SimGuruEugi, one of the developers working on The Sims 4, explained some of the apartment functions and their creativity limitations in City Living, such as not being able to play with apartments outside San Myshuno or build an apartment from scratch.
You can think of an apartment building as a neighborhood. They are authored by our world creation team as part of the world we ship for the EP. (We actually can’t patch worlds without invalidating saves).
If we had allowed the creation of apartment buildings from Build/Buy, we would not have been able to achieve the look we were going for. For instance, B/B limits construction to five floors, but you want buildings to look like they have many more than that, so you can look over the city skyline.
There are also performance implications. You might want a building to look like it has, say, hundreds of windows and small items of decor. If those were actual B/B objects, they would all count against our performance metrics.
We also allow multiple households to inhabit the same building. So we’d have to add some element that would have allowed players to define the boundaries of an apartment. If it wasn’t properly authored (e.g. lacking front doors), some game functionality might not work.
So we reached what we think is a good compromise. We modeled “shells,” which are apartment buildings that look great but are technically one object, and then we allowed B/B operations inside it.
- There are up to four apartments per building. All those apartments are playable. You can move in/move out of them, and they can be inhabited by NPCs. You can interact with your neighbors by knocking on their door and whatnot.
- For each apartment building, the playable space is one floor in that building. The elevator takes your Sims from street level to their floor.
- Penthouse are not a lot type. You can change the penthouse’s venue type to any type, and it’s really cool. The premade lots in San Myshuno are gorgeous. Can’t wait for you guys to play with it. I didn’t work on EP03 and when I saw the final world I was really impressed with what the team pulled off!
- The population cap will be increased by roughly 25% for EP03 (regardless of whether or not you buy the pack. It’s patched in).
- I think the shells are objects, so I’m sure modders will find ways to “liberate” them and do crazy things. It’s just not something we support in worlds other than San Myshuno.
- You can think of apartment buildings like neighborhoods. We don’t go back to shipped worlds and change the lot/neighborhood configuration, because that might negatively impact your existing lots.
- Question: Do you know if the new careers will have any major impact on the way careers work at the moment? Will the apartments traits be moddable?
- SimGuruEugi: There may or may not be 😉 some added career functionality, but I can’t talk about that, and I don’t know how/if it will invalidate mods. Apartment traits should be fully moddable.
- Apartment buildings have between two to four apartments. All of the playable apartments for a building are on a single floor.
- The area around lots can be accessed without loading screens. It exists in other worlds as well, but it is especially large in San Myshuno.
- We did not change the way households are managed. If you move your Sims in with a rommate, in the same household, they’ll become playable.
- The festivals are specific to San Myshuno, so I don’t think they’d work in other worlds.
- There are no new editing tools, but you can do everything you can do in other worlds. So you can freely build on any lot, including apartments and penthouses, from Manage Worlds.
