The Sims 4 Needs an Everyday Hardships Expansion to Increase the Difficulty

Compared to previous games, such as the re-released Sims 1 and Sims 2, The Sims 4 is easy. You can step away from your game for a while, then return to find that things are fine, and you’ll likely have a pop-up pausing the game. Overall, the stakes are low, and that’s true even when you’re actively controlling your Sims. Death from sources other than old age aren’t that common in The Sims 4, and Sims that catch on fire when cooking almost always live, although their mood drops from that experience. You might enjoy not worrying about your Sims, or you might be looking for a way to make the game more challenging.

Rather than updating the base game to increase the difficulty, The Sims 4 could center an expansion around the challenges of everyday life for players who miss how older Sims often made you work to keep households alive and well. This gives you the option to not pick up and install the pack if you’re happy with The Sims 4 in its current state but also lets you decide if you want to give the added difficulty a shot.

Expansion Packs are the Perfect Way to Add Optional Difficult to The Sims 4

Since there’s a mix of players who like The Sims 4 primarily for building to spice up their neighborhood and others who enjoy challenges when playing, the best way to handle the low difficulty level of the game is to put difficulty increases behind a paywall in the form of an expansion. That leaves it up to the player to decide if they’re happy with the difficulty, or if they want more of a challenge.

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An expansion that adds everyday hardships could include features like cooking skills being more important in avoiding housefires, a variety of injuries and illnesses that Sims could contract, the chance to lose a job or have difficulties finding one, random costs, and more occurrences that happened frequently in older games like robbers and infestations. These wouldn’t be huge features that would make players who don’t get the expansion feel like they’re missing out on content, but it would still increase the difficulty for those who desire a challenge.

The other nice feature about expansions that is that you can always choose to not install that particular pack. This would let players freely decide when they want a challenge and when they don’t. If The Sims 4 is the version that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future with The Sims 5 not being created, then there should be ways for different types of players to further tailor their experience, and this is just one possible way that could be done.