The Sims 4: Neighborhood Stories adds even more depth to the Sims experience, but its rollout has me longing for The Sims 5 more than ever.
Neighborhood Stories offers a kind of immersion heretofore unseen in The Sims 4. With the free update, neighbor Sims (aka NPCs outside of your active household) now have free will and no longer remain frozen in a perpetual state of just, sort of, existing. Now the Sims in your neighborhood can make life-changing decisions like getting pregnant, adopting a cat or dog, or leaving their job. It's the kind of depth Simmers have been asking for since The Sims 4 released in 2014.
And that's what makes it so odd. Neighborhood Stories is a great addition to a game that's getting closer and closer to the decade mark. Simmers want The Sims 5 and even more immersive features like open-world exploration, driving, and freer babies. And while EA and Maxis are consistently improving upon The Sims 4, it's often a stark reminder of how much more can potentially be done with a sequel.
In the neighborhood
Don't get me wrong – Neighborhood Stories is a great new feature. It's so seamlessly woven into the existing gameplay that I don't realize it's there for the first several playthroughs after the update. When my Sim gets a phone call from her neighbor asking if she should get to know another Sim, I'm able to gently nudge her towards a decision. And since I'm a messy you-know-what, I tell her to go for it, knowing full well that Sim is married. It's only when I get a follow-up message from them a few Sim days later, thanking me for my suggestion as she had a "spectacular time," that I realize this is part of the new update.
Prior to Neighborhood Stories, there were only a few examples of this kind of immersion introduced in expansion packs like Get Together and Eco Lifestyle. If you owned these packs, you might get phone calls from a neighbor asking for advice on accepting a marriage proposal, or get the chance to nudge a neighbor towards leaving their partner. But now, thanks to Neighborhood Stories, every Simmer can enjoy these interactions and more as part of the base game, which is a lovely nod to the community – proving that EA is really listening to its concerns and taking steps to make improvements.
A recent Neighborhood Stories update adds even more depth to the featureset, giving your neighbors even more agency that helps the game world feel much more lived-in and dynamic. Now the Sims in your surrounding households can adopt pets, retire, move in and out of lots, and, of course, die in a variety of macabre accidents. And what's even better than the idea of Agnes Crumplebottom freezing to death on the slopes of Mt. Komorebi is that you have the ability to turn all of these things on and off.
New gameplay controls let players opt in and out of aspects of the Neighborhood Stories systems. If you want your neighbors to stay frozen in a perpetual state of sameness, you can turn all the features off. If you want Nancy Landgraab to consider leaving Geoffrey but don't want their son Malcom to adopt a puppy (you cruel bastard), you can customize which components of Neighborhood Stories are available to your NPC Sims. Ultimately, this all leads to a more immersive and expansive experience, which is all players want from a life sim.
Too little too late?
Adding free features like Neighborhood Stories can certainly be taken as a gesture of good faith from EA to the Sims community, but that's not how every Simmer sees it – for some it's too little too late. The Sims 3 had similar functionality in Story Progression, a feature that, if turned on, would allow uncontrolled Sims' lives to progress. They'd have babies, move away, get promotions, and more, all without players' input. This feature was infamously unpredictable, but players were able to turn it off if things got a little too out of hand. Players have been asking for The Sims 4 to include a feature similar to Story Progression for years, and have created custom content as a workaround for its absence.
The MC Command Center is a mod that adds NPC story progression options and lets players give NPCs limited commands as if they were Sims in their active household. Responses to the announcement of Neighborhood Stories in the Sims 4 Reddit include many references to MCCC and players' desires to turn off the new feature in favor of letting MCCC continue to control NPC lives. Conversely, console players seem excited about the base game update, as it adds a layer of immersion that they can't add without access to PC mods.
This has been the state of The Sims 4 for years now: the PC community works on mods and custom content that fills gaps left by developer Maxis while console players have to take what they can get when they can get it. Updates like Neighborhood Stories show both types of players that there's more life to be squeezed out of The Sims 4 yet, although the kinds of features that can go into the current game only work to highlight how powerful a full-fledged new entry to the series could be.
EA is yet to confirm that The Sims 5 is in active production, but it's releases like Neighborhood Stories that give us some sense of where Maxis wants to take The Sims next: an even more immersive playground with a heightened focus on social connection and shared experiences, where your Sims feel as if they are part of a world that lives and breathes with them rather than because of them.
The question, of course, is whether The Sims 4 will ever truly get there. Maxis and EA had always thought of The Sims 4 as a game that would grow and evolve over time, but as it prepares to celebrate its ninth anniversary, you have to wonder whether it's running out of road, and if a new path should be carved out for The Sims 5 instead.
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