25 Years Into The Sims, EA Is Still Making The Same Mistakes

The Sims celebrated its 25-year anniversary on February 4, 2025. Below, we take a deep dive on how it’s reached its current state and why EA and its fans don’t always see eye to eye on what’s best for it.

Sims franchise just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and the festivities included legacy editions of The Sims and The Sims 2, along with the announcement of several new DLCs for The Sims 4. Acknowledging the series’ past while looking toward its future certainly sounds like the right way to honor a franchise that has been around for a quarter of a century, but EA has hit a few snags along the way. The Sims 1 and 2 re-releases launched with some pretty serious bugs, and with over 70 expansions, not everyone agrees that more DLC is what The Sims 4 really needs.

The Sims 4 has been around for nearly half the franchise’s lifetime, celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024. But as EA continues to provide glimpses of what the future holds for The Sims 4 and the franchise overall–including the mysterious, still-in-development Project Rene–long-time Sims fans are beginning to feel a hint of deja vu. For those who witnessed The Sims 4’s extremely rocky launch, Project Rene feels like Groundhog Day.

When The Sims 4 launched in September 2014, it was in pretty rough condition. GameSpot gave it a middling 6/10, noting the game’s lack of depth and, perhaps most glaringly, its lack of features. Sims themselves arguably looked better than ever, but some players were surprised that EA had taken the art style in a more cartoonish direction than previous iterations of the game. But what really had long-time Simmers simmering with anger was the fact that gameplay itself had seemingly been gutted. Prior to The Sims 4, each iteration of the game had included whatever new features were introduced in the last game. Removing a feature–especially one as popular as the ability to choose custom colors and textures–was unheard of.

Of course, there were new features. Create-A-Sim–referred to by players as CAS–now included the ability to customize a Sim’s face by clicking and dragging facial features themselves, giving players much more control over a Sim’s bone structure. But features like eyelashes and fingernails (which had been present in The Sims 3) were absent when the game launched, and hairstyles (especially those intended for non-white Sims) were extremely limited.

Another glaring issue was the absence of any option to customize a clothing item’s color or texture. This feature was introduced in The Sims 3 and became pivotal to The Sims experience. Its absence from The Sims 4 meant that if players didn’t like the handful of color swatches available for a given clothing item, there was nothing they could do about it. Creating matching outfits was therefore a huge challenge, as even color swatches that were meant to be identical often differed from each other in-game. The Sims 4 included 24 hair colors, a large step back from the any-shade-you-want color-picker players had access to in The Sims 3.

EA claims that a color wheel for custom Sim hair colors would be impossible to implement in The Sims 4, but it’s worth noting that Sim-cats, Sim-dogs, and Sim-horses can be any color a player’s heart desires. Players can even design the pattern of their pet’s coat. Somehow, turning a Sim-cat into a multicolored Lisa Frank-esque monstrosity is baked into the game’s DNA, but customizing a Sim’s hair color is an engineering problem EA says it doesn’t have the resources to solve. The ability to tweak the lightness and darkness of the game’s default hair shades was recently added to the game, but the game still lacks any ability to truly create custom hair colors, let alone the multicolored custom paintjobs Sim-pets have access to.

Customization woes followed the game into Build Mode and Buy Mode as well. The Sims 4’s Build Mode was easily the best the franchise had ever seen, with powerful tools that gave players more control than ever over their Sims’ homes, but those tools were hampered by the lack of a texture selector and color picker. The same color-matching issues found in CAS were also present in the game’s furniture, flooring, walls, and roofs, making home decoration just as painful as Sim creation.

Live Mode–the game’s main mode, in which Sims live out their lives in the outfits and homes players have created for them–also felt anemic. The moodlets and memories of The Sims 3 had been replaced with dynamic emotions that could turn on a dime simply due to the way a room was decorated. Despite being popular features of previous Sims games, things like vehicles and pools were inexplicably absent from The Sims 4. Even the toddler life stage was missing–after spending a few days as a baby, Sims would just morph into a roughly 9-year-old child and start attending school. The game’s once-vibrant open-world neighborhoods were replaced with a map so empty players initially thought it was leftover placeholder art that devs had forgotten to remove from the final release, and players encountered long loading screens any time a Sim wanted to explore further than their own doorstep. Even the game’s pre-made houses had issues–stairs led directly into walls, bathrooms had no toilets, and the impressive premade builds found in previous Sims games were notably absent.

