11/27/2023 08:42 pm EST

The Sims 5 has been in the works for quite a while now under the Project Rene codename. However, developer Electronic Arts hasn’t given fans too many hints about what to expect. All we really know at this point is that The Sims 5 will launch as a free-to-play game. The team has yet to share any sort of release window, let alone a teaser trailer. Fortunately, it looks like we might be getting close to the hype train really starting to pick up, as developer Lyndsay Pearson recently sat down for an interview to talk all about how The Sims 5 is approaching multiplayer.

The RadioTimes interview is squarely focused on multiplayer, though Pearson is speaking to both The Sims 4 and its upcoming sequel. She said, “We definitely want to introduce multiplayer. And not multiplayer in the big, scary ‘jump in a world full of strangers’ kind of way. But literally, how do you and your friends want to do some play together?” 

That may sound a little confusing at first, but essentially what Pearson is saying is that The Sims 5 isn’t looking to put strangers in the same world. Instead, the developers want to give players new ways to interact with their friends and their Sims. That’s where the comparisons to Animal Crossing come in. Pearson said the team “talk[s] about Animal Crossing all the time, because it is such a good example of my little space, my little island, but I can invite you over.” 

“And we’ve seen throughout the last few years of Animal Crossing, people inventing new ways to play together that the game doesn’t specifically support, but they’ve made up scavenger hunts or whatever, which is amazing.” 

However, Animal Crossing isn’t the only comparison Pearson made. She also pointed to Among Us, saying, “We actually look at a lot of games that are doing multiplayer in clever ways, like Among Us even, which is this sort of mystery thing, but you have to talk about it and solve it.”

It’s clear from the interview that The Sims 5 developers are taking a hard look at all different types of multiplayer as they build out the next entry in the long-running franchise. Hopefully, with the devs starting to talk more about the upcoming features, we’ll soon learn much more about when The Sims 5 is coming and what exactly it’ll look like.

The Sims 5 Release Date

Unfortunately, we don’t really know anything about when The Sims 5 might be released. However, we do know that the free-to-play game won’t replace The Sims 4 when it does come out. Instead, the two games will live side-by-side, letting the playerbase choose which one they’d prefer. That makes a lot of sense when you consider how many expansions some players have bought for The Sims 4. That said, if The Sims 5 is able to nail its multiplayer, it’s likely tons of players will make the jump. 

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