After receiving a lot of backlash over the decision to drop toddlers and pools from the launch of The Sims 4, EA and Maxis posted a long explanation to the Sims' official website detailing their position.

Sims Executive Producer Rachel Franklin addressed the legions of Sims fans personally via the post, talking about the many technical limitations the brand new AI system is facing with the two removed features.

"It begins with new technology and systems that we built for this new base game for The Sims – a new AI system, new animation system, new audio positioning tools, new locomotion logic, new routing intelligence and much more are all entirely new in this game," Franklin writes. "The vision for The Sims 4 is a new experience that brings your Sims to life in deeper and uniquely personal ways – through emotions, personality traits, behaviors and interactions. To do that, our technology base needed a major upgrade."

Because of that technology upgrade, Franklin explains, some things needed to be sacrificed in order to achieve that deep and unique gameplay. "Rather than include toddlers, we chose to go deeper on the features that make Sims come alive," she wrote. "Instead of pools, we chose to develop key new features in Build Mode: direct manipulation, building a house room-by-room and being able to exchange your custom rooms easily."

We're not sure if fans of the series will accept this explanation, but everything that Franklin writes about in this post makes perfect sense. This also leaves the door wide open for those features to be included in Sims 4 expansions...because it would be foolish to think that The Sims 4 won't receive any expansions.

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