A new, small selection of new furniture and architectural details came out for The Sims 4 yesterday in the Industrial Loft Kit, a small collection of new items with a Brooklyn loft theme. The Industrial Loft Kit initially felt like it might include architectural details players were excited about. Sims fans especially liked the window that’s highlighted in the tweet announcing the pack.
The only problem? That window isn’t in the Kit.
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Sims fans have been dissecting the Kits’ new items at length on Twitter, on the game’s forums, and on Reddit. One fan even clocked it as looking almost exactly like the Brooklyn loft apartment from the original Gossip Girl rather than feeling truly industrial.
“I’m reminded of how they decorate the NYC apartment of the ‘broke’ character in a tv show,” they wrote. “Like it still looks out of a magazine and is huge but bare brick walls and exposed beams = poor.”
When Kits, a new type of downloadable content in The Sims‘s catalogue of expansions, were announced, players were pessimistic. The current ecosystem of Sims DLC is already convoluted. You have Expansion Packs, which significantly change the game and add a huge amount of new clothes, furniture and architectural items. Then there are Game Packs, which often have one major new mechanic and a smattering of other items. Stuff Packs used to be the smallest tier of DLC, usually adding small new gameplay items and a couple of clothes and furniture.
Kits are even smaller than Stuff Packs, supposedly to be hyperconcentrated in terms of aesthetic or function. The Bust the Dust Kit adds vacuums and a dust mechanic, and the Country Kitchen Kit adds country style kitchen items. Almost none of the current packs have been a hit with players, with the exception of the Courtyard Oasis Kit, which has some truly beautiful architectural details for creating a mediterranean style courtyard. Otherwise, Kits often feel too small to make an impact in your game–unless they’re the dust mechanic, which, when turned on, feels completely inescapable. I don’t vacuum that much in real life!
As outlined by Sims YouTuber Deligracy, there are a lot of annoying details that make this Loft Kit not all that usable. The one window that is actually in the pack, for example, is very small and doesn’t match the size of other windows that could complement it.
It also looks just different enough from the window that is featured in the game’s key art that fans are frustrated with it. The window in the key art has a rich black swatch, is recessed into the wall, and hangs high enough on the wall to catch the sun’s rays as it sets. By contrast, the one in the game hangs awkwardly low and doesn’t have as rich of a black swatch, which absolutely matters very much to people like myself who build a lot of houses in The Sims 4.
Fortunately for Sims fans, the developers have said that the window that was featured in the tweet announcing the pack will be added to the game in a future update. I’m sure there will be new things for the fandom to be in uproar about by the time it arrives.
