The Sims franchise is moving beyond linear, sequential video game releases, according to Franchise Vice President and General Manager Kate Gorman Revelli. Instead of moving to The Sims 5replace The Sims 4Electronic Arts and developer Maxis will continue support The Sims 4by complementing the franchise by developing alongside it, not by replacing it.
“The way people play The Sims is so much about expressing themselves and their creativity and finding their own goals to pursue within the game, but what brings them back is their attachment to those little people that they’ve built,” Gorman Revelli told Polygon. “We also know that we’re not going to go to a linear model, because we’ve got so much to do with The Sims 4. What we’re really looking at is, how do we continue to work with our community, with our players, and how do you avoid at some point resetting all of your progress and losing those amazing memories and characters and things that you’ve built up over those 10 years of your gameplay, potentially?”
Confused? Until now, most people considered Project Rene as The Sims 5. But that’s not entirely true. Project Rene will be next to The Sims 4 and other games as a multiplayer component. “We want to continue to expand, so if you want to play that kind of multiplayer experience, that’s what you’re looking for in the things we’ve talked about with Project Rene,” she said. The first real look at what to expect there is planned for later this year, according to Gorman Revelli, as part of his new experimental testing ground, The Sims Labs.
“Again, it’s a complementary experience to all of the things — it’s not a linear experience,” she said. “There’s a lot that we’ll see in playtest, but the most important thing to know about Rene is that we’re really looking at a way to make The Sims playable together. That’s what we’ll continue to iterate on and learn from with the community.”
Gorman Revelli made it clear that The Sims will continue to evolve and improve. In a post on The Sims blog, The Sims 4 was described as “a foundational Sims experience” that will continue to be modernized. Will there ever be a game that The Sims 5? The answer seems to be no. But that doesn’t mean the Sims experience isn’t going to change or evolve; whatever would come in fifth place if a mainline Sims game (Rene or not!) is not a replacement for The Sims 4 — it is a continuation of that.