‘The Sims 5′ as such will not happen, EA seeks no more “working on replacements” for the franchise

‘The Sims’ franchise has been with us for almost 25 years, with a total of 4 base games and a huge amount of expansions. A few years ago, Project Rene was supposed to be The Sims 5 and to reboot the franchise, ten years after the last base game. However, Electronic Arts’ latest post on The Sims official blog shows us that the future of the franchise will be different than we thought.

Project Rene is not The Sims 5. In fact, The Sims 5 will not be released as we expected

In the release entitled ‘The Future is Plumbob Green’, Electronic Arts has revealed a lot of information about the future of the franchise. From the signing of a movie with Amazon MGM Studios, directed by Kate Herron and co-written by Briony Redman, as well as the announcement of The Sims Creator Program, which will allow collaboration with “both established and up-and-coming creators around the world” to get early access to help create content.

The big surprise, however, is when it comes to Project Rene, what was predicted to be the next title in the franchise, namely The Sims 5. In this section, more information was released, revealing that Project Rene is “focused on building ways for friends to meet, connect, and share while playing together in an all-new world”. In addition, there will be an “early look at a multiplayer experience that explores joining friends and other players at a shared location” in the fall of 2024.

In an interview with Variety, Kate Gorman, vice president and general manager of The Sims at EA, commented that the reason for this change is that they don’t want players, after 10 years of playing the game and buying expansions, to start over.

“The way to think about it is, historically, ‘The Sims’ franchise started with ‘Sims 1′ and then ‘Sims 2,’ ‘3′ and ‘4.’ And they were seen as replacements for the previous products,” Gorman said. “What we’re really working with our community on is this a new era of ‘The Sims.’ We are not going to be working on replacements of previous projects; we’re only going to be adding to our universe. [...] We’re still continuing to support ‘TS4′ more than ever. Still continue to deliver expansion packs and updates and fixes. But what this is to say is, the way we’re going to do things going forward is a little different.”

For clarity, he was asked about Sims 5, which she commented that “it’s not ‘Sims 5′ as a replacement for ‘4.’” To this, she continued: “we will continue to bring HD simulation experience and what people would want from a ‘5′ — but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to start you over, reset all your progress, and really feel like you’re going to lose all of that amazing play you put into ‘4.’ [...] And so it’s not about as much of what the numbers are in the games, but know that the future of the franchise looks more like keeping your progress, keeping things across titles.”