World Systems
Llamas don’t like loading screens either
When discussing the future of life simulation games, one of the first design questions isn’t traits, aspirations, or careers. It’s the world itself. How do players actually move through space? How do neighborhoods connect? How do you expand the map as years of DLC stack on top of the base game?
The Sims 3 worlds overview
The Sims 3 gave us the series’s first open world, and at the time, it felt groundbreaking. You could drive to the park, run into your neighbor’s house, or bike to the gym; you could live in an integrated space. But it came with serious limitations. Each world was sealed off from the others. If your household lived in Bridgeport, you could never just pop over to Moonlight Falls for lunch. You could travel to destinations like Shang Simla, but only as a side trip. And even then, your sims from Bridgeport would never show up there if you’re traveling from Sunset Valley. The result was that your sim’s universe always felt siloed — every save file was a self-contained bubble.
Customization was another sticking point. Sunset Valley looked great at launch, but as more expansions added new venues, lot types, and systems, retrofitting them into the map was a pain. Trying to squeeze an empty lot onto Sunset Valley’s roads felt clunky, and over time, the world aged poorly as a “forever save.” Yes, you could move on to a custom or new world, but that meant leaving behind your history in Sunset Valley.
The other Sims worlds overview
The Sims 4 regressed to the Sims 1 and Sims 2 experience. Gone was the open world, replaced with small, disconnected neighborhoods full of loading screens. And yet, it introduced one thing The Sims 3 never managed: the ability to travel freely across worlds. You could live in Oasis Springs and hop to San Myshuno for dinner, then spend the weekend with your sim’s sister in Del Sol Valley. That kind of cross-world freedom was liberating but came at the cost of immersion.
The promise of “lively neighborhoods” never really materialized, and instead, players got smaller, static areas stitched together with loading screens.
The world problem in a nutshell
The Sims 3 nailed immersion but locked every save into its own walled-off experience. The Sims 4 lets you hop across worlds endlessly, but the worlds themselves are tiny, shallow, and boxed in.
For Project Llama, we need a better answer. The goal is an open world experience — not just inside one neighborhood, but across an expanding library of worlds that can grow with DLC. That means designing a system that keeps neighborhoods lively and customizable, allows cross-world travel without breaking immersion, and still works as the map expands over time.
For now, I want to take technical limitations off the table. Open worlds have been the industry standard for decades, from Zelda to GTA. The harder question isn’t “is it possible?” — it’s “what’s the right design for the next iterations of the Sims?”
Looking at other games for inspiration
Since I don’t have the perfect solution yet, I’ve been looking at how other games handle worlds, travel, and scale. No other franchise works quite like Sims, but there are lessons to embrace and pitfalls to avoid.
Zelda (Twilight Princess, Breath of the Wild)
Zelda games are masters of making regions feel distinct but connected. Twilight Princess, for example, lets you walk around villages, ride horses across open plains, and then funnels you through natural choke points like mountain passes or canyons to reach the next area without obvious loading screens. Breath of the Wild took it further with a continuous open map, but still leaned on layered travel speeds: walking for short hops, horses for mid-range, and fast travel shrines for long distances. What Project Llama could borrow here is the layered approach to movement. Not every trip should feel the same — walking down the street should be seamless. At the same time, a weekend getaway could justify a quick animation or travel transition.
The Assassin’s Creed Series
In the Assassin’s Creed games, especially the Ezio trilogy, cities like Venice feel truly connected and immersive. You can wander on foot through its alleys, climb rooftops, or hop into a gondola to cross canals — all with no loading screens. The games also include fast travel stations where you can pay a small fee to teleport from one district of Venice to another, or even to another city altogether, like Florence or Monteriggioni. However, you can still go on foot or ride a horse to travel between those cities for a more scenic, slower journey.
Later entries added even more options, from ships in Black Flag to trains in Syndicate. The core idea stays the same: seamless within a district, quick transitions between districts, and multiple travel options depending on distance. That’s a blueprint Project Llama could learn from: each world or cluster could be traversed naturally, but with built-in shortcuts so travel never becomes a chore.
Animal Crossing (New Horizons) and Stardew Valley
Animal Crossing’s island is small, but it nails the feeling of one cohesive space. You get a brief fade-to-black transition when you enter a villager’s house or the museum. It’s quick enough not to be annoying, and in the rhythm of that game, it almost feels natural — like taking a little pause between outdoor play and indoor scenes. Traveling to a mystery island takes longer, but it’s framed as a special excursion, so the transition doesn’t break the experience.
