The Sims 4 is officially 10 years old as of this week. That's a huge milestone—it's the only game in the series to hit double digits and still receive content updates, lasting twice as long as both The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.
Yet despite a record-breaking anniversary, it's hard to feel all giddy. Part of that is due to the fact that it's gone completely ignored by EA across its socials and news channels. Like, c'mon guys, not even a "10" graphic on your Twitter page or daft in-game t-shirt to celebrate? Nothing? But more so than that, it's an ever-growing sense of frustration with where the game is at right now.
You'd think with all this time to cook, it would be the definitive simming experience. Yet instead of ageing like a fine wine, it's been leaving more of a sour milk taste in my mouth for longer than I'd care to admit. Yes, The Sims 4 has been alive and kickin' for a decade, but I think the game is all the worse for its long lifespan.
I can't help but feel like, as the years have gone by, The Sims 4 has become increasingly oversaturated. While The Sims 3 squeezed out 11 expansion packs and nine stuff packs in four years, The Sims 4 currently has an eye-watering 79 packs in total: 12 expansion packs, 16 game packs, 20 stuff packs and 31 kits.
That is, to be frank, an absurd amount. Of course a lot of it has come from kits, the $5 mini packs that EA introduced back in 2021. Almost all of them are simply cosmetic offerings bar Bust the Dust, the only gameplay-focused kit currently available. That's kind of whatever at this point, but there are still 48 additional packs available for the game, each with their own gameplay features that are actively working with (or against) every other moving part happening in the game.
Now life sims are damn hard to make—there's a reason The Sims has gone relatively unchallenged in the space over the last 24 years—but I feel like the complexity of the genre is a consideration EA should be making as it continues to stuff hundreds and thousands of lines of code into The Sims 4.
The game has long been accused of suffering from a bad case of spaghetti code. I can't speak to the truth of that, but I can speak to an increasingly buggy playing experience that has killed my desire to continue dedicating my time and money to a series that has been in my life since I was a child. An experience that is getting so bad EA had to specifically address it and tell folk it had "assembled a team" to deal with bug fixes. Which, shouldn't it have been doing that already?
For me, my frustrations really started settling in when My Wedding Stories released in 2022—a game pack that was supposed to breathe new life into base game weddings, only to hopelessly break the entire system and then leave it unrepaired for the following two years. Now, EA has literally just released a laundry list of bug fixes that appears to have tackled the pack's most glaring problems. I haven't been able to verify for myself yet whether this fix has actually worked, but two years feels like too little too late.
It's not the only $20 pack that has been left to rot over the years. 2016's Dine Out game pack still regularly causes issues for me—the process of seating customers, taking their orders and getting them out the door takes up hours of in-game time, with them often getting stuck and their behaviour freezing up.
When these things cost so much damn money, it's hard to not be a little miffed by the whole thing. I don't even own every pack, yet I've easily spent hundreds of dollars across both PlayStation and PC despite regularly taking advantage of sales and bundle discounts. The complete Sims 4 experience is a hopelessly expensive undertaking, and I can't even begin to imagine how intimidating such a thing might be for someone looking to get into The Sims for the first time.
The scariest part is, EA clearly isn't done trying to shove more $5/$20/$40 DLCs in our faces. It just revealed two kits and brand-new expansion Life and Death, and it seems like EA is fairly set on continuing to support The Sims 4 alongside Project Rene. I have to wonder how many more ideas it can possibly spin out into costly DLC while continuing to try and maintain the integrity of the code it's been weaving into the game for the last 10 years.
But really, what's the solution here? Put The Sims 4 to rest, start all over again with a stripped-down base game with some easy-to-sell $40 packs like Seasons, Pets and University that we've become all too used to? As much as I would like to think we'd see a Sims 5 that included core features that we've spent the last 20 years having to pay for, I also know better than that.
Folk can point to mods as an easy band-aid fix, but that actively ignores our fellow Simmers who enjoy playing the game on console. That's not to diminish the community effort—many aspects of the game are smoother thanks to the hard work of modders implementing bug fixes—but the onus shouldn't be on them to turn The Sims 4 into a more playable experience.
Either way, it feels like a lose-lose situation. The Sims, as a complete package, is more expensive than ever. Setting aside hundreds of dollars and starting again seems like a friggin' nightmare. Ideally, support would've winded down around 30 goddamn packs ago, but we're far past that point now. I'm not quite sure where the stopping point is going to be for EA, but I'd be ecstatic if they straight-up stopped adding new packs and got to work on fixing what's already there. But bug fixes don't bring in money, and in a time where development is more expensive than ever, it's likely a hard thing to justify.
I love The Sims—trust me, I really do, which is why I'm being so hard on it. It's a series that has given me hours of joy for the last 20 years of my life. Hell, The Sims 3 is the first videogame I distinctly remember saving my pocket money for, just to get the collector's edition with the plumbob USB drive. But if this is the modern Sims experience, I might have to say "dag dag" for good.
