a quote would imply that toddlers were axed from the beginning of the game’s development. I’m not disagreeing on the facts, they wanted them - couldn’t make them in time, so they didn’t make them in favor of other things. They were then trapped in limbo while the developers decided on what they wanted to make and where toddlers fell on that list. That isn’t what you said, and that isn’t what you said SGDrake said, which she clearly didn’t say since you can’t actually find the quote.
You were misrepresenting what was said. The quotes you provided just show that.
How is that any different than what I said?
The person I quoted saying they decided to only add toddlers because the sims wasnt doing too good. I replied that toddlers were planned from the start to be patched in at a later date, which the quote says.
"We always knew we were going to add toddlers eventually."
And yes, her post history is wonky. Multiple other simmers have quoted her on it.
I'm not sure if these are the quotes you're looking for @Zeldaboy180 but here's a blog post and a Q&A.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say we've been talking about this particular update for years. We just had to find the right time, resources and design to allow us to start the heavy process of actually building and bringing Toddlers to life." - SimGuru Lindsay
SimGuruDrake pretty much says the same thing at the bottom of the Q & A. If there was an actual forum post from her it very likely got deleted.
I swear if they've already started developing Sims 5 then I will simply just laugh condescendingly, when the Sims 4 is nowhere near "finished" as is. Sims 4 has so much potential to be a great game and to think they would go ahead and reveal Sims 5 already is an absurd joke that's nowhere near funny. Typical EA mindset though.
I agree. It's not time for Sims 5 when Sims 4 isn't even complete.
Simming for 19 years! Family Tree Playing Mod & CC Free
I swear if they've already started developing Sims 5 then I will simply just laugh condescendingly, when the Sims 4 is nowhere near "finished" as is. Sims 4 has so much potential to be a great game and to think they would go ahead and reveal Sims 5 already is an absurd joke that's nowhere near funny. Typical EA mindset though.
I agree. It's not time for Sims 5 when Sims 4 isn't even complete.
But for EA TS4 was already “complete” when they released the basegame and all the later packs have just been “extras”!
I swear if they've already started developing Sims 5 then I will simply just laugh condescendingly, when the Sims 4 is nowhere near "finished" as is. Sims 4 has so much potential to be a great game and to think they would go ahead and reveal Sims 5 already is an absurd joke that's nowhere near funny. Typical EA mindset though.
I agree. It's not time for Sims 5 when Sims 4 isn't even complete.
But for EA TS4 was already “complete” when they released the basegame and all the later packs have just been “extras”!
Where did the sims 4 mention the game was ''complete'' ?
I swear if they've already started developing Sims 5 then I will simply just laugh condescendingly, when the Sims 4 is nowhere near "finished" as is. Sims 4 has so much potential to be a great game and to think they would go ahead and reveal Sims 5 already is an absurd joke that's nowhere near funny. Typical EA mindset though.
I agree. It's not time for Sims 5 when Sims 4 isn't even complete.
But for EA TS4 was already “complete” when they released the basegame and all the later packs have just been “extras”!
Where did the sims 4 mention the game was ''complete'' ?
The idea that the released games aren’t complete until and unless they get a lot of later packs to “complete” them only exist in the minds of simmers. No game company will guarantee a certain number of later additions to their released games to “complete” them and EA isn’t different in such matters either. I agree that simmers now expects at least 5 years with such additions for each new Sims basegame. But only because they happened to get it for TS2 and TS3. EA has never promised that to happen for any of the games and it won’t unless the sales numbers for EA seem to indicate that releasing that many additions will be worth it.
Still the question about whether to release TS5 five years after the release of TS4 was something that EA had to decide 2-3 years ago. But we won’t know EA’s decision until some time in the middle of this year (2018).
Several simgurus have mentioned they expect the sims 4 to have a longer life span than 1,2&3 did tho because it's still very stable and they still think there's loads left to add.