The launch of The Sims 4 left players who had grown fond of the franchise wondering, “How did this happen?” It felt as though EA had plucked out the game’s most charming, useful features, and the question on most players’ minds was, “Why?”

The answer to that question was Project Olympus.

Back in 2002–fresh off the success of The Sims’ initial launch–EA released The Sims Online: an MMO version of The Sims in which players could take their Sims into various chat rooms, dress them up, and make friends. The main issue The Sims Online faced was the fact that in 2002, the average America Online subscriber’s internet connection could barely handle a trip to the official Sims website, let alone maintain a sustained connection with other players. The Sims Online shut down in 2008, having done little to justify its budget, which was estimated to be over $25 million, but EA felt there was still potential in an MMO Sims game. The Sims Online sold roughly 2 million copies in its lifetime–it wasn’t a failure, it was just ahead of its time.

So the same year The Sims Online servers went offline for good, The Sims 4 entered production as Project Olympus. Olympus was envisioned as–you guessed it–an online, MMO-style Sims experience. From 2008 to roughly 2013, The Sims 4 was developed as an MMO meant to run on mobile devices and PC. One mistake EA wanted to avoid repeating was creating a game that struggled to run on the average Simmer’s PC. As much as players loved The Sims 3, it put a lot of strain on most PCs, and crashes were common. Thus, The Sims 4 was stripped of various features–most notably its open-world neighborhoods and color/texture customization options–in order to ensure it could run on just about any machine.

But in 2013, with just a year of development time left on the clock, EA decided to change course. The Sims 4 would not, in fact, be an always-online MMO. It would be the next iteration of The Sims, with all the features players had come to know and love. (Well, some of them, anyway.)

It’s hard to say exactly why EA decided to reroute its course at the last moment, but one popular theory is that the rocky launch of 2013’s SimCity gave EA cold feet. 2013’s SimCity could not be played or saved without an internet connection, even for those wanting to play solo. Server issues and other bugs only bogged the game down more, and the game’s reception was generally negative. EA apologized for the way the game launched, but said that creating an offline mode for the game didn’t fit their vision and was an intensive undertaking that simply couldn’t be managed. Meanwhile, players quickly found that modifying a single line of code made offline play instantly accessible. EA would eventually release an offline mode as a part of SimCity 2013’s 10th update.

In the wake of the SimCity debacle, EA opted for a 180-degree turn. The Sims 4’s launch was pushed back from March 2014 to September 2014, while the dev team worked to turn the streamlined MMO back into something players would recognize as a mainline Sims game. But developers just didn’t have enough time to pull this off, and the end result was a game that felt distinctly hollow.

In the years after its launch, The Sims 4 was slowly improved. Free updates to the base game reintroduced toddlers, pools, and more hairstyles, though cars and texture/color customization options still remain absent. As for the game’s lack of furniture and clothing variety, EA’s solution seems to be “release as much DLC as humanly possible.” While The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 each had a total of 20 expansions and DLC packs, The Sims 4 alone has over 70 DLC packs, which, if bought separately, cost over $1,600.

This much DLC has led to another problem: recurrent bugs. Each time the game is updated, a plethora of bugs seem to rise to the surface, and until very recently, they weren’t fixed quickly. The launch of the Get To Work expansion pack reintroduced Alien-Sims to the franchise, but a bug that caused their faces to warp when they move into a new life stage was left unaddressed for years. The My Wedding Stories pack completely broke the game’s wedding mechanic, leaving players with no choice but to disable the pack if they wanted their Sims to experience bug-free nuptials. (This issue was addressed by EA in 2024, two years after My Wedding Stories launched.) The Eco Lifestyle pack and Laundry Day pack both launched with a multitude of issues, and for years, it felt as though fixing The Sims 4 was the last thing on EA’s to-do list.

