REDWOOD CITY, Calif — During EA’s Investor Day event, EA has unveiled a new multiplayer expansion to The Sims 4 in the works titled “Going Outside” which has led to varying reactions among fans of the series.
“I, much like many long-time Sims fans, was really excited to give this a try. But I can’t begin to understand what EA thought upping the difficulty for any and all social interactions out of nowhere,” said Morty Goth on the Sims subreddit. “I mean I have yet to have a single flirt interaction that actually succeeds. Not to mention the rather severe failure penalty that occasionally comes with trying to flirt that can disable your game altogether with the pepper sprayed status.”
Other fans also voiced complaints due to cheats being locked behind whatever family they chose to start in with even further restrictions following that if they wish to maintain that playstyle.
“I was completely locked out of any cheats unless I chose to start in a wealthy family. Even if you do pick the richer families to spawn into, while you may have access to cheats, you get stuck with either being named after your parents or something that I assume is a glitch cause there’s no way any human would name a child something this weird,” according to a player going by ʞ𝓎🅻Ꮛ 爪ʊⓢ𝕜.”Plus you also get locked out of transgender and gay options unless you give up all benefits you had from your origin, making this extremely limited for certain playthroughs.”
Meanwhile, while fans have had a less than positive reaction to this new experience, EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson has come forward to issue a statement on the expansion and its development.
“We understand that many fans have concerns with how quickly we may have pushed this expansion. However, we do want to state that this development cycle was done to get a product out to our consumers as quickly as possible at the cheapest price point possible,” said Wilson. “We wanted this to be developed as cheaply as possible so we did not need to burden our fans any more than necessary with recuperating any development costs. All with the idea that they could easily and cheaply jump right into this fresh new experience we’ve created for them”
Following the release of The Sims: Going Outside EA has announced an annual subscription fee players will be required to pay by the in-game month of April due to a partnership between EA and TurboTax.
