For over 20 years now, The Sims series has been one of the most popular video game collections out there. Spawning four base games and numerous spin-offs and expansion packs, the franchise has gone from strength to strength thanks to its addictive gameplay and ever-expanding capabilities. It's the simplicity of the concept that makes it so ef🌄fec🌃tive: you create your Sim family, raise them from birth to the end, and take them on a journey that's yours to control. If you're a wannabe architect, you can spend hours building extravagant mansions for your characters. If you want to play deity, you can end your Sims off in increasingly more inventive ways. The possibilities are pretty much endless!
As with any long-running video game series, the technological advances that have been made over the past couple of decades have led to more and more gameplay elements being added to each new title. It's hard to believe that there was once a time when Sims didn't actually age, or when the seasons didn't change with each passing in-game day. Considering just how much the Sims franchise has grown, it's strange to think that among the numerous changes that have been made, there are plenty of scrapped features that have never seen the light of day. The Sims games could have been so different if some of these characters, events, and scenari🐠os had been kept in! Here are just some of the cut features that would have changed everything if EA a𝕴nd Maxis had only kept them in their final products.
25 ꦓ The Fire Warning
Fire has always been one of the biggest threats to the wellbeing of our Sims. Asking your Sim to pꦆrepare a meal when their cooking skill is too low is a sure-fire way to cause a blazing inferno to engulf their entire home. Generally, there's no way of telling if or when a cooking-related fire wil🅘l occur.
However, that wasn't always going to be the case!
Originaไlly, a warning was programmed to pop up if your Sim's cooking skill was go😼ing to cause a fire. You could choose to cook anyway or save your Sim from a fiery doom.
24 𓂃 The 🌼Downtown Curfew
In 2001, The Sims: Hot Date introduced Downtown, a new area that your𒁃 Sims could visit to go and dates and have some fun. They could go for a leisurely stroll in the park, pick up a new outfit to impress their romantic interest or stop off for a meal at one of the area's restaurants. There was no time limit to the fun, either: Downtown was open 24/7! This was a late addition to the game, though: originally, the area was set to close at 2 am. We're glad they got rid of that party-pooping curfew!
23 The Mi෴ssing Lots
Players of the original Sims game will probably remember that initially, only 10 lots were available for your characters to live in. That number slowly increased as each expansion pack was added. In total, The Sims eventually included around 80 residential and community lots—or at least, 8💫0 accessible lots. The game was actually able to handle a total of 100 different lots, but around 20 of these didn't ꧃make the final cut. They're accessible via cheats, but still not actually usable.
22 ⛄ The "Family" Motive Bar 🌠
One of the many challenges involved in playing any game in the Sims franchise is keeping your characters' "motive bars" in a healthy area at all times. If their Energy bar drops too low, they'll pass out; if their Hunger bar drains until it's empty, the Sim will starve to the end. The different motives that are measured in the game have remained pretty much identical since The Sims came out—although The Sims 2 nearly brought a big change. A "Family" motive bar was almost add🃏ed, which revolved around your Sims interacting positively with♓ their nearest and dearest.
21 Th🐈e Sims 2: Seasonꦰs (Kind Of)
The Seasons expansion pack has been a firm favorite of Sims fans for some time now. The amount of hype generated in the community when The Sims 4: Seasons dropped in June shows just how important this aspect of gameplay is to fans! What a lot of Simmers don't realize is that Seasons was originally just going to be an aspect of the base game version of The Sims 2—not an expansion pack. However, the game's development team encountered too many glitches for this to become a reality, and Seasons became a later add-on.
20 Emotional Memories 🧔
The Sims 2 introduced a 🌳lot of new mechanics into the franchise, including the concept of Sim "memories." ꦿNotable and important events, such as marriage, having children, and putting out a fire, were added to a Sim's memory bank.
A Sim's memories didn't really impact gameplay at all.
They existed more for players to look back on later. This wasn't always going to be the case, though! Originally, if a Sim had too many bad memories, it was programmed to impact their mood negatively—and vice-versa. However, this concept was eventually s✱crapped.
19 ꧋ ꦕ The Power Aspiration
Another new gameplay element that The Sims 2 added was the Aspiration syste🧜m. Essentially, your Sim could choose one of a number of goals to strive for and would receive various benefits if they manage꧒d to meet their target. Adult Sims could choose one of five Aspirations: Romance, Fortune, Knowledge, Popularity, and Family. Originally, though, there was going to be a sixth Aspiration: Power. This would have functioned as a blending of the Popularity and Fortune Aspirations but was abandoned midway through development.
18 𒉰 The Population Counter
While this feature wouldn't have affected gameplay too much in The Sims 2, it would have been pret𒈔ty neat to see in action. Apparently, in early versions of the game a "population counter" was visible on the neighborhood screജen of each world. As you'd expect, this would be nothing more than a tally of the number of Sims in the neighborhood at any given time. Those players who like to force their Sims to meet grisly ends would presumably have enjoyed seeing that counter slowly going down.
17 🔴 Functional🔯 Cars
In The Sims, cars were nowhere near to being fully functional. Your Sims wouldn't even get in them realistically: they'd seemingly teleport from the pavement to the inside of their work carpool, then be hastily driven away. It looks like cars were initially intended to be a bit more realistic, though. There's an unused animation in the game's code that shows a Sim climbing into a car in a realistic, normal-human kind ♋of way. This clearly didn't make the final version of the game, probably because it was an easy thing to cut.
16 🌼 The Par🌱ty Clown
Before you panic, the Party Clown character in The Sims sounds nowhere near as sinister as the Tragic Clown featured in the Livin' Large expansion pack. ๊This scrapped NPC was intended to be 𝓀an entertainer for children's birthday parties.
It's a pretty cute idea if you think about it!
However, since children—and adults—can't actually age in the original Sims, having any kind of ♚"birthday party" scenario wouldn't really make sense. Thus, the poor Party Clown was cut.