The latest Sims 4 downloadable content, Dream Home Decorator, is a perfect embodiment of the awkward tug-of-war between Sims players and Sims developers. The Sims 4’s devoted fandom knows what it wants, but the developers’ downloadable content sings when they give them something they didn’t know they needed.
Dream Home Decorator adds a new interior design career to the game that allows the player to redecorate and in some cases physically rebuild the homes of NPC Sims in the world. So far, I’ve turned the prefabricated Jang apartment from a boho apartment into a mid-century wonder; I added a mission-style study to the pancake house; I even redesigned the living room of the vampire Vladislaus Straud, although he wasn’t into the French country house decor in which I adorned it.
In the lead up to Dream Home Decorator, the Sims fan base couldn’t stop talking about bunk beds. Players had finally got them in a free update, but they had an annoying bug: they couldn’t place objects underneath, which limited their usability as a space-saving measure in a game with limited space. With Dream Home Decorator, the buggy bunk beds are now fixed. You can easily place another bed, chair, desk or chest of drawers underneath. But for the fandom, the fact that they were shipped in an unfinished or faulty condition is a sin the series has to carry through to the end of time, in addition to a laundry list of requests that circulate every time there is new content for the game there.
This tension is no stranger to The Sims development team. Speaking to Waypoint about Snowy Escape, Sims producer Graham Nardone told Waypoint that since Eco Lifestyle was announced and launched, the Sims development team has changed the way it brings new content to fandom.
“Our players are always about having expectations because they want so many different things,” said Nardone. “One of the hardest things for our players to understand is that when we create a pack, we want something that is a strong, themed experience. It won’t get all of the community details as they are not necessarily interwoven all smoothly connected to this experience. “
Unfortunately, at the moment, fandom is very focused on the bug-issue issue, especially with regards to the new, otherwise brilliant, expansion.
In some cases, like the notoriously buggy Dine Out expansion pack, these bugs just weren’t fixed. More recently, whenever I’ve had access to the preview for an upcoming DLC, I’ve had issues with bugs that are usually fixed at startup, but not always. When I was playing the preview build of Snowy Escape, the winter sports expansion pack, after a few hours of gameplay, I had a totally devastating crash that almost completely kept me away from the pack. I had frequent crashes while playing a preview build for Eco Lifestyle, the mechanically impressive Green Living expansion pack. I’m not a YouTuber who spends all day playing The Sims every day, and I’m older than many of the people who make up the game’s most loyal fan base, and I don’t have the time to scour every single re-release for bugs . I’m good with The Sims content I get and it works most of the time. We get a lot of it too, as it proves the summer roadmap that The Sims‘s development team released just before the announcement for Dream Home Decorator.
Unfortunately, the release of Dream Home Decorator in The Sims 4 fandom was positioned as an indication of these issues. The package contains errors; While I haven’t seen very many with it, Waypoint’s senior social media editor Emily Lipstein has had issues with crashes while using the camera in-game, which is essential to the interior designer’s new career. When I was completing a renovation, I had the experience that one of my Sims’ customers went missing. I found her wedged by the first floor of the building and had to strategically position my camera to speak to her and finish my work. YouTubers like Plumbella had even more extreme problems including the characters that snap into the roof of their lotswhich makes it impossible for them to speak to them.
Dream Home Decorator is also probably the best use of The Sims 4’s existing mechanics, showing the team’s eye for detail and a willingness to experiment with their existing systems. It shows the potential of what The Sims 4 can become after 6 years of active development. It’s probably my favorite package – it’s just unlucky to get released at this particular time if the fandom for The Sims has other needs.
Dream Home Decorator’s interior designer career – the pack’s main attraction – is a miracle. The breakdown of this new career into its components shows how skillfully the team uses the existing resources and transforms them into something new.
Interior design is an active career, as introduced in the Get to Work extension, but instead of a variable checklist of tasks, each appearance has the same structure; They arrive there, ask customers about their likes and dislikes, take before pictures, renovate, take after pictures and then have a reveal. In fact, getting gigs works more similarly to the acting career introduced in Get Famous which gives you a choice of available jobs. Once you’re at work it just works like no other part of the game so far. In Dream Home Decorator, any type of job gives you selective autonomy depending on how much change your clients want. If you’re just redecorating one room, you won’t have access to construction tools to add new walls. Once you’ve done enough to renovate an entire floor of a house, these options are available again, but only on one floor of the house. Finally, once you’ve completed your gig, host a reveal event using the social event mechanic that should be familiar to any player who has previously hosted a party in the game.
These are all known enough that the new career is not completely overwhelming, which is helpful because the new career can be absolutely overwhelming. Although your customers will describe their likes and dislikes to you – a new mechanic added in a free update – these characters always have more to offer than they tell you in advance. It is advisable to speak to your clients to find out which colors and interior styles they like and dislike so that you don’t accidentally confuse them by designing a style they hate. All of a sudden, these Sims’ personalities feel a lot deeper than they used to, and I’ve been enjoying the interactions where I don’t live up to their expectations. The drama is delicious, just as you’d expect from a classic episode of the home decor show Trading Spaces.
Building on the new mechanics of Snowy Escape and the free update that comes with it, The Sims 4 will become less of a truly open dollhouse where everyone follows your commands and more an unpredictable web of mechanics that push and pull each other. Having full autonomy is an option, but the game is approaching a place where it feels like playing me just like me. Just as lifestyles are determined by what your Sim does a lot, likes and dislikes can appear spontaneously depending on how you play the game. Whenever my Sim goes jogging, she’s in a tense mood because she’s sweaty. I recently received a pop-up asking if this means my Sim doesn’t like exercising. Although I’d made her jog quite often, the game took her mood into account while jogging, which resulted in me learning about the character that I was creating in ways that I hadn’t considered. I thought the poor girl liked jogging!
When describing the sentiments system introduced for Snowy Escape, Nardone said that the system is designed to flow back into itself. If your Sim has the workaholic lifestyle and feels tense after being away from work for too long, you as a gamer have an incentive to get them back to work.
“I think ultimately some of these things can be pretty subtle, but it makes for this richer simulation for players to experience, which is a really cool thing,” he said. “And, you know, it ultimately comes down to what the players wanted, more depth in that experience.”
Another longstanding question about The Sims 4’s fandom is the depth of gameplay that the team is actively working on. Before Dream Home Designer was released, The Sims 4 development team also redesigned some of the game’s personality traits to differentiate them and have more impact on gameplay. It’s harder to get this aspect of what fans want than mending bugged bunk beds, and ultimately I find it a lot more interesting. There’s no easy way to add depth to a Sim, their family, and their interactions, so any new addition to the game is never what I ask for, it’s exactly what the game needs. Dream Home Decorator is the expression of the team that adds depth to the game’s myriad systems. Although flawed, it is a omen of good things to come.
