The Sims 4 releases content fairly regularly, which is pretty good for a game that, having released originally in 2014, is now in its sixth year of running. Full disclaimer, constant reader: I have every single The Sims 4 pack, except for Eco Lifestyle and Nifty Knitting, and the only reason I don’t have those is that I’ve been strapped for cash lately. Nonetheless, over six years, I have spent something like £500 on this game. 

I even have the much-despised My First Pets, because I hate seeing those little icons on The Sims 4 menu screen be greyed out. This is probably by design; keep the players constantly reminded, every time they start up, of what exactly they’re missing. Just a few short weeks after announcing that they’ll be expanding the skin tone swatches and fixing blotchy assets in The Sims 4, they’ve announced a new game pack: Journey To Batuu!

Okay, so… it’s a Star Wars pack. You now get to live out your dream(?) of having the Millenium Falcon in the game and having a setting that is in a galaxy far, far away. Coming out on September 8th for all platforms, Journey To Batuu sees more storyline-based The Sims 4 gameplay, not unlike the StrangerVille expansion pack. It also sees EA really milking that exclusive Star Wars games license they got from Disney. 

For a long, long while, that license kind of languished. Agreed to in 2013 and apparently due to expire in 2023, they only released three games in the six years that followed: two Battlefront installments and Jedi: Fallen Order. 2020 marks a plethora of Star Wars content really coming out from EA, but Journey To Batuu is not the first time that Star Wars content has made it into The Sims 4.

The first time we saw official Star Wars items in The Sims 4 was in 2015, when Star Wars Day, May the 4th, saw the free addition of several Star Wars costumes. In 2019, they gently slid a Baby Yoda, or The Child as he’s officially called in source material from The Mandalorian, into the game. In hindsight, it was only a matter of time before EA said, “What if we just slid an entire Star Wars game pack in there? Wouldn’t that just make us tons of money, huh?” 

In truth? It probably will. The Sims series has always been lucrative for EA. The first installment, released in 2000, had the core game plus seven expansion packs. The Sims 2, which followed in 2004, had eight expansion packs and introduced additional content through the stuff packs, of which there were ten. 

The Sims 3 had eleven expansion packs and nine stuff packs, but it also had an online store, which is still active. Some plucky Steam user calculated that there’s probably about $70,000 worth of items on that storefront, and we’re all collectively grateful that the same move hasn’t happened with The Sims 4. Instead, the fourth installment has nine expansion packs, nine game packs (including Journey To Batuu), and a slightly monstrous seventeen stuff packs. 

Yet, for some players, The Sims 4 still feels empty. It launched with a controversial lack of key Sims game features, such as pools or toddlers which are an entire life state. Babies are objects with no personality and teenagers look exactly like young adults. There are countless internet essays and articles dedicated to the opinion that The Sims 4 lacks detail, depth and has repeatedly failed to give players what they’re asking for like bunk beds. Come on, you guys, the freaking The Sims Mobile has bunk beds and the main game has none?!

So Journey To Batuu, which many feel fails to address basic lifestyle simulation requests the players have been making for years, is causing ripples of dissatisfaction. Frankly, I understand. On the long list of things I’d love to see in The Sims 4, a whole Star Wars game pack isn’t even close to the top of the list. The frustration mostly stems from players not having what they want first. 

Game packs like Journey To Batuu would feel a lot more like a fun optional extra if they weren’t all the players are being given. Although it takes around a year or more for these packs to be developed, players have been asking for fixes and basic additions to the game for almost its entire life cycle. Some of this won’t be entirely on the developers; they’re constrained by budgets and instructions that are dictated by the higher-ups who are more interested in padding a bottom line or say, making abundant use of a particular IP license.

On that note, something interesting about Journey To Batuu is that the titular Batuu isn’t an existing location in the Star Wars universe. It’s a location that Disney invented to be the setting for its Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge areas at Disney’s theme park resorts and is mostly fleshed out for that reason. So… Journey To Batuu feels like an advertisement, not only for one of Disney’s most lucrative IPs but for its theme park resorts. Yay.

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