Where as with the other games there were set numbers how many expansionpacks etc the game could handle, the sims 4 doesn't have that (Simgurus mentioned this)
Several simgurus have mentioned they expect the sims 4 to have a longer life span than 1,2&3 did tho because it's still very stable and they still think there's loads left to add.
Where have you seen that?
Where as with the other games there were set numbers how many expansionpacks etc the game could handle, the sims 4 doesn't have that (Simgurus mentioned this)
TS1 got many more EPs than EA had planned. They therefore were quite difficult for the developers to make and for us to install.
TS2 wasn’t planned to get SPs and it didn’t for two years. But then EA made a Christmas SP just as an experiment. It sold so amazingly well that EA decided to make another SP and release it 3 months later. Both those SPs were without copy protection because they were only experiments. But when also the second SP got huge sales numbers then EA decided to release also SPs on a regular basis. So also TS2 got many more packs than EA originally had planned.
So no there isn’t a fixed maximum number of packs or EPs each game can get. But I agree that especially GPs and EPs become more and more difficult to make after a few years. They also sell less and less especially because most new simmers usually prefer to buy old discounted packs instead of the new more expensive ones. Therefore EA has always preferred to start over with a new basegame after at most 5 years. I don’t expect this to change unless EA at some time turns also the big PC versions of the game into a MMO game.
My feeling is its just an opportunity to market the TS4 console version and Sims Mobile to gamers. Not getting my hopes up for any kind of massive announcement.
Also theres no way TS5 is being announced just yet. They just came out with the console version and theyd essentially be like "hey guys this ones pretty much obsolete already, why bother buying the future packs we convert?"
My speculations on hints for future content:
-Cars Update
-Spiral/Diagonal Stairs Update
-Hotel Pack
-Romance Pack (possibly combined with Hotel Pack)
-Bands Pack
-Royalty Pack
-Fashion Design Pack
-Fairies Pack
-Werewolf Pack
-France-inspired World
Guys, guys, can't we all just wait until June to finally do the "I told you so" posts? I'd rather just wait and see so this silly arguing can subside and then the latest argument about what is revealed begins.
Guys, guys, can't we all just wait until June to finally do the "I told you so" posts? I'd rather just wait and see so this silly arguing can subside and then the latest argument about what is revealed begins.
Agreed
For me it isn’t about “I told you so” though because I am just curios to see if TS5 will be announced and released at the time that I see as much the most likely and also to see how it will be different from TS2, TS3 and TS4?
It is just a little hard for me not to answer when somebody claims to have found “proof” that TS5 won’t be released until 2020, 2022 or 2025
Guys, guys, can't we all just wait until June to finally do the "I told you so" posts? I'd rather just wait and see so this silly arguing can subside and then the latest argument about what is revealed begins.
Agreed
For me it isn’t about “I told you so” though because I am just curios to see if TS5 will be announced and released at the time that I see as much the most likely and also to see how it will be different from TS2, TS3 and TS4?
It is just a little hard for me not to answer when somebody claims to have found “proof” that TS5 won’t be released until 2020, 2022 or 2025
No one is claiming to have absolute proof. It's no different than the article you linked to in another thread showing possible release dates for console dlc. That doesn't 'prove' anything. It's all speculation until EA announces it. And the only argument you have for a June announcement of Sims 5 is "that's the way it's always been done." Don't forget a popular phrase from several years ago. Things change.
Guys, guys, can't we all just wait until June to finally do the "I told you so" posts? I'd rather just wait and see so this silly arguing can subside and then the latest argument about what is revealed begins.
Agreed
For me it isn’t about “I told you so” though because I am just curios to see if TS5 will be announced and released at the time that I see as much the most likely and also to see how it will be different from TS2, TS3 and TS4?
It is just a little hard for me not to answer when somebody claims to have found “proof” that TS5 won’t be released until 2020, 2022 or 2025
No one is claiming to have absolute proof. It's no different than the article you linked to in another thread showing possible release dates for console dlc. That doesn't 'prove' anything. It's all speculation until EA announces it. And the only argument you have for a June announcement of Sims 5 is "that's the way it's always been done." Don't forget a popular phrase from several years ago. Things change.