Stardew Valley uses a similar trick, though with more frequent breaks. The valley is divided into distinct areas — the farm, Pelican Town, the mines, the desert — and moving between them often means a one-second black transition. They’re fast, but they still fragment the world. Over time, you start to notice how frequently you’re stepping through those invisible doors, and it reminds you that the valley isn’t one continuous place but a set of stitched-together screens.
For Project Llama, neither of these approaches feels like the right fit. If transitions are so short they barely register, they’re unnecessary — the way Sims 3 lets go of them with open worlds. When transitions are frequent, like in Stardew Valley, they risk turning daily life into a chain of micro-pauses that break immersion. That’s why these games are useful mostly as reminders: small can feel alive, and stitched-together areas can work, but the transitions have to be handled differently for a life simulation that’s about fluid, everyday movement.
One thing New Horizons does especially well is hosting visitors. Friends can fly to your island, wander your spaces, and interact with what you’ve built. It’s simple, but well-designed because it makes the world feel communal.
GTA and Skyrim
Both GTA and Skyrim lean hard into scale. Los Santos in GTA V is sprawling — highways, hills, downtown districts, and beaches all stitched into one massive map. Skyrim does the same with its open province: snowy mountains, swamps, villages, and dungeons you can hike across on foot. And both games make it possible to traverse those spaces in two ways: immersively (drive a car, ride a horse, hike a mountain) or efficiently (fast travel to a chosen point).
The key takeaway for Project Llama is the layered choice. You don’t always have to sit through the long drive; you can decide whether to experience the journey or skip it. That flexibility is powerful.
But there are also clear limits here. GTA’s scale can feel vast to the point of emptiness — miles of streets and buildings you can’t actually enter, all serving as set dressing. (It’s what makes the Sims 4 feel so empty, too.)
Such a vast world works for a crime sandbox, but it doesn’t match what a life simulation game is about. Project Llama doesn’t need dozens of square miles of highways or unplayable buildings. It needs neighborhoods, restaurants, parks, and friends’ houses — the kinds of places your sims actually live in and interact with. A giant world might look impressive but risks diluting what makes the genre fun.
There’s also the expansion problem. You can design a massive world up front, but it’s hard to expand without breaking it once it’s built. GTA and Skyrim don’t face that challenge because they launch with a fixed map. Project Llama, by contrast, should grow over time with expansions. We’re not aiming for over 100 DLCs, but it’s unlikely we can get everything we want out of the game in a single base game either. That makes it dangerous to commit to a single large world.
So while GTA and Skyrim prove that open worlds can feel alive, the lesson here is restraint. Project Llama doesn’t need vast empty set dressings but right-sized worlds — big enough to feel lived in, small enough to stay manageable, and expandable enough to keep evolving.
Differences in gameplay
In games like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or GTA, you’re essentially inhabiting or directly steering a single character. Even if it’s not first-person, the design is about you moving through the world as them. That’s why short transitions or stitched-together screens work — they’re part of your personal journey through that space.
The Sims gameplay is different. You’re watching them almost like a stage play, not embodying them like an avatar. It’s not about “being” your sim in that way — it’s about puppeteering multiple Sims and managing their lives, households, and routines. That shift from character-driven immersion to management-driven puppetry changes what feels acceptable. Every time you leave the lot, a one-second fade isn’t just a pause in your adventure; it’s a constant interruption in the flow of household life.
So while Animal Crossing or Stardew can get away with “lots of small transitions” because their gameplay loop is about focused tasks and personal routines, The Sims needs something smoother and more continuous. It’s about orchestrating overlapping stories, not just ticking off objectives for one character. That’s why Project Llama has to aim higher than those transition models — what feels natural there would feel choppy here.
Questions for you as you read on
Before I explore the possible world concepts, I want to ask you a few questions. These are the things I keep circling back to, and I’d love for you to be thinking about them as you read on.
1. How big should an open world be?
To put it in perspective:
- Something tiny like Foundry Cove neighborhood from Willow Creek or Forgotten Hollow with 5 lots?
- A smaller world with 15–20 lots, as if Sulani (12 lots), Evergreen Harbor (15 lots), or Oasis Springs (21 lots) were their own open worlds?
- A larger open world, such as Belladonna Cove (49 lots) or Champs Les Sims (58 lots)?
