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As of last year, The Sims 4 team committed itself to going back and working on big lists of outstanding issues with the game (which it has been making good on) but an equally big bug in the system is EA’s communication to players—or the lack thereof. I don’t really think that much is going to change on that front any time soon but the message we got in a recent interview with Sims series VP of franchise creative Lyndsay Pearson is that the team is at least aware it’s a pain point for players.
In the past six months EA and Maxis:
- Completely upended our understanding of Project Rene by announcing The Sims Hub during a publicly viewable investor presentation without ever following up to explain the announcement language aimed at fans
- Ignored leaked screenshots from a playtest that massively differed from players’ expectations, providing no clarity on whether this was Project Rene or some other test
- Gave a slightly scold-y non-acknowledgement of the above in its Behind The Sims news post this week saying “what you might see are slices of experiences that are in very early phases of development.”
A little more than two years ago, Pearson was the one to announce Project Rene, saying at the time that the studio would be sharing information about the in-development game sooner than The Sims ever had before with occasional updates and closed playtests.
It has continued to share updates but each Behind The Sims presentation just keeps getting shorter, leaving the ravenous fanbase desperate for information about what to expect. That’s the environment that the EA Investor Day put its foot in last September, dropping on players that Project Rene is actually not The Sims 5 as we’d been assuming and that The Sims 4 would be sticking around getting new DLCs even after Rene’s eventual launch.
“It definitely happens in these franchises like The Sims, where you have a lot of things happening, you’re going to end up with crossed wires occasionally,” Pearson said during our conversation. “I think we are always evolving our communication strategy to try and figure out what is the right way to share the right information at the right time that isn’t confusing or misleading.”
Learning about EA’s vision for The Sims Hub as a foundation for several different Sims games on PC from an investor presentation was pretty confusing, especially when no further explanation was forthcoming. Pearson wasn’t able to take questions about The Sims Hub during our chat, but I imagine if I’d been able to ask whether that was the way the team wanted that announcement to reach players the answer would have been a (politely worded) “no.” What Pearson did tell us on the subject was, yeah, pretty diplomatic.
“What you saw us doing this past fall with EA’s big investor day—and we announced a whole bunch of things in Behind the Sims around then too—is symbolic of the kinds of things you might see like: how do we give a bigger, broader message about what the franchise is up to?”
That broad message left a lot unanswered as the studio carried on like business as usual without giving any version of the same message to players in a way that actually felt comprehensible. If that set of announcements was a hot pan of grease, subsequent leaks from playtesters in October were cold water—which, as a reminder to anyone in the room with level 1 cooking skill prone to starting fires while making grilled cheese, are dangerous to combine.
“Leaks are unavoidable, unfortunately,” Pearson said. “So that’s a hard one too, because sometimes it’s before we’re ready to share something. And you’re like, I don’t have that message quite buttoned up because it was an experiment. Or sometimes it’s leaking in a really weird, backwards way, where it’s something from a year plus ago and you’re like ‘How did this get out now?'”
Ultimately, huge publishers struggle to communicate with players in the way that we want them to and EA isn’t alone in that. We see similar struggles from Blizzard and Ubisoft, for starters. It’s difficult to tell from the outside who’s making the calls on what to share when and in what ways information is getting clogged in the pipes against the hopes of the developers.
“We’re always trying to learn and iterate and grow and all those buzzwords,” Pearson told us. “But it’s true. We’re always trying to say, how can we do this a little differently, a little bit better?”
For all that Pearson mentions wanting to learn and iterate, the recent “just a reminder for all the Simmers that have helped us in our playtests,” aside in the Behind The Sims blog post that “what you might see are slices of experiences that are in very early phases of development, and we’re still finalizing the final product,” doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence that the studio isn’t just going to continue retreating into secrecy rather than communication.
Project Rene wasn’t mentioned directly in the Behind The Sims presentation at all and we were told ahead of our conversation that Pearson wouldn’t be taking questions about it, which doesn’t really feel like a step in the right direction either.
Despite all that, I’ve found myself pretty positive on the things that Maxis is actually doing with The Sims 4 in the past several months, if not the way it’s communicating with players. I think the new main menu is great actually, as are the townie home refreshes and the limited time in-game quests that it’s been running, along with other Sims 4 anniversary update plans. I was originally psyched that Project Rene seems to be reviving the Create-A-Style tool too.
Project Rene could end up being great, no matter the secrecy and uncertainty EA puts us through during development. I just wish it would quit claiming it’s going to share more information while constantly shutting us out.
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Kurt Indovina
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