The Sims 4: Horse Ranch Expansion Pack - Horses are coming back to The Sims on July 20th
After numerous rumors and repeatedly shattered hopes, Electronic Arts and Maxis Studios have announced a horse-themed expansion pack for The Sims 4. The Horse Ranch pack is barely a month away, releasing on July 20th 2023.
A reveal trailer released today shows Sims feeding, hugging and getting snapped at by horses, learning how to ride better, riding barrel racing and jumping obstacles. The trailer comes in a thoroughly Western aesthetic, features canyon environments and Sims making wine in wooden barrels, and showcases interactions with aggressively cute sheep and goats.
In terms of horse animation, what’s been shown so far is a bit of a mixed bag: While some of the facial expressions, equitation improvements and feeding animations are convincingly stylized horse motions, there’s also multiple oddities of bad weight distribution that’s too cartoony for the rest of the art style, in my opinion. Fortunately, I’m finding the walk, trot and canter animations quite alright at first glance.
Rigging and animating horse mouths to open correctly has repeatedly proven difficult for game creators - not this time: I really like this one.
A certain amount of cartoonish exaggeration is of course to be expected from a Sims game, but stylization is always most effective when it is grounded in realistic motion. I can therefore forgive the bent back and neck here, but not the fact that the legs are way too far out behind.
This horse in an official screenshot unfortunately suffers from a bad case of giraffe neck, and an unrecognizable coat color and pattern.
Fitting with the Western aesthetic, all of the horses shown in the trailer appear to be wearing Western saddles, including correct back cinches and breast collars. Noticeably absent for now are not only English style saddles (edit: not quite! going through frame by frame actually shows one glimpse of an English saddle!), but also any sort of bit. I consider that a deliberate choice rather that an oversight, since the design of riding halters and bitless bridles we see look roughly correct and functional, and the horses can obviously use their mouths for neighing and eating.
If something isn’t included just now, that doesn’t mean we’ll never see it though:
When The Sims 3: Pets was released in 2011, a massive community of equestrian-focused modders grew up around it. Not only were players creating and sharing every visual upgrade imaginable, passionate players went as far as roleplaying as stud farms and passing game files around to breed each others’ horses. In some cases, the motivation was not even to play with the resulting horses but to take ever prettier screenshots of them modified and posed so far beyond what the base game offered that the actual gameplay of The Sims became an afterthought. It’s a fascinating topic that I had completely missed back in its glory days and would love to do a proper deep dive into some day.
In the years since, after the release of basic The Sims 4 in 2014 and its many expansion packs since, the Sims equestrian community has grown quieter. I for one am excited to see how many of them will come out of the woodworks to dive once again into equestrian modding shenanigans. And of course, to try The Sims 4 and its Horse Ranch expansion myself.