While Maxis should stick to its decision not to release The Sims 5, the American studio would have new plans for its license. EA unintentionally confirms the latest rumors.
2026 is shaping up to be a special year for The Sims. At a time when Electronic Arts is on the verge of being bought by the investment fund, which would place Saudi Arabia in an ultra-majority position (93% of the shares), the future of the franchise seems turned upside down. Project Rene will only be a multiplayer experience, and not a global renewal of the license, when The Sims 4 would finally be shelved soon in favor of a project halfway between the remaster and the new game. Maxis’ initial plans were however clear: the episode active for more than a decade was to continue to exist alongside future projects, so that players do not lose their historical saves, nor the content they have purchased. However, the studio seems to be changing course, and previous leaks are confirmed thanks to Electronic Arts itself.
The Sims 4.5 leaked again thanks to Electronic Arts
If you read us regularly, you are up to date with the latest rumors. Shortly before we all kissed each other under the mistletoe and wished each other our best wishes for this new year, the revelation of a famous Sims 4.5 shook the community. According to a source who worked with EA Firemonkeys, Maxis should soon unveil Project X, a game which would be neither a remaster nor a real Sims 5, but something in between. The latter would take the fundamentals of the fourth opus by adding features requested by the community for years, such as a graphical facelift, neighborhoods up to four times more lively, and above all an open world. The Sims 4 saves could be transferred and a form of backward compatibility would be provided for the extensions, which would undoubtedly be slightly reworked for the occasion.
The rumor label is gradually coming off this Sims Project X, since the official EA website now mentions it. With the naked eye, you will find a job offer with the name of a game hidden. By digging through the lines of code on the site, however, you will find the name of this Sims 4.5, even in the URL of the page intended for a future AI engineer. The recruited person will be responsible for studying “generative AI technologies” in order to create a “new platform”.
A release in 2026?
The features that will be used, apart from those presented in 2024, remain unknown at the time of writing. This is one of the community’s concerns: what if The Sims gave in to the sirens of generative AI, like its only real rival on the market, inZOI? The offering seems more focused on learning and automatic data analysis than on the creation of assets and other content. Don’t panic…yet.
We should know more in the weeks or even months to come. Several reliable community sources are categorical. This Sims 4.5 should be officially announced and launched by the end of 2026. As a reminder, the rumor mentioned a project which would in reality be the single-player version of Project Rene. The latter was never designed to compete with the main episode, but to coexist with it. We should therefore expect a more simplified variant which would above all allow the teams to start again on more solid technical bases. In fact, the Sims 4 code is more than 15 years old. No wonder the studio is struggling to fix bugs that have been corrupting savegames for over a year.
Source : EA