Yes things change. Just rarely without a reason.
What doesn’t convince me is the simmers who claim that the gurus have said that TS4 won’t stop after 5 years like all the previous games but without anybody being able to link to such a statement anywhere.
The link about the console expansions says that all the planned release dates are from a usually trustworthy retailer in Switzerland. This means that the dates actually are from EA. So the only problem about those dates is that most of them are so far out in the future that there is a risk about EA changing plans. Still EA seems to be in a hurry about releasing packs for the console game much faster than for the PC game. This again indicates that EA just want them out before TS5 is released.
TL;DR It's been part of the plan for a long time. We knew folks wanted it and so did we. We've been working on them throughout a lot of the "endless feedback".
Longer explanation:
Toddlers are something we've desperately wanted to do since we launched. And for free as a patch too - not paid content. We felt strongly about that and it was very important to us. It took time to get everything in order (balancing SP, GP, EP, and free content development simultaneously is no easy task. It's actually quite challenging). Simple as that.
Trust me, at several points we wanted to scream from the highest mountaintop "THEY'RE COMING!" but were simply unable to. So we kept our heads down, weathered the repeated feedback, and did our best to get quality content into your hands as soon as we possibly could.
With a little luck we've made Simmers happier today and given them something to enjoy.
I hope you all enjoy it too! You deserve it!
I'm not sure if these are the quotes you're looking for @Zeldaboy180 but here's a blog post and a Q&A.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say we've been talking about this particular update for years. We just had to find the right time, resources and design to allow us to start the heavy process of actually building and bringing Toddlers to life." - SimGuru Lindsay
SimGuruDrake pretty much says the same thing at the bottom of the Q & A. If there was an actual forum post from her it very likely got deleted.
Hope you’ll excuse me, but this all sounds very dishonest to me, explaining away in retrospect to make all the backlash around toddlers sound unjustified and unnecessary, especially with Rachel Franklin’s statements in mind when Sims 4 was less than a year old.
Interviewer: I was trying to check last night, and you still don’t have toddlers?
RF: No.
GC: Is that something that’s going to come later, in maybe the next expansion? Since that is one of the main things fans are still asking for.
RF: You know, our fans ask for a lot of things! [laughs] And here’s the thing, we look at a lot of different factors. We look absolutely at things that are being said in public forums. We also have groups of fans coming in, but we also have telemetry to tell us what people are actually playing with and using.
GC: It almost reminds me of a Kickstarter project, where you have all these ideas and demands coming in and you have to push back against some of them.
RF: I think it gets factored in. I would say it’s less of a push back and more of a,’How are we taking that into account and weighing it against all the other influences?’
GC: So you’re satisfied that not having toddlers was the right choice?
RF: That’s the decision that we made based on all of the information that we had at the time. So absolutely, I feel like it’s the best decision for the game to date. I’m not talking about future stuff. But I do think it’s important to know, that players play in very different ways. We see all kinds of different play styles and family players are very passionate, so are players that play other ways.
And I want to make sure that all of those voices are considered when people are thinking about whether or not we’ve included the right things. Because we do, we take it very seriously about whether or not we’re approaching all of those different play styles. We take it just as seriously as the players do that are asking for the things that they want.
Sounds to me nothing was settled back then. It was nothing more than a possibility, an option. An option that probably got very serious once they discovered the community was not planning to be silent and accepting about this. If not, they have been playing with player’s feelings and patience. For that I just have one word: yuck.
Comments
Yes, it was stated by SimguruDrake and many other guru's that toddlers were planned to be patched in at a late from the start. The issue is they needed time to make them the best they could be. You claimed you could make them in 3-6 months? That is absolutely false, where do you get that assumption?
The Cas update alone took them over a year. Toddlers are a new life stage, and they had to COMPLETELY re write the engine to add them, on top of still working on other packs.
