The Sims is a franchise that has been going on since the release of the first game in February of 2000. The franchise is celebrating twenty years of Simish and wacky player antics, and fans couldn’t be any happier. With Sims 5 in development and The Sims 4 still getting regular updates, the series is very much alive.
In fact, players from all over the world, both casual and not, seem to have fallen in love with the charming game. Throughout the years, the series has gone through some major overhauls to get to the point where you can truly express yourself in the game, with deep customization and rich interactions.
10 Wants and Fears
While most players are going to be familiar with The Sims 2, which was released in 2004, where the sims have much more personality, this wasn’t always the case. Before the release of Sims 2, the virtual humans had no wants, fears, or even memories; they were pretty much blank slates that players sort of played pretend with.
The introduction of wants and fears affected the mood of sims and was a huge step towards a more interactive ai.
9 Genetics
Players of the original game can attest for just how bad childbirth could go. Children would often look nothing like their parents in the first game, and each iteration of the series has worked to improve genetics. Many couples will now use the game as a way to even try and predict what their children could look like using this engine.
While The Sims certainly isn’t a scientific tool, the way it can now generate children that look like the parents is extremely interesting.
8 Pets
One, if not the most popular expansion that players can get for their game is the Pets expansion. This allows you to bring both cats and dogs into your family to play with and raise, but it wasn’t always around. In fact, players wouldn’t see furry friends incorporated into the series until two years after the release of The Sims 2 in 2006.
Since the initial pets add-on, the expansion has gotten bigger and better for each new title in the series with more breeds of cats and dogs to pick from than ever.
7 MySims and Friends
About a year after the release of the popular Pets expansion, players got to see the first spin-off title from the series appear in 2007 called MySims. This was a major step in the franchise’s history as this brand of games targeted younger players and left out features like Woohoo that wouldn’t have gone over well with parents.
In 2011, the franchise also started to target mobile gamers and social media users with The Sims Social and The Sims Freeplay. Business-wise, this was an intelligent move that put the franchise into the hand of an untapped player base.
6 More Life Stages
When the series first debuted, there were a total of three life stages, which is much worse than the toddler stage being left out of The Sims 4. Originally the stages were just baby, child, and adult. This was later increased to seven stages that included baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, adult, and elder.
The lifespan has also fluctuated in the series, with the longest lifespans reaching over 900 days in The Sims 3 and cut back to over 300 in The Sims 4.
5 Adding Neighborhoods
It’s safe to say the initial game in the series was pretty limited due to both resources at the time and the limits of computers. Neighborhoods were added in and expanded upon in later games so that you could watch your sims go about their daily lives. You can force them to go to a restraint, bother them after school, or even send them out to socialize in town.
Neighborhoods have gone through a ton of changes with no loading screens being present when you moved around in The Sims 3 and then putting loading screens back in for The Sims 4.
4 SmartSim
Even though loading screens did return in the Sims 4, the game brought with it some incredible new features; SmartSim overhauled the AI and made them feel more alive by giving them real-time reactions to situations. This created a more fluid environment that pleased players who loved to experiment with their sims in various situations.
SmartSim is a major step for game design and is most likely being overhauled for the next game in the series to make the AI even more lifelike than players have ever seen.
3 Character Customization
It’s no surprise the character customization has evolved over the years, especially in games that put an emphasis on players making their own characters. When The Sims 4 released in 2014, it had one of the most comprehensive customization series on the market that let players get down to the nitty-gritty when shaping characters.
Players can easily spend hours in customization, making characters in the appearance of their favorite actors or close friends. The possibilities are almost endless, especially with all expansion packs added on.
2 Content Packs
Speaking of expansion packs, the content add-ons for the franchise have become the stuff of gaming legends. There are very few games that have the amount of DLC that The Sims franchise does. Each iteration of the game has come with even more expansions, stuff-packs, and free furniture.
Players can download packs that allow them to play as vampires or throw extravagant parties in their homes. There is even a Star Wars expansion set to that just came out.
1 Community Involvement
The internet and player base of the franchise has grown, and there are tons of places sprinkled around the web where players regularly trade ideas. EA, the parent company, took notice of this and decided to use customer feedback when making content packs. The company allows fans to vote on the type of items they want to see in the game.
This is a marketing move that helps to ensure that the company is creating DLC that will both sell well and make the player base stay interested in the game for long periods of time.
NEXT: The Sims 4: 10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With The Animal Crossing Mod
