The Sims 4’s latest expansion pack, Enchanted By Nature, launched earlier this month, adding fairy-Sims, magical ailments, and charming new clothing and furniture items to the game. As a lifelong fan of The Sims franchise, I decided to dive back into the game after a few months of not touching it, fully prepared to be disappointed.
Most veteran players of The Sims 4 can probably understand my trepidation. The Sims franchise recently celebrated its 25-year anniversary, and the last 10 years have been focused on The Sims 4, which was released in 2014 with barely any content at all. The game launched without franchise staples like pools or color customization options, and even toddlers were missing — your little bundle of Sim-joy would simply morph into a school-aged child upon aging up. EA remedied this by adding content to the game over the next decade via free base game updates and new DLC in the form of expansion packs, game packs, stuff packs, and kits. As cool as many of these additions were in theory, many of them were disappointing in practice, usually due to bugs and underwhelming content.
For a good chunk of its existence, The Sims 4’s gameplay loop has looked something like this:
- Spend an ungodly amount of time building your Sims in Create-A-Sim mode while struggling to find matching color swatches for clothes.
- Spend an even ungodlier amount of time building a house for them to live in, or tweaking a pre-made house to your liking.
- Immediately get bored and/or frustrated with bugs and the sheer lack of anything to do.
- Log off for a few months.
So when I fired up Enchanted By Nature, I wasn’t expecting anything particularly special. I created a fairy-Sim named Nyx and enjoyed mixing and matching the new expansion’s clothing items with clothes from other DLCs to create cute, ethereal outfits for her. Shortly after moving Nyx into her new home, she received a call from the Grim Reaper himself, offering her a job as a reaper of souls. (Yes, that’s an actual career track. It was introduced alongside last year’s Life & Death expansion.)
After politely turning down Grim’s job offer, Nyx went out for a night of drinking and dancing at a bar for fairies, where she met the love of her life, a fellow fairy named Nadya. Their relationship moved quickly, and not long after joining the household, Nadya watched in horror as Nyx got struck by lightning after failing to appease one of the gnomes living in her house. (She survived, it’s fine.) Nyx and Nadya started getting serious, and decided to expand the family by having a “Science Baby” (which allows same-sex Sims to have kids that share their genetics.) They only ordered one baby, but somehow ended up with a pair of twins, whom I immediately turned into nightmare fuel with a little tweaking in Create-A-Sim. This is the kind of creative freedom and charming chaos I’ve been craving since The Sims 4 first launched.
A few hours into playing, I realized something truly amazing was happening: I was having fun. I wasn’t struggling to put outfits together (a normally common occurrence, since The Sims 4 did away with features from iterations of The Sims, like custom hair, clothing, and furniture colors). The game still has some technical quirks — Nyx seemed to catch a new type of ailment every other day — but for once, my gameplay experience wasn’t entirely bogged down by bugs. For the first time since I picked it up a decade ago, The Sims 4 felt complete.
But that’s probably because I own all 98 of the game’s DLC packs.
Yeah, you read that right. The Sims 4 has nearly a hundred DLC packs, ranging in price from $5 for a single kit to $40 for a full expansion pack like Enchanted By Nature. Now, obviously nobody’s forcing you to buy every DLC, but given the sheer lack of content in the base game (and the fact that The Sims 4 does not allow full color customization for clothing and furniture like The Sims 3 did), you’re going to have a pretty mediocre time trying to dress up a Sim or decorate a room if you don’t shell out for some DLC packs. If you want all of them, it’ll run you roughly $1,600, depending on what kind of sales or DLC bundles are available at the time.
I’ve always been a bit of a purist when it comes to The Sims. I don’t really mod my game (aside from using MC Command Center, a must-have mod nearly all Simmers use) or download custom player-made content, because I hate having to fiddle with a giant folder of mods after every single game update. I’ve played this way since The Sims first launched in 2000. I’ve bought every expansion pack for The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The Sims 4. But there are some pretty stark differences between previous iterations of The Sims and its current form.
The main difference is that the first three iterations of The Sims were already fun when they launched. Yes, I looked forward to each DLC, but they weren’t required for the game to feel complete, because up until The Sims 4, Sims games were already well-polished and enjoyable at launch. The DLC packs of yore enhanced the game, whereas The Sims 4’s expansions largely serve to fill in gaps that shouldn’t have been there to begin with, which is part of why there are so damn many of them.
For comparison, The Sims 3 had 11 expansion packs and nine stuff packs for a total of 20 DLC packs. How on Earth did we get to the point where players need a four-figure budget and nearly 100 DLC packs in order for a game of digital dollhouse to be engaging?
I’m finally having a blast with The Sims 4. But the fact that it took a decade (and a frankly unhinged amount of money) to get here is a shame, and has me worried about the future of the series, which EA seems to be steering in the direction of an MMO.
