Electronic Arts updated The Sims players with some news about Project Rene this week. The new Sims game was revealed last year and will be the next installment in the series. Grant Rodiek, the game director working on Project Rene, shared some news about the game.
The director confirmed that playtests for the next Sims game are already underway, and that the team has plans for the game to incorporate player feedback into the game's development. But Project Rene has been around for years, so these playtests and occasional updates like this are what players should expect now.
Rodiek talks about Project Rene about three minutes into the video below, where he confirms the news of the test runs and that these types of tests have already been done. The director tempered expectations regarding the game's release date at the beginning of the clip, reminding people that this project is still a long way from its release date.
What we're doing is testing the game in the early days and this is just the beginning of an incredibly long journey. There's a lot to do, but we're excited.
These playtests consist of small parts of the game being put into the hands of a “limited number of people” to see what will be fixed, Rodiek said. For these early playtests, that process consisted of letting people try out the apartment customization feature, where players place furniture to customize a space to their liking. We expect we won’t hear more concrete information about the game until two years from now, and it’s possible longer because the word “far” in the games industry should be taken seriously and a little patience should be exercised until we see the project in its closest form to release.
