The article can be found here

it's not surprising.. they can do a lot more with ts4 than they could with ts2 considering they are a decade if not more apart. and that's a super long time in between with how fast technology develops.. i mean the things that were extremely difficult back then are probably more of a breeze now.

Except toddlers. And unique teens/young adults/elders. Those are still waaaaaaaaaaay too hard and would be a lot of work for their animations team.

ETA: The stuff about environment changing based on what you buy is interesting. They sort of managed it with The House Of Fallen Trees, which apparently has dim horror movie lighting no matter how many lights you buy.

I love this kind of stuff. I wish there was a place or thread to gather all the history and ins and outs of the development of the various Sims games. Thanks for sharing the article!

Of course, we have little of that nuance and situational awareness in the Sims 4 (and the Sims 3). It really only reinforces how much detail was in the Sims 2 that is missing from the future games.

Remember in the Sims 2 how if a sim flushed the toilet while another sim was in the shower, the second sim would get scalded, jump out of the shower and yell at the first sim?

Please make that thread exist people :lovestruc

What a great article! I find the whole development process of The Sims 2 just so fascinating. The game is one that I probably have played more than anything else, but yet I still learn so much from it each day. I do see a lot of similarities between the Sims 2 and the Sims 4, which I think is largely due to the whole feedback many had on behalf of the third installment. Either way, thanks for sharing the article! (:

And yet The Sims 2 has a lot more features than Sims 4...

The gaming industry has also changed since then. Throughout the Sims 2's existence, the gaming climate changed substantially from TS1 up to TS2, and it's evident. The most notable and taxing change on the series was putting less effort into larger chunks of content and selling off smaller bits for more than their worth. DLC definitely appeared towards the end of TS2, but TS3 has day one DLC, large and small. TS1 also has DLC, but all of that was free.

As you can see, companies can get away with trimmer the game of its features and selling them later. We didn't get a store of any kind until the first expansion pack, and store have been expansion pack corner stones since TS2.

A fascinating read, especially in TS4 context - vision vs. "vision".

It's a fascinating article, but I don't think there was any conscious decision to take cut TS2 features and put them in TS4. I believe any similarity between cut TS2 features and TS4 GTW are purely coincidental.
I feel like the TS4 development staff are in large majority a whole new group of people with very few TS3 veteran staff involved (if any) and even fewer from TS2 and TS. Rather than building upon features from previous games, EA seems to always start completely from scratch, seeming to totally forget that the previous games ever existed. I often get the impression when I play the latest sims game that the current developers never played the previous one before. All too often, they seem to miss the boat on what key features simmers enjoyed from the previous games.

I thought everybody knew by now that TS2 was originally going to feature fully functional hospitals? I would have loved to see them in action, and it seems the patient system they were trying to perfect, eventually became the customer/shopping mechanism implemented in OFB, just as the rain became part of the Seasons EP. Many of the ideas and features for TS2 Base seemed to have been available later on in the various EPs. And with all of the cut features and content, It often makes me think that perhaps TS2 was the most ambitious of the series.

I would have also loved to see the adaptive environment that was discussed later in the article. I can just imagine how that would've changed the game atmosphere.

As for GTW, I don't really think the hospital functionality was based off of cut features from TS2. More inspired by TS3 Amibitions, than cut features from TS2.