Sims boss Lyndsay Pearson says 'leaks are unavoidable' and 'you're going to end up with crossed wires occasionally' as EA stays clammed-up about Project Rene
As of last year, The Sims 4 team committed itself to going back and working on big lists of outstanding issues with the game (which it has been making good on) but an equally big bug in the system is EA's communication to players—or the lack thereof. I don't really think that much is going to change on that front any time soon but the message we got in a recent interview with Sims series VP of franchise creative Lyndsay Pearson is that the team is at least aware it's a pain point for players.
In the past six months EA and Maxis:
A little more than two years ago, Pearson was the one to announce Project Rene, saying at the time that the studio would be sharing information about the in-development game sooner than The Sims ever had before with occasional updates and closed playtests.
It has continued to share updates but each Behind The Sims presentation just keeps getting shorter, leaving the ravenous fanbase desperate for information about what to expect. That's the environment that the EA Investor Day put its foot in last September, dropping on players that Project Rene is actually not The Sims 5 as we'd been assuming and that The Sims 4 would be sticking around getting new DLCs even after Rene's eventual launch.
«It definitely happens in these franchises like The Sims, where you have a lot of things happening, you're going to end up with crossed wires occasionally,» Pearson said during our conversation. «I think we are always evolving our communication strategy to try and figure out what is the right way to share the right information at the right time that isn't confusing or misleading.»
Learning about EA's vision for The Sims Hub as a foundation for several different Sims games on PC from an investor presentation was pretty confusing, especially when no further explanation was forthcoming. Pearson wasn't able to take questions about The Sims Hub during our chat, but I imagine if I'd been able to ask whether that was the way the team wanted that announcement to
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