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If something new is shown at EA Play regarding The Sims Franchise, what do you think it will be?
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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.