The Sims 4 has enjoyed the attention of a huge audience for well over a decade at this point, and it’s still getting updates and new content drops surprisingly regularly, with the modding community being an especially important part of the game as it stands today. However, there’s still room for expansion and improvement, particularly in terms of interactivity. Here are some suggestions for new minigames that might enliven the Sims 4 experience, even after all this time.
Making Activities Skill-Based
There are a few activities in The Sims 4 that Sims can be set to complete, and which then play out passively, with the player watching their chosen character complete a canned animation until a preordained point is reached. Gardening and fishing are good examples of this, and there’s an opportunity for skill-based minigame elements to be applied here.
For instance, requiring the player to click rhythmically to weed the garden, awarding points and speeding up progress the more in time they are with a constantly moving meter, would improve interactivity and add an element of skill to proceedings. The same would work for fishing, and arguably for a range of other activities Sims currently do without direct player engagement.
Adding Casino Games
Games of chance have been featured in Sims releases in the past, with gambling and luck featured in The Sims 3, and the card game Sabacc, a tie-in with Star Wars, appearing in The Sims 4 as part of the Journey to Batuu add-on. However, it would be good to see a wider range of casino games added officially, reflecting the growing popularity of betting IRL.
The developers could take inspiration from these slots, and even add table games, and perhaps create entire casinos, or allow players to build their own gambling dens in their homes. The options are endless.
Including Bar Games
Socializing is of course a core aspect of The Sims 4, and doing so at venues like bars is a good way for Sims to build relationships. Making the bar games featured as static objects in these contexts into interactive games would give players more reason to care about such locations and meet-ups.
Something straightforward like darts would make a great mini-game, and there could even be leaderboards added to amplify the competitiveness. Taking this further with pinball or even game-within-a-game style arcade cabinets, perhaps loaded with emulated, licensed classics, would not only be fun, but also improve immersion.
Considering Puzzle Opportunities
Minigames within The Sims 4 might reasonably be adapted as broader metagames within the world of the game itself, and puzzle-style challenges lend themselves particularly well to this. So, for instance, a player might be required to fulfill certain criteria within a Sim career path like interior design, where the project assigned to them by the virtual client comes with specific constraints in terms of space, aesthetic, budget, and so forth.
Basically, if the core gameplay loop of The Sims 4 is spiced up with more mini games, interactivity will increase, and we won’t have to rely on the modding community to fill these gaps.
