A harrowing thought crossed my mind the other day. What if the Sims 4 is made in a way that can't be modded? A lot of games are already made like this, so it isn't like it's impossible for it to happen. It would be harder to make expansion packs for it though if it were made in such a way.

What would you do? Would you still play the game?

As long as the DRM is not onerous, I expect that I'll buy and play the game. However, without mods I may lose interest quicker. That would probably make EA happy; they don't really want us to continue to play games without buying stuff from them on a regular basis.

One of the reasons that the series has survived as long as it has is because of mods and custom items. If they made it impossible to mod, they'd be left with very few players. Should they choose to go this route, the Sims series will never recover.

Either way, I have no plans on getting the game.

I agree with Butch SIms...so many players would leabe and not comeback

There would be a riot on their hands.

Do you hear the people type? Typing the words of angry modders? Black, the colour of our PC's! Red, the colour of EA's faces because they're going to be so embarrassed after they read the reviews!

i suck at rhyming

Mod... proof? If the good people of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony cannot keep their consoles "mod proof", I don't think EA could. Wasn't TS3 essentially mod-proof in the beginning?

It would burn soooooo hard.

Considering the fact I played TS2 for ages when I was younger without mods and only discovered them late last year, I probably would play TS4 but I'd probably get bored of it faster because mods make the sims a hell of a lot more fun and if I even decided to buy it because of the fact that I'll be at uni hopefully studying two degrees so I don't know if I'd even find the time.

I don't think there are many games that are actually "mod-proof" so much as there are not that many amazing modders working on figuring out how to mod it. Just because there are no mods doesn't mean mod-proof. Luckily, the Sims community has a lot of great modders who are not just capable of doing meshes and textures, but also figuring out file formats.

Additionally, as TS4 is supposed to be based on the Sim City engine and that is moddable . Also, because EA likes to use very similar file formats for its different games (Spore, SimCity, Simcity 4, Simsocieties or whatever it was, Sims 2, and Sims 3 apparently all share similarities in the way the file formats work), it's likely Sims 4 will also use similar file formats and thus be similarly moddable.

Also also, if you recall with TS3, originally it "wasn't moddable" in that we had to use a d3dxblah.dll and put the stuff in Program Files and tell it to read it there... Then, about a year-ish after TS3 came out, they patched that so we could put stuff in My Documents instead. And they've never then gone, "Uh, no, we actually don't like CC, nevermind" and patched it out again. While I'm sure it was a relatively small programming change on their end, it does show that they were willing to support CC.

If it was mod proof then from my stand point unless they have more good expansion and stuff packs for it then for me at least I am sticking to my none cc glitch filled sims 3 and my 17GB of cc sims 2. True it takes forever to load but it has my wonderful sims that I use for storytelling.

Why on earth would EA do that? They would have nothing to gain from it- they may be evil and lazy, but they're not stupid.

Modders and creators buy the game to enjoy going through the code and creating art as a hobby, that would definitely cut in their profits. I don't think EA would do that with the Sims series, unless they do think a bit too much of their ability to keep this game interesting for all players. I don't see that happening either.

If by the slight chance that Sims 4 is unmoddable, then I will definitely have no interest in it, as I am not interested right now.

Like Alfred said in Batman:

I'd still play it, but I'd probably lose interest in it pretty fast.

But like HP said, people were panicking and claiming we could not mod TS3, but within a week the first mods were being made. Mods find a way.

Within the first day there were mods released for TS3. I dunno if we'll be that lucky for TS4, but really, it was "mod-proof" for like 10 minutes, till someone (probably Rick, he does everything - go look at just about any game with mods and you'll see his name pop up) figured out how to tell the game to read our packages too (hurr) and off we went.

Well, actually the first mods were released before the game was. Gotta love leaks!

And it seems like EA actually managed to learn from their mistake and made it easier to mod Sims 3 after the fact, hopefully they really have learned and don't try stupid shit like that again.

I won't buy it if I can't use mods.

It's interesting that they had that change of heart with TS3. For one thing, it's revealing in that that was their thinking originally with TS3 was to exclude fan-made modded content. It's a concern because it maybe indicates a trend they might pursue - just because they changed it for TS3 doesn't mean they'll do it for TS4. TS2 was better - the most significant thing being the Downloads folder and the ease of adding CC. Still the tools they did release for both games were limited.

I think what would happen if they did attempt to make the game resistant to fan-made modding is that the new game might be quite popular for a while but, as others have said, the longevity of the game will be limited. My personal behaviour towards TS3 is in this line. I bought the base game. There were so many issues with it that I was put off - the struggle with CC was one of those things (there were more insurmountable problems with the gameplay for me, it's true). Anyway, having once turned away from the game, I never did go back and TS3 is completely lost to me (and furthermore, no monies for you EAxis!). If they do make TS4 difficult to mod, there is going to be a section of the playing community that will say: 'ok, that was fun for a bit but now for something more interesting' and that'll be it. The sharing and creativity of the modding community for the game is what makes it a long-term commitment for me. I'd have stopped playing any version of the game years ago if it hadn't been for the fun of poking around in the game files and talking to other people about it. Ah well, we'll wait and see I think.

I don't even think it's worth worrying about. As long as it's for PC, it won't be mod-proof. I don't think any game for PC is mod-proof.

Someone mentioned console games. Well, the DRM on those is such that they are virtually impossible to mod (you can mod the consoles themselves with the possible consequence of console being banned, etc, but actual games are almost never modded). However, we don't have that kind of hardware-level DRM to worry about in the PC world.

I'm confident TS4 for PC can be modded, and will be modded, with the right minds working on it.

Now if some analysts are right and PC gaming dies off and everyone switches to consoles, then there might come a time when games will be nearly impossible to mod, but that time isn't now. And yeah, keep buying games for PC.

I use very few mods anyway so it probably wouldn't be that big a deal to me. I played a vanilla TS3 game for the first year I had it.

Companies will always attempt do what they think they can get away with, and the bigger they are, the more infallible they believe themselves to be. Just because they "learned their lesson" once in the past doesn't mean that they will play nice from then on. It just means that they'll try again from a different angle and hope that the new customers (plus any of the old ones that stuck around since last time) either won't notice or won't care.

Spore was released with undisclosed and terribly invasive DRM back in 2008 that created a massive uproar, triggering a class action lawsuit as a result. Maxis said sorry, and backed off (if they hadn't, TS3 would have likely been locked down just as tight). Maxis then returned with the new SimCity, claiming that a persistent internet connection was required for a whole bunch of backside server reasons -- oh, "but not for DRM!". Evidence began to emerge that many of those reasons were bogus (leaving many to conclude that DRM was indeed the real reason) and the fans revolted, prompting the most recent assurances from Maxis that TS4 would not have an always-on internet connection.

My advice would be to hold off on TS4 and continue to play TS3 for a few weeks as the forums light up and the reviews roll in. No amount of pre-order swag is worth the potential frustration. It's not as if TS3 is suddenly going to suck once TS4 is released.

Exactly. And some paranoid corner of my brain is wondering if EA doesn't really see a problem here... Seeing how they try so hard to pretend TS and TS2 have never existed, I doubt they are interested in prolonged game survival. They want the players to stay interested for as long as they release expansion packs and stuff packs and then to move on to the next installment along with the company.

EA isn't stupid enough to make a game 'mod-proof' or 'custom content-proof'.

Teehee we thought the same about Sims 3 but that didn't last long LET ME TELL YOU.

Nah we have some very talented people in and around this community. Some people could probably take apart Sims 2 and put it back together if they tried.