Sims 4 Fans Are Mad About Snow

Sims fans are excited as hell for the upcoming Seasons expansion pack. It’s been long awaited, given that every game since The Sims 2 has eventually gotten it, and it has always been a fan favourite. Players have one big problem with what they’re seeing in previews, though: The depth of the snow.

Screenshot: The Sims 4 (EA/Maxis)

The Seasons expansion was announced on May 24, and it will bring distinct seasons as well as weather to The Sims 4. In spring you’ll get rain showers, and in winter you’ll get snow. While Sims fans are pretty excited to finally get this expansion, they picked up on one detail in the trailer. Even though there’s enough snow for Sims to make snowmen and do snow angels, the snow itself never seems to get deeper than a light dusting

The fandom is not having it, especially since the Seasons expansions for The Sims 2 and 3 both had much deeper snow:

The reaction from Sims fans over this dissatisfactory precipitation got kinda heated. The day after the official trailer for Seasons debuted on YouTube, Sims fans started posting Reddit threads about the snow depth.

While many people professed that the lack of depth didn’t bother them, it was a topic that was brought up repeatedly, with fans scrutinising the trailers and promotional images for evidence of deeper snow. This tweet promoting Seasons has dozens of fans replying to either complain about the snow, or complain about people complaining. Some fans made a petition on Change.org to fix the snow, and over 900 people signed it. When the new Sims community manager, Kate Olmstead, tweeted about finally having the time to play her Legacy family, someone replied to it saying, “Why don’t you take that free time to fix the awful snow of the sims 4 seasons? ;)”

On May 31, Grant Rodiek, lead producer of the The Sims 4 and one of the audience-facing developers on the Sims team called “Sim Gurus”, took to Twitter to try to explain to fans what they were seeing.

“We knew deep snow would be important from the very beginning and we researched a variety of solutions to implement it. However, we never had confidence we’d be able to achieve the visual quality bar we expect for The Sims 4, which is key on an aesthetic feature!” he wrote. “Therefore, as lead producer I made the difficult decision to focus our efforts elsewhere.”

Sims fans have calmed down a bit, but they still aren’t really buying it. One point fans keep bringing up to counter Rodiek’s claims is the infamous ball pit from the Toddler Stuff Pack. While the pack itself was only a few items, and the particular item is one that not many players would use in all of their games, fans very quickly picked up on the fact that the balls in the pit are just a flat texture:

The Sims devs improved the texture for the ball pit in a later patch.That hasn’t stopped fans from bringing it up every time they want to gripe about the game.

In The Sims 4 Seasons, Sims will still be able to ice skate, make snow angels, have snowball fights and make snowmen. The snow, however, will just be a flat texture. For some Sims fans, that’s a total dealbreaker after the more substantive snow from previous games. Honestly, I’m psyched about a world where the cuffs of your jeans will never get soggy.