You’ve probably been wondering ”What’s taking EA so long to announce EP3?!”. There are multiple factors behind their announcements for The Sims 4, and Lyndsay Pearson and Rachel Franklin explained all of them during Gamescom on their Sims Panel.
The quote down below has been provided by JulyVee:
Of course we as simmers want all the information at once – when will we finally get toddlers, seasons and pets, huh? But after this panel, I’ve realised it’s not that easy. Especially with the team wanting to keep things interesting with new ideas rather than just warm up the usual expansions. But in terms of announcing here are a few key points that show why they don’t announce a pack as soon as it goes into planning.
- Things might not work out. If the team realises they have to change important things in the pack due to technical reasons or add other stuff to replace it, many fans might be disappointed. Retracting statements is never good. So they decide to show a pack when it’s clear that no considerable changes have to be made and that things work out the way they are supposed to.
- Be able to show stuff. If a pack would be announced just when the sims team starts planning it, there would be nothing to show – no animations, no items, no art. As long as that is the case, it’s just words. So the teams decides to announce packs when they have something real to show us. At this point they also said they don’t want to make fans wait too long between the announcement and the release.
- Keeping track. If the team would communicate every step of development to the fans, their heads would be spinning. Since there are so many projects at once it might be hard to keep track. So the policy is quality over quantity.
- The perfect timing. This means that, e.g. a tropical island pack would rather be announced and released in the summer rather than winter (though Rachel said it almost never happens that finished packs are held off because of this). It’s also about the feature space on origin – EA has other games too and they have to make sure to find a good time to talk about the sims. So announcing a new expansion when they just launched a new battlefield game might not be a good idea.