And I'm not twisting any words. It was stated by a sim guru that the Sims 4 Would not stop the development of packs until it no longer made sense to keep adding them. The sims 4 is different than sims 2 and 3, both of those had a number cap on the limit of expansions it could handle, the sims 4 has no limit on packs, it was built from the ground up to be expanded on. None of this is speculation, these are all guru quotes.
They did not rewrite the entire engine when adding in toddlers. We’re they a ton of work? Absolutely, especially since they did not have any work accomplished on them when the base game released, and had lots of DLC already released for the game that could potentially break. A complete rewrite of the engine would be for a brand new game.
I’m also going to somewhat disagree with the verbiage where you say they were planned as patch content “from the start” - could you possibly find where SGDrake said that? I find it weird that they would say that, because the omission of toddlers was originally blamed on a lack of time/staff - not as an intentional move. Do you think pools were also purposefully omitted and reserved as patch content? Ghosts? I think you might be misrepresenting what these gurus are actually saying.
They’re not saying they “intentionally” left them out to be patched later, but they knew that when The Sims 4 launched without them, they would be added for free.
SimGuruRachel even said specifically Pools and Toddlers wouldn’t be available “at launch” so it seems they were on the development cards before we’d even see any Sims 4 live gameplay.
EA originally was given a March 2014 release date, and only got a 6 month extension.
It was clear that The Sims 4 was always going to have Ghosts and Pools, they just hadn’t finished them. There’s no way they had no intention of working on them, the coding was already in the game at launch. The problem with EA at the time was they were known to put out games unfinished because EA were setting Devs unrealistic deadlines, so they worked on finishing the stuff that couldn’t be added later and left the stuff that could be.
It was bad but I’m glad EA seemed to change in 2015. There was a huge shift around the release of Get Together and beyond.
Insta: https://instagram.com/jkarajs?igshid=oef2ymrand3g
You buy everything way too easily. TS4’s game engine would have been a complete disaster if it really made it so extremely difficult to just add things like the toddlers and the CAS update when all other games can add much more in just about a month. You sound like you know nothing about programming or other games. But I am actually educated as a computer scientist on a university where we studied all about different types of computer languages and computers and I have played hundreds of games for many years too. So I don’t believe that EA ever would use an engine that made it so extremely difficult just to add a little to the game and toddlers and CAS aren’t such huge things which you seem to think that they are. EA could almost make a whole new big Sims game in those 2 yrs and 4 months that EA used just to make the toddlers
I'm not going to try to debate with you if you refuse to listen to any of the facts and statements I've provided. You are free to disbelieve anything you want, I however cannot convince you if you refuse to listen.
I promise you this is what was said. I will go back and dig it up, I believe it was around January, so it might take a few. Once I find it I will edit this comment with the quote.
AS @jackjack_k has said, they did not leave them out on purpose, but after they were forced to leave them out, they knew they would add them back at some point.
EDIT: The post history seems wonky, I can't find some of Drake's quotes for some reason. Someone was commenting that negative feedback is what caused us to get toddlers, and I believe SimguruDrake stated something along the lines of "That's not true, we always knew we were going to patch in toddlers, and we wanted to do it for free. Your feedback definitely helped shape them however"
But it's okay because I found another source stating it.
-SimGuruSarah
Source: https://beyondsims.com/2017/01/ts4-toddlers-interview/
Neither what they said, or what you said corroborates your post. “We knew we were going to add them, we just weren’t sure when” does not equate to “they were planned as patch content from the very start” such a quote would imply that toddlers were axed from the beginning of the game’s development. I’m not disagreeing on the facts, they wanted them - couldn’t make them in time, so they didn’t make them in favor of other things. They were then trapped in limbo while the developers decided on what they wanted to make and where toddlers fell on that list. That isn’t what you said, and that isn’t what you said SGDrake said, which she clearly didn’t say since you can’t actually find the quote.
You were misrepresenting what was said. The quotes you provided just show that.
How is that any different than what I said?
The person I quoted saying they decided to only add toddlers because the sims wasnt doing too good. I replied that toddlers were planned from the start to be patched in at a later date, which the quote says.
