The next Game Pack for The Sims 4 has fans a little unhappy. Star Wars: Journey to Batuu will be the first gameplay add-on to introduce a major franchise to The Sims, an idea that doesn't quite fit in. The Sims has always been about creativity and playing the characters you want, sort of like writing your own story. The game's Origin description even reads, "Unleash your imagination and create a world of Sims that's wholly unique." But how can you play creatively or have a unique experience in an established story with an existing set of guidelines?
The Sims pairing with companies and brands isn't a new thing, and past games have included crossovers with IKEA, H&M and even Katy Perry. However, these didn't interfere with the game. If anything, it was a great way to bring real world objects and clothing into the game and add and extra layer of real life to the life sim.
Journey to Batuu will be the first time The Sims is partnering with a franchise that will be inserting more than just items. For a game where you can create characters the way you want and have them live their life the way you want, adding new gameplay elements based on Star Wars is an odd and stifling choice.
In this Game Pack, players will be creating their own Star Wars stories by choosing to help a side, completing objectives and making friends on Batuu to unlock décor and outfits. It's not unusual for certain items to be locked behind a goal in The Sims, but it doesn't make sense to structure this a narrative-based game here. This essentially requires players to progress through a story, and that doesn't exactly sound like the freedom to play that The Sims has always promised. Usually, non-player-created stories are a minor part of the game, but here, players will need to adhere to the Star Wars universe's factions and rules.
The Game Pack will include tasks that mirror events from the movies, which would be great in a Star Wars game where there's action, but The Sims isn't known for that. The Strangerville pack also has a story and goals, but where Strangerville uses established gameplay, Journey to Batuu tries to combine the life-simulator with Star Wars action, a combination that doesn't make a lot of sense. Journey to Batuu would be better off as a stand-alone Sims spin-off game, like The Sims Castaway or The Sims Medieval. These games had stories you had to play through as a Sim, and the entirety of the game focused on meeting goals and progressing to new ones, a format would work better for a Sims/Star Wars crossover.
Instead, this pack takes away from what The Sims is. Having to travel to a specialized world to access its content takes players out of the established game for a disjointed experience. A pack like this takes the focus away from the creative elements that make The Sims great and exchanges it for a virtual life management theme park mashup where each area is its own thing. Expansion and Game Packs are best when they build upon what's already there, working together to create a rich Sims world for players to create unique content in.