The Sims 4 Cottage Living is proof EA is listening to players

(Image credit: Ea)

The Sims 4 and its players have a complicated relationship. EA's hit-and-miss content releases have frustrated those who have spent hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours connected the 8-year-old game – just the specified mention of the maligned Star Wars Journey to Batuu expansion still makes waves on Reddit.

That's why the announcement of The Sims 4 Cottage Extant garnered indeed much excitement. Not only is information technology finally introducing farming to the game, but its trailers call a bevy of new, tangible content. Naturally, Simmers were cautiously optimistic, wondering aloud if the gameplay would actually mirror what Ea was presenting. Now that I've spent some sentence performin The Sims 4: Bungalow Living ahead of its release on July 22,I'm willing to composition that it delivers on all advertised front – and past some.

Because of how broad The Sims 4 experience is, its elaboration packs need to top a lot of bases for all of its different player types. On that point should be build items that add more variety to dwelling design, Make up-A-Sim (aka CAS) items that allow for more persona customization, and new gameplay elements that entice players to spend even more meter in the liveliness sim. Cottage Animation covers all these areas, qualification IT a must-have expansion for all case of Simmer – and EA goes above and on the far side with free new content, as well.

Hay girl, hay

Simmers take up been asking for a farming expansion for nearly a ten, and the options for introducing farming are endless – do you ADD a intact innkeeper of farm animal that require a short ton of management, or give players large-scale agricultural tools like tractors and harvesters? For Bungalow Aliveness, EA settled on a garden-to-table theme, which fits in advisable with the quaint English countryside towns that inspired Henford-connected-Bagley.

Cottage Living lets you buy and take care of chickens, cows, and llamas, and all three animals seamlessly integrate into The Sims 4's particular post of impertinent humor. Chickens fire roam anywhere if not properly enclosed, showing up away your side while you'rhenium trying to fecundate crops, and llamas will set up a equip if you try to curry them without getting to know them first. The animals all provide goods for your Sim to use in cooking, baking, and knitting, as wellspring. And with new Lot Challenges, like Simple Living requiring Sims to cook only with the ingredients they have disposable (goodbye, infinite electric refrigerator), Cottage Living is one of the most cohesive packs eventually.

Speaking of ingredients, The Sims 4 Cottage Living adds even more shipway to garden with gigantic plants that you can turn into delicious meals or put into the every week Finchwick Fair competition. There's also a new canning option that testament lease you make a variety of delectable preserve and a unimpaired host of English-inspired new recipes (Yorkshire pudding, anyone?).

Be warned: The Sims 4 Bungalow Living takes the cuteness factor that we saw in the 2017 Cats and Dogs expansion and turns the telephone dial adequate to a level we've never seen in front. Cuddling your overawe bequeath causal agency it to let loose an adorable Greek chorus of moos, and wild rabbits leave hesitatingly approach you look to get fast friends. Therewith dismantle of squee comes the necessary danger of all of these animals dying, nonetheless, so make sure you break into options and turning that off right quick if you deprivation to invalidate what happened to Pine Tree State – the camera panned over to a violent play a trick on last in the far tree of my property and I cried so petrous I had to go pet my IRL cat for a couple of minutes to settle down.

Cottagecore

I'm a builder in The Sims 4, spending most of my time perfecting New-Orleans-style haunted mansions or Brooklyn brownstones I could never afford IRL. I dabble in some gameplay, only ever find myself drifting away from a home later on few Sim days just to start a brand new kin in need of an elaborately constructed home. For my blighter Simmers World Health Organization spend most of their gamey clock time swatching wallpaper and rotating end tables until they're just right, The Sims 4: Cottage Surviving is going to get you very, very hyped.

Cottage Living is wish a wicker basket packed to the brim with delicious goodies, omit the basket is the figure menu and the goodies are thatched roofs, creeping wisteria, and lovely knick-knacks that would make a artistic movement hyperventilate. Do you wish a globose stained methamphetamine windowpane depicting an adorable fox? Cottage Living has IT. OR maybe you'd prefer a toadstool that doubles as an actual seat? Cottage Living has it. Everything you could conceive of you'd see in an English grandmother's Gloucestershire home is in this pack, down to the basket of cross stitching supplies tucked away next to a shabby emerald green armchair.

During my preview, I spent at to the lowest degree four hours building a warming and tantalising cottage tucked away on a large plot of land that was mostly dedicated to my crops and farm animals. I meticulously placed smatterings of daisies and lavender bushes entirely over the dimension, and hand-painted a new pink-hued stone path. In that respect are so umteen lovely virgin build options that add an extra layer of lived-in realness to the cosmos of Henford-on-Bagley.

Mayhap above all is the improver of the pool tool, which is a free update coming to the base game that couldn't Be timed more absolutely. Nada says idyll English life quite like a moss-covered pond, and the new tool lets you build one anywhere on your lot. You can even populate it with animals like ducks, swans, and alligators (give the axe you imagine if alligators were native to England? The Chaos).

The Sims 4 Cottage Living expanding upon multitude has as many layers as a trifle. In that respect's the farming gameplay elements and cottagecore build and buy items that model at the top – the obvious additions that we'd entirely await. Then the are the unexpected additions that add more depth to Henford-on-Bagley: the town and their dramatic relationships, tea they willingly serve if you spend a couple of hours in the pub with them; the mysterious man World Health Organization lives in the forest, tending to the animals; the return of perpetually cranky Agnes Crumplebottom, WHO will step unstylish from behind the counter of her garden stall to outwit you with her purse if you capture a chip brash. All of these things make Henford-on-Bagley feel like-minded a real English village and urinate it easy to spend hours exploring information technology – even for someone like me, World Health Organization quite oft overlooks gameplay elements in favour of building.

But the July 22 release date of The Sims 4 Bungalow Living won't just include paywalled satisfied. EA has folded in approximately free base game updates in what has become a much-satisfying new normal. Last year's The Sims 4 Snowy Escape brought lifestyles and platforms, while Cottage People introduces pond tools, Lot Challenges, and the ability for kids to cook (finally they can earn their save). These are base game updates which means you do not take in to buy Cottage Keep in order to enjoy them. Considering I recently explored The Sims 4 Kits controversy and how much the community does to fuel content updates, it's lovely to see EA foldable in much free imitative game updates when rolling out a new buyable expansion pack.

The Sims 4 lives on, precariously balanced betwixt "dead game" comments on Reddit and beautiful expanding upon packs that take a breath life history into a game that's nearing a decade old. Cottage Aliveness makes that proportionality fewer precarious, giving players highly sought after paid content updates miscellaneous with some necessary, free quality of life improvements. If this is a sign of what's to go down the Sims 4 content line, I think it's got another several years in IT.

The Sims 4 Bungalow Living will let go of on July 22 happening PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, and PS5. The expansion pack costs $40/£34.99.

Alyssa Mercante is an editor and features writer at GamesRadar based out of Brooklyn, NY. Prior to entrance the diligence, she got her Masters's stage in Modern and Modern-day Literature at Newcastle University with a dissertation focusing connected synchronous independent games. She spends most of her time playing competitive shooters and in-profoundness RPGs and was recently on a PAX Venire around the best bars in video games. In her spare clock time Alyssa rescues cats, practices her European country, and plays association football.

Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/the-sims-4-cottage-living-preview/

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