I do really like the customization abilities. My favorite idea for using this is with big families. I micromanage everything, so bigger households just stress me out and I tend to quit playing that family. With this, I can set family members to be NPCs in different rooms of the house and presumably have them there like roommates? That would be super cool!

I was thinking exactly this earlier today! Imagine making a prison lol

I doubt we could have all households on a single lot at once but you never know! Maybe we’ll get a menu setting to increase the active Sim limit.

It's been a while since I've commented here, but this is the first update in a long time that has me interested in The Sims 4 again. I agree this looks like it should have been included with City Living, and seeing something like this coming much later and at the price of an Expansion Pack often feels insulting but it's typical with The Sims 4 at this point.

However, there's so much I think this pack could open up in terms of gameplay and storytelling if it's done well - as others have mentioned, I feel like the tools could be used to create somewhat functional hotels, prisons, retirement communities and all sorts of communal or multi-occupancy type of lots. Expectations are low as always, but I hope there's enough customisation and options (particularly with building rules and setting the cost of rent) so it can be adapted easily to suit the variety of things we'll want to build.

I think it will go some way towards changing how we might play/manage larger households through generations and I'm looking forward to how modders might expand on whatever options there are too.

Deep down, I feel like the unit detection won’t allow the game to determine if a space is “livable” (fridge, cooked, beds, toilet, shower/tub, entertainment, skills, etc.), but also won’t push Sims into common areas to fulfill their needs.

Imagine a lot where it’s effectively an air B&B, and Sims will not leave the lot to used a shared bathroom/kitchen.

I'm wondering what possessed Maxis to create another apartment pack with a property manager career. Hmm, could it be because LBY will have apartments in the base game? Is it because LBY will have work as housekeepers in hotels in the base game? I think it's a good thing that Maxis had to up their game to compete with something not even out on the market yet. If LBY didn't exist would Maxis have created yet another apartment pack when some of this in the pack could have been added to an update for CL. Yes, it's milking just as much as My First Pet pack milked the players, but it's curious of why now.

Happy to see options to change the cost of rent per day and the lease length in the gameplay reveal trailer today. The tool to assign something as part of a unit or a shared space looked quite intuitive too.

I like this. I can sort of make a hotel with this based on the trailer, but I can see them EASILY turning this into a hotel pack.

I also love there are at least two versions of the new toilet.

Loading screens between apartments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-zeBYvxghc

TS2 didn't have loading screens between apartments, but TS4 which is supposed to be the better game does. Maxis doing what they do best; keeping tempers flared all over the place.

Haha, I won't pretend I'm surprised to learn that, but it's certainly disappointing. You'd hope with apartment building and units being the key feature here they would've been able to find a way to combat the need for a loading screen when units are on the same lot, especially when they seem to have imposed their own limit of 6 units per lot (although it seems we can potentially increase it through cheats). More and more it's feeling like something that should've been part of City Living but for whatever reason didn't make the cut.

They did give a brief reason for the loading screens and it is the usual answer. They're catering to people that play on low end computers although they don't say that... in those words. Dump 70 (?) dlc on a game that was built on a mound of Swiss cheese and well, yeah. My TS3 game takes 5 minutes to load with over 100 lots, roughly 80 sims, ect. I was just watching another so-called review that was given by yet another person that was paid off with a free computer of the upcoming humanoid game and even that has loading screens. I digress.

I would expect somebody to give me a dope slap if I spent $40.00 for this. There is no $40.00 worth of stuff in this pack.

I don’t think having a loading screen is all that big of a deal personally. If I can build an apartment complex, populate it myself with my own sims and play each unit independently of each other then they have satisfied what I want from a feature like this. Some people apparently need a reminder that there is a 20 sim limit in the entire loaded area. Based on statements from gurus a multi-unit lot can have up to 48 sims (6 units x 8 sims = 48 sims), and since there’s a load required I’m now leaning toward all “up to 48” belonging to playable households.

Everyone is entitled to be disappointed that it requires a load but was anyone really expecting it not to? IMO it seems to do enough of what Sims 2 did to be on my radar.

As I like to sum my thoughts with a meme:

Child: Can we have better, 100% finalized apartment system
finally
Mom: We have apartments at home
*Apartments At Home*
[insert screenshot of the news or SnatchOnSims video tlink*

Honestly, do I need to say more? Ofc another $40 bit expansion pack will fix only a quarter what needs fixing of earlier $40 pack that should have be done right the first time.

On a bright side, this is essentially Create A World in closed world setting. Meaning, you can plot down more than one lot in a lot for a 6 or whatever number of household this mechanic can hold to reside Ain’t that (creating residentials areas in one lot) wonderful? Wishful thinking does come true, with the bare minimum santa claus EA is known for J’d too honestly would feel a clown to preorder this 40€ pack just to get apartments again, but only able to build them how I like and elsewhere in the worlds. Soooo cool/wicked!

It’s quite amusing how you can just go about this issue just by easily installing a mod that hosts many sims, use a locking system mod to set apartment and voila - no loading screens! Of course it’s not perfect - but so is Maxis not bothering to put a slack to make it work, as it requires them to recreate room-unloading system TS2 had from University/Apartment expansions. So instead of recreating the way preset saving method (hard to explain what it is, but if you played you know apartment units were sorta like seperate saves for four tenants), they decide to go l-a-z-y route and cut off the idea altogether.

