After several months of EA remaining uncharacteristically silent when it came to one of their biggest cash cow series, fans of The Sims may finally have the leak they’ve (we’ve?) been waiting for.
The leak comes in the form of the website belonging to Brazil’s media ratings board (think the ESRB for the U.S., or PEGI in Europe), which has a listing, added only today, for “THE SIMS 4: VIDA NA CIDADE (EP3)”. The ‘EP3’ part of that is interesting, because Maxis has specifically been keeping radio silence on the subject of expansion packs since the second one for The Sims 4 was released December of last year. The listing was originally discovered by oSimBR.
And as for the subject of the proposed expansion, I don’t speak any Portuguese, but SimCookie, a French language Sims fansite who are always among the first to report on these kinds of things and from whom I usually get my Sims news, has translated the title into “Vie en Ville”, which, in English, could either be “Town Life” or “City Life”.*
Either way it seems like we’re looking at a more urban themed expansion, in the nature of 2’s Nightlife and 3’s Late Night, and possibly even-dare I say it?-The Urbz. The Sims 4 included nightclubs in the base game, expanded on them in Get Together and gained restaurants with Dine Out, so there’s very little that these two expansions for previous games were themed around that The Sims 4 doesn’t already have in some way.
There one big aspect of living in a city that The Sims 4 (or The Sims 3, for that matter) doesn’t have, however; apartments. It’s been an asked-for feature for sure, and there was even some drama sparked over it when some promotional materials for Get to Work included the word ‘apartment’ in some innocuous way. A developer ended up confirming that apartments would not be appearing in Get to Work, so Maxis are at least somewhat aware of their fandom’s desire for them.
I guess we’ll see.
* French has no distinction between ‘town’ and ‘city’ like English does, and I couldn’t tell you which of the two the original Portuguese implied.