But in 2024, things changed. EA released several free updates that added new content to the base game, and addressed a number of long-term issues, including the bug that made wedding guests sit down in the middle of the aisle and generally just refuse to cooperate while Sims were trying to get married. Missing features from The Sims 3–like eyelashes and manicures–were finally implemented. Most notably, EA released two expansions that really seemed to embrace the series’ wacky, off-the-wall roots: Lovestruck and Life & Death.

In addition to the iconic vibrating heart bed first seen in 2001’s Hot Date expansion pack, Lovestruck also introduced jealousy settings and polyamory. In previous Sims titles, a cheating spouse could be easily caught, and Sims did not respond well to being cheated on. In The Sims 4, a Sim’s partner needs to be close by–like, uncomfortably close by–to even notice that their spouse is being unfaithful. The Lovestruck expansion allows players to set the tone for Sim relationships. Some Sims may not be happy to find their beau in bed with the maid, while others might offer them a high-five. Some Sim-couples may have an excellent relationship, while others may be distrustful of one another. Lovestruck added some much-needed depth to the way Sims interact with each other, and while some players may feel it’s too little too late, others are just happy to see the game improve.

2024’s Life & Death expansion also served as a ray of hope for jaded Simmers. Life & Death implemented a touch of much-missed morbid mischief that the squeaky-clean Sims 4 desperately needed. Despite being rated T for Teen, The Sims 4 has an overly safe, distinctly Disney-esque feel to it. But the Life & Death expansion allows players to work for the Grim Reaper, adds a number of ghoulish new ways for Sims to kick the bucket, and allows Ghost-Sims to live interesting, enriching, occasionally hilarious lives.

It would seem that The Sims 4 got its fairytale ending just in time for the series’ 25th anniversary, but a closer look reveals that rather than finally righting the ship, EA appears to once again be chasing its elusive white whale: an online Sims experience that, frankly, nobody asked for. For years, fans of the franchise who became frustrated with The Sims 4 have been anxiously awaiting any news about The Sims 5. For these players, nothing can truly get the franchise where it needs to be like a fresh start. Unfortunately, it seems that The Sims 5 is no longer in the cards. Instead, Project Rene–an online, MMO-style game that’s just as much about socialization and connection as it is about creating and playing with Sims–is next on the agenda. Sound familiar?

We’ve only seen a glimpse of Project Rene so far, so it’s hard to judge it. But given EA’s previous struggles to turn The Sims into an MMO, some fans of the franchise are skeptical–especially those who have been around since the days of The Sims Online. Although a screenshot from a Project Rene playtest showing texture/color customization options similar to The Sims 3 has offered a ray of hope, it’s hard not to feel like EA has fundamentally misunderstood what Simmers really want. The implementation of recent features like login rewards underscores this misunderstanding–any Simmer will tell you that The Sims isn’t a game you play every single day forever. Like Animal Crossing, it’s a set-your-own-pace sort of game that you frantically play every single day for a week after deciding you need to recreate the Twilight trilogy in Sim-form. Then you forget about it for a few months until the latest expansion pack (or a stray creative urge) sucks you back in. Trying to copy and paste Roblox’s Dress To Impress into The Sims likely won’t go over well unless Project Rene also launches with a traditional offline mode alongside its social MMO mode.

When original The Sims creator Will Wright first pitched the game, he wanted to call it “Dollhouse.” After all, that’s what The Sims effectively is: a digital dollhouse, full of potential stories to tell and lives to live out. Ultimately, Maxis and EA decided on “The Sims,” for fear that “Dollhouse” was too feminine, and might be off-putting to male players. 25 years later, it’s abundantly clear that the franchise is a hit with players of all genders, but it’s concerning that after a quarter of a century, EA is still trying to make its Sims MMO dream a reality, seemingly oblivious to the fact the majority of Sims players ultimately want one thing: to be left alone to play with their dolls.