Sims 4: High School Years Expansion Pack Announced
Posted on June 30, 2022 by Aywren
The Sims has just announced their newest expansion – High School Years – which will be available July 28, 2022.
While I did just pick up the Werewolf pack and haven’t had a chance to dive into it yet (I want to), this expansion seems like it might have the gameplay that the community keeps asking for. But we’ll have to see!
The teen lifestage has always been rather lacking in The Sims 4. To me (and the majority of players), the biggest complaint about teens is that they look almost identical to the adult lifestage. Just a little shorter. I’ve always taken that to do with making development easier for the different ages, but I’d have much more preferred younger looking teens, myself.
Other than going to class every day and working on skills – the same things that kids do – there hasn’t been all that much to celebrate the teen lifestage in Sims 4. While I didn’t expect a high school pack (and I haven’t been keeping up with all the community polls about the game), I think it’s a good move to fit in some content for what should be a fun and exploratory age.
My thing is, I’m just not sure how it’s going to fit in terms of what you can do in a given Sim day. Sure, there’s lots of activities here – even a theme park being introduced – but by the time my Sim gets home from school and does homework, they’re usually so burned out they don’t have that much energy left to do fun things. Not to mention, teens have a curfew that keeps them from being out and about after a certain time.
I suppose if most of the activity in the pack focuses on the time spent in the school, that’s probably fine. I assume it’ll work a bit like the careers that allow you to follow your Sim and perform job duties. There has to be an option to not follow a Sim to school, just like sending the adults off to work on the days you don’t want to play the teen.
Overall, I think it’s a great idea. I just hope my Sims will have time to explore activities and do homework!
Seeing that I have story Sims at the teen age, this works quite well for some of the families I’ve been playing. I know I’ll be picking it up because it certainly is going to fill in the gaps and add content to the teen age group. It also looks like it has a lot of new teen-style housing items, which are much needed.
