Outdoor Retreat, Spa Day, Dine Out, Vampires and Parenthood: of the five released so far, none exhibit the can’t-miss creativity that the expansions of The Sims 3 showed from their first release, World Adventures. But so far, The Sims 4 has continued to use it as a means to restore features and items that “should” be part of the vanilla experience. In the previous titles, the additional post-release content was a way for The Sims to play with outrageous themes and ideas that couldn’t, for whatever reason, be included with the base game. But more than that, none of the expansions seem particularly compelling. I’m not particularly interested in the new dialogue and “improved storytelling” options, and I don’t need better graphics. Years later, however, I still haven’t gotten into The Sims 4. So eventually I moved on and by then enough time had passed that my enthusiasm for the new material far outranked any misgivings about “missing” features. Fortunately, most of the stuff I enjoyed about The Sims 2 eventually made it into The Sims 3 and the expansions, with gems like World Adventures and Supernatural, tipped the scales in the new game’s favor.

At the time, I’d paid too much money for all the expansions to downgrade to a skimpy base game, and I wanted to see and do everything The Sims 2 had to offer. The Sims games are too expensive, and too expansive, to leave behind easily.Ĭase in point, it took me years to feel comfortable transitioning to The Sims 3 from The Sims 2. With the absence of key strategic features or the little details that make the game such mischievous fun, it can take years before a core Sims game has enough additional content to make the switch “worth it”-especially if you paid full price.

One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s always a tough, drawn-out process moving onto the next game, mostly because the content packs become such an integral part of the experience. While I never got to play the expansions of the original, I’ve otherwise sampled almost everything The Sims has to offer over the years, observing how the additional expansions took shape as the series evolved. I’ve been playing The Sims literally half my life, since the first game came out when I was in high school. If I hadn’t just checked the date myself, it would be hard to believe that The Sims 4 came out in late 2014.

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