The Sims 4: it’s got quite a few features, many of them new, and it places a particularly large emphasis on emotions, but a lot of people also feel that it lacks the depth of previous Sims games. I can get behind that sentiment for a Sims game that launched without giving you the option of letting you drown Sims in swimming pools. Really, what kind of a Sims game is this? So what exactly would the fans, i.e. you, like to see out of the next Sims game? Apart from swimming pool murder, of course, which we can all get behind.

Toddlers, for one, are missing from The Sims 4. However, a lot of missing features in The Sims 4 can and likely will be fixed by adding them back in expansions (and charging for it, as is the Sims tradition). With all the work that will probably go into The Sims 4 yet, it seems unlikely that we’re going to see a Sims 5 release date for a number of years. The way the Sims games work, of course, is for a ‘vanilla’ game to be released, followed by a number of expansions. And we’re probably not even close to finishing that life cycle.

To compare, The Sims came out in 2000, followed by The Sims 2 in 2004, The Sims 3 in 2009 and The Sims 4 in 2013. These are gaps of 4 years, 5 years and 4 years respectively. Needless to say, the minimum gap needed for developing the next generation of Sims games takes 4 years at the least. This puts The Sims 5 release date at somewhere around 2017-2018 at the earliest.

What features are you looking forward to from The Sims 5? Let us know in the comments below.