Could The Next Sims 4 Expansion Break Your Sex Mods - Or Even Put Them Behind A Paywall?

The next big expansion for The Sims 4, Lovestruck, is going to be a momentous one. It's slated to dramatically overhaul the game's romance mechanics to add depth and better reflect the social dynamics we experience in real life--including a new romantic skill for your sims to level up. The free update that will accompany the new content will even introduce new relationship preferences (including polyamory) for those who don't shell out the $40 that Lovestruck costs. All of that, on its own in a vacuum, sounds pretty good. But there's just one little issue: Most of the features Lovestruck will charge money for were already modded into the game years ago for free.

I'm not trying to question the point of buying Lovestruck given that fact--lots of folks play The Sims 4 without mods, either because they play on Xbox or PlayStation where they literally cannot, or because that's just not their bag, baby. There are players for whom all this stuff will be new, or who can't get it any other way, so even abstractly there's a clear market reason for doing this.

But for those of us who do use mods and custom content in The Sims 4, which is many people, this new expansion inspires some big questions, because video game publishers don't usually like it when free mods do the same thing as an official paid release--even if the mods were there first. And in this case, those free mods--like Wonderful Whims/Wicked Whims, and the SimDa Dating App--are extremely well established and have been among the most-popular mods available for The Sims 4 on Curseforge since they were created

So what are we talking about here? Wonderful Whims and Wicked Whims are the mods that are primarily being made redundant here--they're really the same mod, but the Wicked version includes nudity and explicit sexual content. What you get from the Whims mods is the ability to customize what kind of hair, body types, etc., that your Sim finds attractive, along with polyamory and open relationships, STDs, birth control, menstrual cycles, and a number of new attributes that play into those gameplay changes. After you've been playing with all these features for a while, it's tough to imagine The Sims 4 without them.

Lovestruck won't, of course, include all of that stuff--The Sims doesn't really want to get that deep into the granularities of human biological processes. But the big stuff, like attractiveness preferences, relationship settings, and the increased focus and emphasis on romantic entanglements, are there--and, if we're being honest, EA's versions of these will probably look nicer and be a better user experience than the mods are, not to mention having this stuff better integrated across the entire Sims 4 experience.

And Lovestruck has plenty of its own original content as well, like the romantic new world, Cuidad Enamorada, and new relationship states that reflect how well a couple is getting along (finally, we'll be able to have a truly loveless marriage in The Sims 4). While I mentioned that there's the existing SimDa dating app mod, the Cupid's Corner app that comes with Lovestruck sounds a lot more useful and feature-packed, with a new system for going on dates that's more robust than the existing dating mechanic--all due respect to LittleMsSam, the prolific modder who made SimDa and tons of other incredibly useful tools, but Cupid's Corner sounds like a big upgrade. Plus there's a new romance consultant career that sounds like it might be a hoot. Lovestruck has the ingredients to be fun.

But I'm not trying to litigate whether Lovestruck is worth buying. I'm more concerned right now for the folks who don't. This is fraught territory for everybody, in a sense, because so many of the redundant features come from an explicit sex mod for a Teen-rated game--it's not really in EA's best interest to publicly acknowledge that Wicked/Wonderful Whims exists. But once Lovestruck is out, Wicked Whims will suddenly include, for free, features that EA is trying to charge money for.

Though I don't know what EA is going to do, this is the kind of situation that could lead to a crackdown on those mods that are newly redundant, or cause the mod creators to add a flag that requires you to own the DLC to play their mods in order to avoid such a crackdown. Locking a mod behind DLC isn't that unusual, even. There are tons of custom maps for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator, for example, and basically all of them that are up to date require every map DLC for the respective game to work. The stated reason for this is that the base game assets are low-quality, and so modders make copious use of DLC assets when they build their maps--and you'll obviously need the DLC to play these maps, or else they'll be full of random missing buildings and objects. But there's an etiquette element at play as well--with just about every custom map requiring every DLC, the developers don't have any real reason to have beef with the modders, and everybody can coexist in peace.

Even though the modders did it first, and beat EA to this stuff by several years, EA remains the boss--it can handle this pretty much however it wants. And if it wants Wicked Whims gone, the release of Lovestruck is the perfect time to try to make that move since it wouldn't be arbitrary in this context. Though it's hard to see much upside to that route since almost everyone who cares one way or another about Wicked Whims is somebody who uses it--there aren't any prominent prudish groups calling for a boycott of The Sims over sex mods, as far as I know, so trying to axe Wicked Whims isn't likely to make many people happy. Being forced to buy Lovestruck in order to use Wicked Whims would be a little bit better, but still quite irritating--but with The Sims 4 base game being free-to-play, it wouldn't be that shocking if they went there because of some ill-advised mandate from management.

Ideally, though, EA would simply continue to publicly pretend it doesn't know about Wicked Whims, and let everybody go about their business. And it's very possible that's what it's doing, considering how massive and well established the Sims modding and custom-content community is, and how important The Sims is for EA's bottom line. But Turbodriver, the modder who is primarily responsible for both Wicked Whims and Wonderful Whims, hasn't posted on their social channels or Patreon since Lovestruck was announced. That doesn't itself indicate anything about what will happen with Lovestruck, since Turbodriver didn't post all that frequently to begin with outside of updates to the mod--but it does mean we haven't gotten any insight on the situation from the person outside EA who's most likely to have some.

The Sims 4: Lovestruck arrives on July 25, so we'll find out one way or another pretty soon.