The Sims 4 community are not happy that swimming pools are absent. Would they be really that hard to add?
Gaming technology is amazing, you can do so much in games these days with the many wonderful game engines on the market. Unless you’re Maxis. Digging a hole in terrain is super complex as Sims 4 lead producer Graham Nardone explained to Kotaku.
“It’s easy to look at something and think, ‘That looks pretty simple.’ When you think about a feature like pools upfront, it looks like a square box on the ground and you put a shader on the top surface and have Sims jump in.”
“But ultimately, it’s more complexity in terms of what tech’s there and what isn’t there, what we have to build to support this. How do we cut down into the terrain, how do we get Sims going through portals across different levels of pools? There’s so much that’s going on in the background that you don’t end up seeing just to have a Sim go swimming.
It sounds pretty simple, and in fact it probably is simple if your engine could actually handle what sounds like a basic requirement. You were the guys who made SimCity 4 right? That’s the one where you could change the terrain? Did the previous game not have pools? Apologies, I must be thinking of a different Maxis and different Sims.
There are other quotes from Graham in the story but to be honest its the same old PR rubbish with words like “community” and “important to us”.
Will Maxis charge for pools in the future? Don’t ask Graham because he manages to respond with a classic non-response.
“I’d really just say look at what we’ve done in the past. We’ve had a variety of different ways we’ve delivered content to players, and I think we’ll continue to support what they’re looking for”
That’s a fantastic ‘how not answer the question’ developer response there. Best we’ve seen so far this week, and Gamescom hasn’t even started.
