As someone who played The Sims 3 on a tragically specced laptop, I'll always remember feeling mildly guilty whenever I ignored its suggestion to "select only a couple of packs at a time to ensure the best game experience," checking every box for every DLC I owned and hearing the whirr of my fans desperately fighting for their lives.
Thankfully that's not an issue I've had with The Sims 4—the power of a better-optimised game not shackled to a 32-bit prison—but I've certainly had moments where I wished I could disable a pack or two here and there without having to faff around with the EA app's advanced launch options. Well, after almost 11 years, I finally can.
The Sims 4's latest base game update has added a proper pack selector which, side note, really highlights the sheer number of paid DLC it has. Unlike The Sims 3—which made you select packs before you booted up the game—The Sims 4 has it tucked away in the main menu.
It's certainly less of a requirement to disable packs than it was in the previous game, too. EA doesn't recommend doing it for any optimisation purposes (yet) and it seems more like a way for people to temporarily go without packs that are particularly disruptive to gameplay. It's giving more optional than necessary, which is exactly how it should be.
I'm a fan of its introduction, personally, but I still have that tiny bit of fear lingering in the back of my brain that EA is eventually going to use this as a crutch for when the game bloats and potentially destabilises even further. From what the developer has been saying, it seems like The Sims 4 is sticking around for the foreseeable future, and with it already having the highest number of packs in the series, I imagine keeping everything running smoothly is only going to become more difficult.
For the most part, though, this is just a genuinely good quality of life addition. As long as it works. Which in YouTuber lilsimsie's case, it currently doesn't seem to be. Disabling all of the packs is an easy enough task, but it seems as though re-enabling them can take at least 20 minutes. To be fair, lilsimsie was trying to re-enable every single pack in the game, but it's certainly worth keeping in mind.
Personally, I hope having this in-game pack selector is a stepping stone to being able to fine-tune what we can pull from each pack in the future. Certain gameplay features can be checked on and off, but it's still pretty selective. Being able to disable larger gameplay overhauls while still keeping the furniture and Create-a-Sim items would be huge. I just hope that doesn't take another 11 years to happen.
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Razer Blade 16 (2025)
2. Best budget:
Gigabyte G6X
3. Best 14-inch:
Razer Blade 14 (2025)
4. Best mid-range:
MSI Vector 16 HX AI
5. Best high-performance:
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10
6. Best 17-inch:
Gigabyte Aorus 17X
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