System requirements should have been boosted when they dropped legacy edition, imo

It’s weird that we can build and view an entire lot at once but hiding them all and enabling them when needed it too much.

Nova mentioned load times not load screens, so we’ll see.

From what we've seen so far, all this For Rent business just seems like an expansion pack for City Living. I guess they got away with the 'My First Pet Stuff' stuff pack, so why not upsell features that should have shipped with the expansion that introduced the core concept

There is no reason outside of greed for why we're getting landlords and apartment lot-types this late in the game. I'm kind of surprised by the hype surrounding the EP. This feels like the time to draw the line, not be cautiously optimistic or "well that's EA for you" like a sitcom gag.

I'm not, these sort of people will even get excited for an EP that was only devoted to Chairs and Sofas.

I don't know what Nova's issue is. Behind Pixelade's ugly ass copyright notice there is enough shown that talks about loading screens.



The reply came from the official sims Twitter account, so I don't know how much more of a confirmation you need. It isn't like sims are going to drive to lots and beep a horn when they get there, but whatever.

Love that travelling (entering a loading screen) is still a car logo, even though there is no cars and all you doing is leaving main hallway to enter another room Reminds me of times Sims used to pull out phones to open map mode and just spoof and teleport to lots without moving a foot. I would have said are we living in TS1, but even then it would be deem inacurate as we had CARS PULLING IN and Sims WALKING UP TO those motor vehicles to get a lift.

“Seen with the current technology”. Well, newsflashs - this “new” technology of yours suck and players are disatisfied. When will Maxis understand that appealing to broke players, that cant ass to spend a dime on better laptops for gaming, setting up said limitations for better performance quality on lower ends doesn’t make the game enjoyable by sacrifising potential dynamics to explore. Other games with their sequal gotten the time to shine with advancement post 2014, while TS4 had to fall behind because “oh no, stubborn players will not be able to play cuz their hardware no meet minimal requirements”. If you don’t have the money to run a new game, then stick to an old once until you can afgord better pc. Why do dedicated simmers have to suffer? With the amount of packs they had released, the average consumer will have to upgrade their machine sooner or later if the goal of EA is to sell many packs I want a word with the head advisor of the team/publisher.

The TS1 community wasn't always in the state of total choas like TS4 either, but here we are.

There are reasons Maxis is catering to specific groups of people. I'd like to get into the weeds of that, but I won't because I know the conversation wouldn't stay civil...

Well surprise surprise for the people that were dreaming of having 48 sims on the lot at once with 6 units and checking up in neighbors apartments anytime, because they been fury over the fact there will be loading screens going from one apartment to the next, so they will function just like City Living's apartments well I suppose at least the pack lets you build apartments.

I will need to see more about the world and see the build and buy items before I decide about getting this.......... later on sale.

Never understood the idea of catering to a customer without a budget to upgrade a computer/laptop, but expecting said consumer to spend $1000 on DLC. Who is their audience?

They can use the excuse of “we don’t expect players to purchase all DLC” - but why wouldn’t you? After 10 years, you shouldn't be serving laptops that were dated 10 ago. I’ve changed computers twice since launch. Let go Maxis.

Almost all of my computer upgrades ever since I have had one have been tied to new ones needed for Sims and other games. I just had to replace my about 12 year old i7 that played the games beautifully, thanks to a Kaspersky uninstall making me unable to use it. Was not happy about that! Thank goodness Best Buy was able to pull all my stuff off it and put on this. So this new CPU is a pretty darn good one. I do not get new ones often, so when I do get good ones I hope will last a long time.

EA is chasing quantity rather than quality hardware players.... clearly.

This would be the perfect time to release a cheat that allows the player to build more than four levels!

Sims 4 has nearly 100 million players and has made over 1 billion dollars in lifetime revenue, in case you’re wondering why they would target low specs. Like it or not, no other Sims game has came anywhere close to those figures. We can talk about how poorly the game has been handled, but from their standpoint (and EAs) it has been a monumental success.

I’m sure if we got a breakdown of PC hardware those with high spec systems would be the minority, not just for Sims 4 but for every Sims game. If you need to convince one person to spend $1000 or 100 people to spend $10 which is more likely to succeed?

Technically - TECHNICALLY - we have the same amount of floors we used to, if you count the foundation as a floor when building a lot (like ts2 and ts3 used to, with the floor cheat in TS2). Just one extra floor to build with would be perfect.



I don't mind the business model of targeting low spec to maximize profit, but some of the design choices following this are a bit too unrealistic for a PC game release in 2023, like how we still get unreasonably large objects.

It wasn't until about Snowy Escape that objects were no longer designed around the unrealistically tall middle wall height, and we saw small wall height friendly objects. thinner frame, tighter polygons, smaller footprint, etc. Prior to that, things were unrealistically large. Compare the windows released in Get Together vs the windows in Snowy Escape. That's a step in the right directions, but I'm sure they can get away with adding a 6th vacant lot to a neighborhood.