So, rather than include toddlers, we chose to go deeper on the features that make Sims come alive: meaningful and often amusing emotions more believable motion and interactions more tools in Create A Sim, and more realistic (and sometimes weird!) Sim behavior.

Focus on revolutionizing the Sims themselves. Hard pill to swallow, believe me, but delivering on the vision set out for The Sims 4 required focus. 'So the bottom line is that when we sat down and looked at everything we wanted to do for this game, all the new tech we wanted to build into it, the fact was that there would be trade-offs, and these would disappoint some of our fans. To do that, our technology base needed a major upgrade.' The vision for The Sims 4 is a new experience that brings your Sims to life in deeper and uniquely personal ways – through emotions, personality traits, behaviors and interactions. It begins with new technology and systems that we built for this new base game for The Sims – a new AI system, new animation system, new audio positioning tools, new locomotion logic, new routing intelligence and much more are all entirely new in this game. 'The fact is, we owe you a clearer explanation for why pools and toddlers will not be in The Sims 4 at launch, so here goes. As a result pools and toddlers ended up on the cutting room floor. New (though seemingly unrelated) features, then, took center stage while others got pushed to the margins. Writing on the Sims blog executive producer Rachel Franklin said that The Sims 4 necessitated a lot of brand new tech, much of which was built from the ground-up. It's totally fair to wonder what exactly drove EA and The Sims Studio to yoink two staple features from the series, though, and now the team has explained itself. I think those people might be overreacting just a smidgen bit, but you know, everyone's got their priorities. To hear some incensed fans tell it, The Sims 4 without pools or toddlers is a barren hellscape, an empty, rotten womb where fun is but a dim memory.

Oblivion cutting room floor