- Or something sprawling like Sunset Valley (92 lots) or even Starlight Shores (120 lots)?
2. How do you feel about transitions between distinct worlds?
Transitions are unavoidable if Project Llama expands over time. Without them, we risk falling into The Sims 3 problem — where each save file was locked to a single world. The real question is: what kinds of transitions are you comfortable with?
- A quick taxi or bus animation between neighbourhoods — think going from Willow Creek’s Foundry Cove to Pendula View?
- A ferry ride between islands — going from one beach town to another, like Sulani to Tartosa?
- A plane trip to far-off destination worlds — think going to Selvadorada or Shang Simla from your home lot?
- Or, should we aim to minimize transitions as much as possible, even if that limits how expansions connect?
3. Do you prefer a “safe compromise” or a bolder system?
The safe compromise is obvious: Project Llama could combine larger open worlds like those from The Sims 3 with The Sims 4 cross-world travel. That would give immersion and flexibility. The question isn’t if we should combine these concepts, but how best to do so.
Don’t worry about technical limitations; I’m curious about your ideal experience. I want to make it clear that I’m imagining Project Llama to ship with various lot types, including mixed zoning, so you could have a bakery below an apartment.
Concepts on the table
I’ve narrowed things down to three main concepts: Tiles, Clusters, and a Growing World Landscape. Each one tackles the balance between openness, flexibility, and immersion differently. However, I’m curious if there’s a fourth path I haven’t considered yet — another structure for worlds that could make even more sense for Project Llama.
Concept 1: Tile-based worlds
This idea was inspired directly by the fan-made maps that stitch together every Sims 4 world into one giant landscape by the likes of strangest_sea and mysimsloveaffair.
Instead of full cities, each tile would represent a neighborhood — but larger than the tiny chunks we get in Sims 4. Think 10–20 lots per tile, enough space for homes, a park, a handful of venues, maybe even a school or workplace. Don’t forget that mixed zone lot types will make the smaller lot count feel more efficient and interesting. Inside a tile, travel is seamless; you only see a transition when moving between tiles, not within one. You could arrange the tiles however you want and get various transitions, such as adjacent tiles could show a short bus/car/bike hop; distant tiles could use a ferry or plane. You wouldn’t have to bunny hop from tile A to tile B to get to tile C. There’s a large world view for direct jump, similar to the Sims 4. (For what it’s worth, I’d rather there was no transition between tiles either, but I’m having a hard time conceptualizing this. Speak up if you can, though!)
Tiles are meant to be modular and customizable. Beyond the pre-made ones, players can drop in their own from a small set of layouts (urban, suburban, rural, mixed-use, island, hillside, grid, etc.). Each layout defines the basic roads and lot placements, but you can adjust terrain (flat, hilly, coastal), set the background environment (mountains, ocean, skyline), and apply a decorative theme that auto-populates details like fences, streetlights, or benches. You can also duplicate tiles; if you love a particular layout, add a second or third instance. Think of this as a better version of “blank worlds”: start with a few solid tiles, then expand with more as you like (within a sensible cap). That makes this system highly customizable within the game.
Larger DLCs, like expansion packs in a tile-based system, would likely add multiple tiles simultaneously — say, two or three new pre-designed ones per expansion pack. Additionally, officially selling single tiles might be too granular; this makes them ideal for custom content. Custom content creators could design and share their own tiles, much like how modders created custom worlds for The Sims 3. I’d also like to find out if it’s feasible for players to share their creations on a gallery-like system, making sharing and downloading tiles even easier. (It might be a big item to share in-game, that’s all.) Regardless, this approach allows for a continuous stream of new, unique neighborhoods driven by the community, offering a huge variety for players.
Another advantage of tiles is how naturally they lend themselves to multiplayer. Because each tile is a self-contained neighborhood, it would be easy to designate one as a shared space for online play — a place where friends can drop in, visit your sims, or hang out, much like Animal Crossing: New Horizons allows players to host their islands. This makes tiles the most straightforward option for experimenting with social or multiplayer features without disrupting the rest of your world or sharing the whole save file online at once.
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Pros:
- Larger than Sims 4 neighborhoods, with enough lots to feel self-sufficient.
- Modular and expandable — easy to add DLC or custom tiles without breaking the system.
- Missing DLC doesn’t feel like a hole; it just doesn’t appear on your map.
- Mixed zoning would make 10–20 lots feel fuller.
