The Sims 4 won't include pools or toddlers, concerned parents will be pleased to hear

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Despite including a revolutionary feature EA and Maxis are calling an 'offline mode', The Sims 4 won't manage to include all the stuff you might have liked about the previous games - namely Create a Style, pool-building, and spawnable toddlers, features that have been left on the cutting room floor and oh god that didn't sound right at all. The bad news was rather skillfully buried in a super-upbeat blog post outlining the game's included features, but if you peer closely (or scroll down to the comments thread beneath it) it soon becomes clear that something's amiss.

"While it's not possible for us to include every single feature and piece of content we added to The Sims 3 over the last 5 years, we've added features that you've asked for and that offer a whole new intuitive and fun way to build. These are features like Wall Height Adjustment, Dynamic Foundation Sizing, and Smart Windows! And though pool building won't be available in September, we do have a new Fountain Tool so you can create sophisticated landscapes."

Wall Height Adjustment and Dynamic Foundation Sizing - at times The Sims 4 reads like a game designed by Handy Andy . Did you notice that cheeky "pool building won't be available in September " line too? Suggesting features may return in the form of a patch or expansion pack/DLC at a later date.

As for the toddler part, it's in the line "as for ages, we have babies, children, teens, young adults, adults and elders". EA and Maxis once again discriminating against ghosts and embryos there.

Create a Style mode wasn't mentioned in the above blog post, but it's been confirmed that The Sims 3's recolouring/retexturing system will be absent from The Sims 4 as well. Of course - worries over these features perhaps being reintroduced later as paid DLC aside - Maxis/EA are rather hoping the game's new emotion system, and revamped character creator and build mode, will make up for any notable absences. We were fairly impressed by those things when we firstlooked at The Sims 4 last year .

Ta, RPS .

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.