The Sims 4 has been going strong for ten years now, and love is finally back in the air. New pack Lovestruck feels like a revamped version of perhaps the best Sims era: The Sims 2. Specifically, the Sims 2's Nightlife expansion. As well as thumping club music, vampirism, and stretch limousines, Nightlife introduced the Chemistry system, allowing players to set their Sims' romantic Turn Offs and Turn Ons to make dating and creating stories that much more interactive.
That's what Lovestruck's new Attraction system seeks to emulate, on top of championing greater dating diversity and more dynamic outings with your would-be beaus. If it all sounds familiar, that's because I suspect EA is drawing inspiration from the past to chart The Sims' future – a move that is pushing it closer and closer to its next generation.
My heart's (paid) content
A long legacy means great expectations, and The Sims 4 has had its work cut out to meet them. The road was rocky at first. It took EA three years to add toddlers to the base game, its Cats and Dogs expansion featured far fewer animals to adopt than in The Sims 2 and 3's respective Pets expansions, and even stuff as mundane as laundry room equipment can only be acquired through paid kit packs. And yet, I paid up.
Adding content through paid expansions has always been the name of the Simming game, but whenever I feel that new content should have been implemented as a free update, I've been known to get the grumps. I'm not grumpy that Lovestruck's more detailed romance systems cost money – I've played a fair few hours of it myself, and there's a lot more to it than retching in disgust after checking out your neighbor. However, I am wondering why EA has gone as far back as Sims 2 to mine for content. With something as seemingly basic as a romance system being introduced at this late stage in The Sims 4's life cycle, my spidey senses are tingling.
As a fan, my immediate reaction is to shout my thanks from the rooftops and ready myself for a Simlish Love Island spectacular set on the glittering shores of Sulani. From an analytical standpoint, maybe EA is just running out of ideas, and the only way to go forward is to look back.
It almost feels like when your mother asks you to check your backpack for anything else you need before heading off to school. Laptop? Check. Charger? Check. Autonomous date invites from NPC admirers? Double check. By picking through the past iterations of the Sims, whether it be City Living's apartments drawn from The Sims 2 Apartment Life or the werewolves of Sims 3 Supernatural, EA is effectively ensuring it hasn't missed anything before moving swiftly on.
A date with destiny
I'm almost hoping that EA's trip down memory lane with Lovestruck signals a clean slate is coming.
It's financially viable for EA, but the problem with this model is that by the time each Sims game has caught up with the last, and added more to it besides, the series starts all over again with a new generation. Consequently, that next generation Sims game will have a whole lot of expectation behind it to innovate with new systems, but bring back renewed iterations of all the fan favorites that came before.
The fact is that the more content we get for The Sims 4, the more EA will have to shoulder next time, and next time, and the time after that. Just how viable is this going to be in the long run, for players and for the publisher?
Which leads us to the big question: when will Sims 5 even land? More to it, are we ready to see The Sims 4 go off into the sunset? Personally, I think I am – but it's a shame, because it's taken a full decade for EA to get the game in as good a shape as it's currently in. I recall the early days of The Sims 4, a time before Wants were re-added and all my digital playthings felt like empty husks. I also recall the not too-distant memory of the harrowing incest bug that plagued my game in the preamble to the High School Years expansion back in 2022 – and let's not even mention the buggy Wedding Stories launch. Most of these kinks have been smoothed over, though I'm sad to report that the incest bug is back with a particularly nasty vengeance.
The Sims 4 now has a veritable treasure trove of expansions under its belt, more than double that of its predecessor, which also featured twice as many packs as its predecessor. I'm almost scared to imagine what The Sims 5 would even look like if that expectation persists, and to make it easier on both the developer and my future wallet, I'm almost hoping that EA's trip down memory lane with Lovestruck signals a clean slate is coming, and that perhaps its learned a lesson or two along the way.
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