Supernatural in The Sims 4: Quality over Quantity.

Electronic Arts has officially released a trailer to announce The Sims 4 Vampires game-pack that’s playable by January 24th 2017. The game-pack introduces vampires individually, instead of a range of supernatural beings bundled in a game-pack. Is this the right approach for EA?

Mythical creatures are no stranger in the land of The Sims. The Sims 3: Supernatural had included playable Werewolves, Witches, Fairies, Zombies and also enhanced the previously released Vampires. Some  The Sims 2 extension packs would add a new life state alongside other content. However, it seems The Sims 4  has decided to introduce Vampires – and vampire themed gameplay – as an individual game pack.

The term “Quality over Quantity” comes to mind with EA’s new game-pack. Yes, Vampires are the only new supernatural beings, but they potentially could be better integrated than previous The Sims games.

In The Sims 2 for example, Vampires were playable with The Sims 2: Nightlife pack. This is comparable to 2016’s The Sims 4: City Life pack. Similarly, Vampires debuted in The Sims 3 with the Late Night pack.

Yet, Vampires in The Sims 2 were not fully fleshed out creatures. They did not have custom traits and needs as seen in The Sims 3. However even The Sims 3 required a second extension pack (Supernatural) to flesh out the Vampire gameplay. This is largely because other Night Life/ Late Night features meant that less development efforts could be put to Vampires.

Instead of having a stripped down version of Vampires featuring in City Life, a creative decision was made so that Vampires follow-up City Life in their own exclusive game-pack. Vampires allows heavy quality control over the gameplay instead of being crammed with City Life.

Now there are different forms of Vampires – regular and dark – allowing players to create Dracula-like vampires and Twilight-like vampires alike. There’s also new abilities, different ‘powers and weaknesses‘ and a different world for Vampires to live in. Presumably, these Vampires will be more optimised for The Sims 4 than previous games.

The future of other supernatural creatures in The Sims 4 is vague. Will there be a separate Werewolf pack, or a Genie pack for example?

Judging by the Vampires pack, life states will become individual. This could perhaps mean that other better developed creatures can make their way into The Sims 4 at a later date. In theory, you could pick specific life states to purchase and play as, ignoring creatures you have less interest in.

That being said, it would difficult to justify a more prolonged and more expensive release of each separate life state.

City Life could have had a larger quantity of features had it included Vampires, but it didn’t. Vampires could have a larger quantity of features by including various life states, but it doesn’t.

But less filling game-packs means that there’s less new gameplay to explore and a longer waiting period for the next The Sims 4 game-pack. In the past I’ve expressed my distaste for how empty The Sims 4 can feel. Without the modding community, there’s not much to do between official game/stuff-pack releases.

So these less jam-packed and better quality extension packs only means that Simmers must spend even more money for a full game. Can EA really justify this “Quality over Quantity” method?