The Sims 4 | History is Repeating Itself...Again

It comes as no surprise that video game developers often form a pattern when it comes to an extensive franchise under their sleeve. Activision likes to release a new Call of Duty installment every year, Rockstar Games likes to push boundaries and parody modern culture in Grand Theft Auto, Volition likes to make each Saints Row installment more and more over the top and Electronic Arts likes to milk every last drop out of The Sims.

When The Sims was a fresh franchise fifteen years ago, leading up to the second generation of the series in 2004 with The Sims 2, nothing was really thought of the expansion packs. I'm sure people commented on the price and the content included, but I can't recall any sort of outcry or negative commentary against the implementations. I mean, The Sims 2 was a very vanilla, albeit great experience and the expansion packs were creative and innovative for the franchise. Allowing Sims to open up their own shops and sell goods, add dynamic seasons and weather change, bring an animal friend into the family and send your Sims to university to further themselves, for example. Wonderful additions that really added to the gameplay and the life of the game overall.

Fast forward to 2009 with the release of The Sims 3 and once again, we had a very bare-bones base game at launch. None of the content from the preceding game's expansion packs made it into the base game...no pets, no seasons, no night life, no apartments, nothing. It had its innovative elements, including the first completely open-world Sims game, paired with a single, initial and very long loading screen. There were a few features that made it in from the last game, but I remember a lot of fans asking why most of the previously released content didn't make it in. Cue the announcement from EA and sure enough, the first expansion pack for The Sims 3 was World Adventures, which was a similar, but almost watered down version of The Sims 2: Bon Voyage. Moving forward, there were eventual releases that seemed to be copy and paste jobs from the previous expansion packs and soon enough, we saw the same expansion packs from The Sims 2 returning in the third generation. There were a handful of expansion packs that were fresh and different, but some were exact copies: Seasons, Pets and University for example. By the time they announced The Sims 4 and discontinued development for The Sims 3, they had released a whopping eleven expansion packs and nine "stuff" packs, which were essentially, watered down expansions with cosmetic items such as clothing and decor that could have easily already been included in the base game.

With the launch of The Sims 4, we had an even more skeletal base game than in The Sims 3. Two inexcusably small neighborhoods with only twenty or so residential lots and a mile long list of missing and excluded content. Some content made its return by way of game updates, including ghosts and swimming pools, but the vanilla base game still remains horribly skeletal. Fifty points to Gryffindor if you can have a proper guess at how EA plans to add the proverbial meat to the experience.

Fast forward to January 2015, four months after the launch of the fourth generation installment in the franchise, The Sims 4. EA released what they called a "game pack," which was just a not-so-clever rewording of the previously known stuff packs from The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. The first game pack, Outdoor Retreat, retailed at USD$19.99 and included a new "vacation" neighborhood consisting of only four (temporary) residential lots for vacation purposes and a few dozen camping themed items and clothing. A quaint little addition, but a lot of people within and outside of The Sims community commented on the return of expansion packs and the reliance upon them to populate an unnecessarily drab experience.

Just recently, EA announced the first official expansion pack for The Sims 4, aptly named 'Get to Work,' which adds...care to have a guess? I'll wait. Ding! Time's up! If you guessed...

A. Careers that should have already been in the base game.
B. A repeat of The Sims 2: Open For Business.
C. A slight repeat of The Sims 3: Ambitions.
D. All of the above

...congratulations! The grand prize is...a horrifically overpriced video game.

Hear me out for a moment. Remember when I stated that there were eleven expansion packs and nine stuff packs for The Sims 3? Well, at launch (and still presently, I believe) the expansion packs and stuff packs were USD$20 a piece. I can't stand mathematics, but 20 x 19 = 380. $380 worth of expansion and stuff packs, plus the $50 cost of the base game and congratulations, you'll have spent $430 on a game that's only worth a fraction of that cost.

Now...where have we seen this before? Give me a moment...ah, yes. Downloadable content. It's a recurring theme, isn't it? Paying the full retail price for a game that's actually very bare and then being expected to shell out a few hundred dollars more by the end of the game's life for the "complete" experience. Please, remind me why gamers are continuously supporting this practice. I think the real struggle is when you're so involved and in love with a franchise or game like The Sims, for example, it is surely easy to justify having spent all of that extra money. But at the end of the day, you've just paid over $400 for content that should have been in the game to start with.

I remember having a chat with my grandmother about it once, just to hear the opinion of an outsider with nothing to rely on but common sense. My grandmother, who's never played a video game aside from virtual Texas Hold 'Em turned to me and said, "I can't understand why they didn't include everything from The Sims 3 in The Sims 4 and then bring out completely new things."

Case in point.

With The Sims, EA has managed to develop this nasty habit of releasing the new generation installment that is more bare than its predecessor, wait a few months, then announce a line of expansion packs that aren't too much different from those of the previous game. Continue until the end of the life of that generation, then rinse and repeat with the next The Sims (enter number here.) It's repugnant and it needs to end, but while there are still mindless gamers who are blindly in love with the game and have no problem shelling out money for the same content they've had before, it will never end. Hmm...sounds like I was talking about Call of Duty for a second there. Weird.

I think the most offensive part is that while the developers are breaking their necks to pump out expansion pack after expansion pack, there are countless issues and bugs that remain unaddressed from the base game. Here's an idea: before expecting people to pay more money for content that should already be in the game, how about you fix the issues that currently persist? You know, fix what's broken before trying to pile more onto it. Just an idea.

I don't think we'll ever see the end of this trend. Where there are sheep, there are wolves to prey upon them. It's almost as bad as a game pending release that has more DLC waiting at launch than actual content in the game. You ever see that in the Xbox Marketplace or PlayStation Store? Two days before the game's release, there's already two pages of downloadable content waiting to be purchased? Yeah, it's almost as bad as that. Maybe it's as bad. Maybe it's worse. I can never really decide.

I think it's just as bad...maybe.