"Rushed and Unfinished" Sims 4 Players Aren't Happy About the Latest Pack

Many The Sims 4 fans are less than enchanted with Royalty & Legacy, the newest full expansion DLC that was released for the popular life simulator on February 12, saying it feels unfinished and believing that its development process may have been rushed. While the new DLC for The Sims 4 is loaded with a ton of additions, like nobility systems and power shifts, some fans have also noticed a lot of little things that have gone overlooked, and they’re not happy about it.

When it was first announced in the middle of January, many life sim fans were excited to see the upcoming features in The Sims 4‘s Royalty & Legacy expansion. With a heavy focus on lineages and bloodlines, the latest expansion promised to give players a greater degree of control in personalizing their families, with new systems like individual family values, degrees of unity among members, social prestige, and even scandals and swordplay thrown into the mix.

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Sims 4 Players Want More Polish on Royalty and Legacy

But the end result hasn’t been the satisfying experience that every player has longed for, and some fans are now pointing out several flaws and faults of The Sims 4’s Royalty and Legacy expansion, including simple mistakes that look like they should have been caught before the game went live. As detailed on Reddit by user ApplicationOdd6600, some of these details are very minute, including a rug option that doesn’t have a miniaturized icon when selecting it for purchase with Simoleans, displaying only a blank, white square in the build menu. As for the object itself, the color swatches don’t all seem to be lined up properly, and the border around the rectangular rug is shown to go missing about halfway through one of its shorter sides.

Multiple players have also been feeling put out by the color palette the new expansion seems to be built around. Many new parts and patterns in The Sims 4‘s Build Mode are locked into one particular color scheme, with a lot of door and window swatches only being featured in a cream tone and the wide variety of interconnecting new wall tile swatches only appearing in a blue and white motif. Some fans have even noted there was more variety matching the theme of the new expansion in The Sims 4‘s Castle Estate Kit, which was released more than two years ago and is available on the EA app for $4.99, as opposed to Royalty & Legacy’s much higher price tag of $39.99.

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But it’s not just the DLC’s new cosmetic features that have upset players, as there are some gameplay elements that have pushed their buttons as well. The expansion features a new aspiration called Social Puppeteer, a Deviant-style set of life goals built around scandal, extortion, and profiting off other Sims’ secrets. This being the only new aspiration included in the DLC has annoyed some players, who are used to seeing an altruistic aspiration coupled with a more mischievous one when new Sims 4 expansions are released. Additionally, the fact that even free-to-play Sims 4 players are able to unlock a similar, second new Deviant aspiration called Master of Grudges from the ongoing Lost Legacies event that accompanied the pack’s release isn’t doing much to smooth the situation over.

There are concerns that the pack’s perceived lack of attention to detail is the result of the $55 billion EA buyout deal that was announced last September, which saw the formerly publicly traded software company going fully private and owned by a number of different investment groups, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Partners, and Affinity Partners. That announcement shocked The Sims franchise’s community and resulted in the public exit of many of its most popular content creators, many of whom showed strong concern that Maxis would be losing control of its creative freedom. While Maxis has refuted those ideas, the recent fallout over Royalty & Legacy shows that they’re still standing strong in the minds of many The Sims 4 players, both current and former.