According to Vice President and General Manager of Series Kate Gorman Revelli, The Sims series is moving beyond linear, sequential video game releases. Instead of moving to Sims 5replacing Sims 4Electronic Arts and developer Maxis will continue to support Sims 4developing alongside the franchise, not replacing it.
“A lot of the way people play The Sims is about expressing themselves and their creativity and finding their own set of goals in the game, but what draws them in is their attachment to these little people that they’ve created,” Gorman Revelli told Polygon. “We also know that we’re not going to go to a linear model because we have so many Sims 4. We’re really thinking about how can we continue to engage with our community, with our players, and not have a point where you reset all your progress and lose all of these amazing memories and characters and things that you’ve built over these 10 years of playing, potentially?”
Confused? Until now, most people thought Project Rene was Sims 5. But that’s not entirely true. The Rene project will exist alongside Sims 4 and other games as a multiplayer component. “We want to continue to expand, so if you want to play that type of multiplayer experience, that’s what you’re going to be looking for in the things we talked about in Project Rene,” she said. The first real look at what to expect is scheduled for later this year, according to Gorman Revelli, as part of a recent experimental testing ground, The Sims Labs.
“Again, it’s a complementary experience to all of the other stuff — it’s not a linear experience,” she said. “We’ll see a lot of that in playtesting, but the whole point of figuring out who Rene is is that we’re really looking for a way to make The Sims playable together. That’s what we’ll continue to iterate on and learn with the community.”
Gorman Revelli has made it clear that The Sims game will continue to evolve and improve. In a post on The Sims blog, Sims 4 has been described as a “core Sims experience” that will continue to be modernized. So will there ever be a game called Sims 5? The answer is no. But that doesn’t mean the Sims experience won’t change or evolve; anything that would be, perhaps, in the fifth spot in line as a main Sims game (Rene or not!) is NO replacement for Sims 4 —this is its continuation.