Sims 4's Next Expansion Pack Has Everything It Needs To (Finally) Redeem The Game

Summary The Sims 4: Lovestruck focuses on improving the game's romance features with a new attraction system, dating app, and career options.

The expansion could bring The Sims 4 closer to the ideal Sims experience, addressing core features that fans have long desired.

Console players may find Lovestruck especially appealing, as it addresses a popular mod topic that has been inaccessible on consoles.

The Sims 4 has had its ups and downs over the course of its nearly ten-year history, but the next expansion pack has a lot of potential to bring it closer to the ideal Sims experience. The Sims franchise has traditionally followed an expansion-heavy model, supplementing each successive base game with an overload of additional purchases to add and improve features. Not every expansion for The Sims 4 is worth the purchase, but the best ones bring out the game's underlying potential in ways that it hasn't seen before.

The next expansion pack for The Sims 4 is Lovestruck, which unsurprisingly focuses on the romantic options in the game. Romance has always been a huge part of The Sims, providing a way to build families or simply have fun with the characters. It's actually somewhat surprising that it's taken The Sims 4 a decade to dedicate an expansion solely to the concept, but the long wait may have only served to make the final arrival of Lovestruck more anticipated than it ever would have been before.

Related The Sims 4 Is Finally Getting One Of The Series Most Iconic (And Spiciest) Items The Sims 4 is looking for love as the game's latest expansion is all about romance and seduction with the return of a classic piece of furniture.

The Sims 4: Lovestruck Fleshes Out Romance

This Is The Perfect Pack For Fans Of Love

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The Sims 4: Lovestruck's set of features promises to overhaul the process of meeting potential love interests and going on dates, with a lot of changes and additions to the process that haven't been seen before. A new attraction system wrangles a set of Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs to determine partner satisfaction, covering interests and interactions alike. Appropriate to the times, a dating app called Cupid's Corner also joins the fray, and it's possible to plan out a variety of dates after finding a match in the app.

Not every addition in Lovestruck will necessarily have as much wide appeal as the basic overhauls to romance, but they all lean into the theme appropriately. A romance consultant career provides the opportunity to make a living off of love, and a new world called Ciudad Enamorada stands out as the best place for the flirtatious to start up a life in the game.

Related The Sims 4 Made The Right Call Removing Disturbing Romance Feature Some players of The Sims 4 have recently experienced an uncomfortable glitch involving the game's romantic relationships that should be addressed.

Addressing Core Features Could Make Lovestruck Great

The Sims 4 Is Still Lacking In Some Basic Areas

Custom image by Glenn Bunn

The sum total of the contents isn't as extensive as the most robust expansions for The Sims 4, but the mechanical additions still stand out as potentially major improvements, and overhauling something as basic as romance could bring The Sims 4 a lot closer to what many people have always wanted it to be. While adding expansiosn that take The Sims 4 to fresh settings or explore new angles is always fun, the ones that cover core concepts tend to be the most widely significant, and packs like Growing Together and Seasons remain favorites for this reason.

Related The Sims 4 Growing Together DLC Understands Modern Relationships The Sims 4 Growing Together acknowledges common forms of modern relationships in refreshing ways that can make players feel represented in the game.

The Sims 4: Lovestruck seems especially appealing for console players, who haven't had the same modding luxury that PC players enjoy. Romance has been addressed by an extensive variety of mods on PC, which only goes to show how important it is for much of the community. Even on PC, modding the game can sometimes be a hassle, and the lack of access to mods on console has left these improvements off the table.

A good way to customize The Sims without getting heavily into modding is downloading basic custom content from websites that provide good curation features.

There's still some cause for concern with The Sims 4: Lovestruck, as expansions have an unfortunate history of stability issues at launch. It might be wise to wait for reviews and see if the expansion releases in a state that's worth buying, a practice that many players have begun to default to over the years. Unlike in the past, there's at least some reason to be hopeful for the game's future stability, as a development team focusing on core fixes was formed earlier this year to help address common complaints.

It's also still a shame that The Sims 4's base game remains as anemic as it is, as having to rely on expansions to make core features stronger has never been ideal. Within that business model, however, it's certainly exciting to get an expansion that focuses on something that matters as much as romance. The Sims 4 may always be divisive in some aspects, but if The Sims 4: Lovestruck pulls off what it promises, it could make the game much more satisfying for a lot of its fans.