EA has reportedly begun sending emails inviting players to a Sims 5 playtest, and these messages mention that the game, currently called Project Rene, will feature apartments.
"This playtest will focus primarily on our new object customization tool currently called Workshop." This tool is meant to help you customize objects to decorate an apartment," EA's message says, as noted by Sims Community. "We encourage you to share your creations as well as download what other players have made. And to experience everything this playtest has to offer, remember that you can play with your friends!"
We might actually have seen this exact bit of content in the Project Rene trailer during the Behind The Sims Summit stream. The brief gameplay demo showed a player decorating what sure looks like a set of apartments, connected by a sparse hallway. The catch here, of course, is that these apartments could exist purely as a way of demonstrating the new build mode rather than an actual gameplay feature, but given The Sims' sketchy history with apartments, it's unlikely that the developers would play so loose with the word.
Word of the playtest, which is apparently set to begin on October 25, began to circulate over the weekend when Insider Gaming posted a copy of the email. The message notes that "this early experience is only one aspect of what Project Rene will grow to be," so you probably shouldn't expect to be able to check out too much beyond that Workshop tool.
It's unclear how widely the playtest will be distributed, though it looks like invited players will be "eligible to invite up to three friends to sign up."
Apartments have typically been added in expansion packs for past Sims games, though their function has varied greatly from game to game. Expansions for Sims 2 and 4, for example, add landlords, rent payments, and the option for multiple households to live in the same apartment complex. In The Sims 3, apartments are effectively just a slightly differentiated veneer over a standard house lot.
EA has acknowledged that the Behind The Sims Summit "did not fairly represent our vast community of players."
