The Sims 4, and why I always come back

Before I get to The Sims 4, I have to own up to a gap. The Sims 3 came out on June 2, 2009, and I never played it. Not once. Plenty of people will tell you it is the best one in the whole series, the deepest, the most open, and I believe them. It just landed in a stretch of my life where I was somewhere else entirely, and it sailed right past me. I went straight from The Sims 2 to The Sims 4 with nothing in between.

Excited all over again

The Sims 4 arrived on September 2, 2014, and it lit me up the same way the originals had. New engine, new graphics, new neighborhoods, new relationship systems, the works. It felt more realistic and more alive than anything before it, and there was so much more you could customize. You could recolor and reskin things, swap out finishes, tune a room until it looked the way you pictured it. I was right back in that giddy, counting-down-to-it headspace I had as a kid waiting on expansion packs, except this time the whole game was the new thing.

Where are my basements

It was not all gains, though, and I will hold this grudge forever: you could not build basements at launch. The Sims 2 had basements a decade earlier, and here was the shiny new game telling me no. The Sims 4 shipped having quietly dropped a bunch of things people loved, and then slowly added some of them back over the following years, basements among them. It was this strange dance of taking away and giving back that made the launch feel a little hollow if you had been around for the older games.

I am an original-game guy

Here is the confession that ties all my Sims posts together: I never really dive into the expansions. The Sims 4 now has something like a million expansion packs and object packs, and I have only ever played the base game plus maybe one or two of the earliest ones. I am an original-game elite, or whatever you want to call it. Give me the core game and maybe some updated objects, and I am perfectly happy. I do not need the hundred add-ons. I need the sandbox.

Because what I actually love, across every version of this game, is the building. I love landscaping. I love laying out a house, then going back and tweaking it forever. And more than anything I love the budget. The constraint is the whole game for me. I would sit there thinking, okay, I need to scrape together another ten thousand Simoleons so I can add a bedroom onto the side of this place, because right now this entire family is basically living in the kitchen. That little loop, earn it, build it, expand it, never stops being satisfying.

The loop that never ends

The Sims 4 is still the main staple of the series, so it has settled into a rhythm with me that I do not think will ever fully break. Every so often I install it, get completely addicted for a stretch, build and grind and obsess over my little houses, and then one day it gets old and I uninstall it. And then a year or two later, I come right back. I have run that loop over and over for years now. The last time I actually played was probably five or six years ago.

It started with an eleven-year-old building families in 2000, and somehow, twenty-some years and four numbered games later, I am still the same guy: broke in-game, dreaming about that next bedroom, completely happy. I love The Sims.