"We always knew we were going to add toddlers eventually."
And yes, her post history is wonky. Multiple other simmers have quoted her on it.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say we've been talking about this particular update for years. We just had to find the right time, resources and design to allow us to start the heavy process of actually building and bringing Toddlers to life." - SimGuru Lindsay
SimGuruDrake pretty much says the same thing at the bottom of the Q & A. If there was an actual forum post from her it very likely got deleted.
I agree. It's not time for Sims 5 when Sims 4 isn't even complete.
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Where did the sims 4 mention the game was ''complete'' ?
-Spiral, L&U shaped stairs-More hair colors-Alternative fashion(Goth,Punk,lolita)-More rabbit hole careers-Witches,Plantsims,Werewolves.
Still the question about whether to release TS5 five years after the release of TS4 was something that EA had to decide 2-3 years ago. But we won’t know EA’s decision until some time in the middle of this year (2018).
Where as with the other games there were set numbers how many expansionpacks etc the game could handle, the sims 4 doesn't have that (Simgurus mentioned this)
-Spiral, L&U shaped stairs-More hair colors-Alternative fashion(Goth,Punk,lolita)-More rabbit hole careers-Witches,Plantsims,Werewolves.
TS1 got many more EPs than EA had planned. They therefore were quite difficult for the developers to make and for us to install.
TS2 wasn’t planned to get SPs and it didn’t for two years. But then EA made a Christmas SP just as an experiment. It sold so amazingly well that EA decided to make another SP and release it 3 months later. Both those SPs were without copy protection because they were only experiments. But when also the second SP got huge sales numbers then EA decided to release also SPs on a regular basis. So also TS2 got many more packs than EA originally had planned.
So no there isn’t a fixed maximum number of packs or EPs each game can get. But I agree that especially GPs and EPs become more and more difficult to make after a few years. They also sell less and less especially because most new simmers usually prefer to buy old discounted packs instead of the new more expensive ones. Therefore EA has always preferred to start over with a new basegame after at most 5 years. I don’t expect this to change unless EA at some time turns also the big PC versions of the game into a MMO game.
Also theres no way TS5 is being announced just yet. They just came out with the console version and theyd essentially be like "hey guys this ones pretty much obsolete already, why bother buying the future packs we convert?"
-Cars Update
-Spiral/Diagonal Stairs Update
-Hotel Pack
-Romance Pack (possibly combined with Hotel Pack)
-Bands Pack
-Royalty Pack
-Fashion Design Pack
-Fairies Pack
-Werewolf Pack
-France-inspired World
They even state the end of pets the start of the second wave. So I’d say another few years to go.
For me it isn’t about “I told you so” though because I am just curios to see if TS5 will be announced and released at the time that I see as much the most likely and also to see how it will be different from TS2, TS3 and TS4?
It is just a little hard for me not to answer when somebody claims to have found “proof” that TS5 won’t be released until 2020, 2022 or 2025
No one is claiming to have absolute proof. It's no different than the article you linked to in another thread showing possible release dates for console dlc. That doesn't 'prove' anything. It's all speculation until EA announces it. And the only argument you have for a June announcement of Sims 5 is "that's the way it's always been done." Don't forget a popular phrase from several years ago. Things change.
What doesn’t convince me is the simmers who claim that the gurus have said that TS4 won’t stop after 5 years like all the previous games but without anybody being able to link to such a statement anywhere.
The link about the console expansions says that all the planned release dates are from a usually trustworthy retailer in Switzerland. This means that the dates actually are from EA. So the only problem about those dates is that most of them are so far out in the future that there is a risk about EA changing plans. Still EA seems to be in a hurry about releasing packs for the console game much faster than for the PC game. This again indicates that EA just want them out before TS5 is released.
Sounds to me nothing was settled back then. It was nothing more than a possibility, an option. An option that probably got very serious once they discovered the community was not planning to be silent and accepting about this. If not, they have been playing with player’s feelings and patience. For that I just have one word: yuck.