How Players Shaped The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy Expansion Pack

Player collaboration has always been at the heart of The Sims, and The Sims 4 Royalty & Legacy Expansion Pack is no exception. Our Player Experience team worked closely with players to test everything throughout development. From the very beginning, your ideas, reactions, and feedback helped shape how this pack came to life.

Today, we’re sharing a closer look at how players have helped guide, inform and support this regal expansion pack, playing a key role from early concepts to the final playtests.

How Players Informed the Theme

Research began a year ago, after two passionate marketing team members and long-time Simmers, Chelsea Nesbeth and Lexi McIntosh, pitched a modern royalty concept based on their listening and engagement with The Sims community. With support from Anna Huerta, The Sims Creative Director, the team incorporated the idea into their exploration of various expansion pack themes as part of a survey for players worldwide.

“We knew that if we did royalty, we wanted to explore it in a way we hadn’t before,” says The Sims 4 Brand Manager Lexi McIntosh.

When we introduced the Modern Royalty theme in the survey, we saw a strong positive response from players, helping to reinforce it as the theme we would pursue for the upcoming expansion pack. Players were drawn to Modern Royalty as a way to enhance legacy-driven storytelling, up the drama, and add power plays. That excitement also came with clear feedback. Players consistently emphasized the importance of depth, noting that Modern Royalty would feel most compelling when supported by dynamic systems and interactions that meaningfully expand how stories unfold.  

Once it became clear that Modern Royalty resonated with players, our Lead Producer, alongside the Design and Art teams, began defining the pack through an early concept exploration study. 

Early concept exploration studies help us gauge how players felt about the team’s early ideas. The Design team used player studies to support many decisions from helping to validate the feature list to informing the directions of the feature designs. 

“This pack was created with the player in mind every step of the way,” says Azure Bowie, The Sims 4 Lead Producer. 

One variation emerged as a clear favorite, focusing on the drama between having status and responsibility. It explored what it means to belong to a prestigious family, honoring or reshaping a legacy while navigating the weighty expectations of the crown and the household. The results showed that players were most drawn to the fantasy of legacy, status, and long-term family progression.

Designing Stories You Can Make Your Own

As we continued to develop the pack, we used storyboards and mock-up designs in Player Experience Studies to further support and validate key gameplay and feature priorities. Early on, some players expressed a desire for touches of fantasy. The team knew, from this feedback, to prioritize Powershifts, a system built around dramatic, storybook moments that influence a Sim’s ascent to Nobility or their downfall. 

Adding nuance to how both your Sims and the world around them respond was important to capturing the complexity of royal life. To support this, the team designed the Dynasty and Nobility systems as separate but complementary experiences, allowing players the freedom to engage with them together or independently. Whether you rule your dynasty, your world, or both, it’s entirely up to you.

“We didn’t want to lock players into a single narrative. Our goal was always to provide Simmers with systems and mechanics that support a wide range of stories that felt right to them. We keep in mind that each player should engage with the simulation in the way they prefer.” says Xènia Peña, The Sims 4 Lead Game Designer.

Similarly, we wanted to make sure players had plenty of ways to create organically messy and dramatic moments. Enter the Scandals system. The game recognizes, reacts, and remembers these misdeeds like if your Sim is having an affair or a secret child. If discovered, these scandals can have undue consequences on your Sims’ social, personal, and professional lives. 

Building Authentic Worlds & Neighborhoods Together

We saw an opportunity to embrace the vast concept of royalty and imagine a place where people from different backgrounds intersect and coexist, reflecting the diversity of our own community. West Africa was a foundational influence throughout this vision, and getting it right meant incorporating diverse voices and perspectives into the process.

Within a fictional narrative, we aimed to celebrate and pay tribute to the richness of West African aesthetics and its coexistence with Southern European influences, all while maintaining the utmost respect. For both cultures, our goal was to reflect how each has evolved in meaningful and positive ways through different periods, remaining culturally valid, influential, and alive up to the present day.

“Each stands on its own with distinct beauty, identity, and lore, while existing together harmoniously. The complex process of creating this pack, drawing from many different inputs and cultural influences, became a meaningful metaphor for the experience we wanted to deliver,” says Eva Garces, The Sims 4 Art Director.

To ensure the world of Ondarion and the neighborhood of Dambele, was built thoughtfully, the Design and Art teams worked closely alongside consultants from the Pan African Gaming Group (PAGG), as well as a group of Simmers, Nardvillain, SpringSims, Oshinsims, Ebonix, EmeraldStories, Creativelyanzy, whose combined perspectives reflect connections to West Africa and the broader Black diaspora in the United Kingdom and North America. We also partnered with these groups for last year’s free West African update. Both these players and PAGG were present through every phase of research, including regular check-ins and reviews with our Art Directors and Production.

Internally, Design and Art partnered with the Games for All team to facilitate and gather feedback from PAGG, weaving in cultural details across the pack’s decor, setting, and gameplay – such as the Anansi’s Trials Power Shift, to handmade patterns and motifs, hairstyles, how fufu is eaten, and much more. Games for All is a team dedicated to helping game teams create experiences where every player feels welcome, safe, and can see themselves reflected.

“The Design, Art and Production teams’ interest in understanding everything from symbology and tradition to emerging trends and regional differences made collaborating with consultants on this pack especially rewarding,“ says Otilia Joao, Senior Specialist, Games for All.

Refining the Experience Through Playtests

With all these features and blends of perspectives, it was time to put them to the test. Through playtesting, which players can sign up through The Sims Labs to get involved, feedback at this stage ensured gameplay was not only fun, but also readily accessible and easy to understand. 

We made swift improvements, including clearer tutorialization and better progression cues within systems.

At its end was the birth of an ambitious pack rooted in legacy where players revel in chaos, calculated rule, good-hearted leadership, and everything in-between.

A Kingdom Built Together

We want to thank everyone who played a role in shaping this expansion pack. We’re deeply committed to our players and communities, and listening to your feedback and collaborating with players will continue to shape and refine future experiences. After all, that’s what makes The Sims special: it’s your story, we just provide the tools.