According to Kate Gorman Revelli, vice president and general manager of the Sims series, the franchise goes beyond linear, sequential video game releases. Instead of The Sims 5replaced The Sims 4Electronic Arts and developer Maxis will continue to support The Sims 4by complementing the franchise, by developing alongside it, not by replacing it.
“The Sims is in many ways about expressing yourself and your creativity and finding your own goals to pursue in the game. But what brings them back is their connection to the little people they’ve created,” Gorman Revelli told Polygon. “We also know that we’re not going to move to a linear model because we have so much to do with The Sims 4
Confused? Until now, most people thought that Project Rene was The Sims 5But that is not quite right. The Rene project will be The Sims 4 and other games as a multiplayer component. “We want to keep expanding, so if you want that kind of multiplayer experience, that’s exactly what you’re looking for in the things we’ve talked about Project Rene,” she said. The first real look at what to expect there is planned for later this year, according to Gorman Revelli, as part of its new experimental testing ground, The Sims Labs.
“Again, this is a complementary experience to all the other things – it’s not a linear experience,” she said. “We’ll see a lot in playtesting, but the main thing we need to do to figure out what Rene is is figure out how to make The Sims playable together. That’s something we’ll continue to work on and learn together with the community.”
Gorman Revelli made it clear that “The Sims” will constantly evolve and improve. In a post on The Sims blog, The Sims 4 has been described as “a core Sims experience” that continues to be modernized. So will there ever be a game called The Sims 5? The answer sounds like no. But that doesn’t mean that the Sims experience won’t change or evolve; whatever ends up being the fifth main game in the Sims series (Rene or not!) is not a replacement for The Sims 4 – it is a continuation of it.