- Expansions could add multiple tiles at once, keeping growth incremental and flexible.
- Perfect size for designated multiplayer zones similar to ACNH.
Cons:
- It still involves transitions between tiles as it is not a continuous world.
- Gameplay styles that rely on wide exploration (police patrols, foraging, scavenger hunts) could feel clunky with too many transitions.
- Single-tile DLC might feel too granular unless bundled — variety would rely more on expansions or free community content.
The appeal here is flexibility. If a tile is designed well, it can stand alone as a self-contained neighborhood, so you’re less likely to leave it if you don’t want to. But if your playstyle is more about exploration, the number of transitions might start to feel like friction. The trade-off is a larger number of customizable, smaller neighborhoods with more transitions.
Concept 2: Clusters as pre-made towns
If tiles are about modular neighborhoods, clusters lean more toward self-sustaining towns. Each cluster would be a medium-sized open world with around 30 to 50 lots, large enough to hold multiple districts like a quiet suburb, a denser downtown strip, a waterfront with restaurants, or a rural edge with farms. Movement within a cluster is seamless — with no transitions. You only see a transition when moving from one cluster to another via a world map for easy jumping.
Because a cluster is bigger and more complex, you couldn’t customize it as easily or extensively as the tiles within the game itself. While you can still build, replace, and decorate individual lots, you won’t be able to rearrange the core structure of the town, like roads or whole lot layouts. This isn’t a limitation; it’s a design trade-off. By creating a more curated and fixed world for you, you get a larger, fuller experience from the game.
Creating a custom cluster would also be a heavier lift than creating a tile; however, hands-on customization of the world itself would happen outside the game in a designated toolkit, similar to the “Create a World” tool from The Sims 3.
With this concept, an expansion would typically add one new cluster at a time, since each is large enough to feel like a full world. They won’t be as large as the worlds in The Sims 3, making them more manageable and inviting players to explore other towns. That’s the balance we’re trying to find here.
Who are tiles and clusters for?
Tiles are for players who want to zoom in on the neighborhood fantasy that The Sims 4 never actually delivered. They’re about tinkering, customizing, and building your own pocket of the world. If you love curating a walkable neighborhood with just enough lots to feel alive — and even dropping in your own custom tiles — this model gives you that freedom.
Meanwhile, clusters are designed for players who want the experience of exploring multiple distinct, self-contained towns. They’re closer to what The Sims 4 should have been: self-sufficient, medium-sized open worlds where your sims can live, work, and play without constant transitions. They’re less about endless customization and more about immersion — walking through a town that feels designed, balanced, and complete, with room for every kind of venue and district.
Together, they represent two playstyles:
Tiles = the experimental builder, the neighborhood curator, the player who loves flexibility and easy variety.
Clusters = the storyteller, the town-dweller, the player who wants one world to feel like home.
Pros:
- Large enough to feel like full towns with multiple districts and identities
- Seamless inside the cluster; transitions only at the borders
- Transit links feel natural and grounded (bus, train, ferry, airport)
- Expansions add new clusters outward without siloing saves, like Sims 3 did
- Fewer interruptions than tiles, so you can stay in one place for longer stretches of gameplay
Cons:
- Less modular than tiles, harder to customize or rearrange layouts
- The edges between clusters would need careful design to avoid feeling artificial
- Over time, adding too many clusters could make the world map feel unwieldy
- Custom clusters would be heavier for players to create and share compared to individual tiles
Concept 3: Growing World Landscape
This idea borrows from games like Assassin’s Creed, GTA, and The Legend of Zelda, which all handle geography in ways that make movement feel natural and immersive. Instead of giving players one giant map upfront, Project Llama could launch with a smaller set of regions and then expand outward over time. Each new map expansion wouldn’t drop in a disconnected “bubble world” like in The Sims 4 or isolated worlds like in The Sims 3, but instead would add new land to the edges of what already exists. Because the geography has to stay coherent, this approach leaves the least room for customization. Players can still build and edit lots, but reshaping the world or creating custom regions would be much harder for both players and content creators compared to tiles or clusters.
There’s actually precedent for this in The Sims series. In The Sims 1, the Unleashed expansion added a whole new stretch of countryside to the base neighborhood. For the first time, the map itself grew outward into new terrain. The Growing World idea works similarly, but instead of feeling bolted-on, each addition would be designed as part of a continuous geography.
So why does natural geography matter in a Sims game, when Sims aren’t traveling across massive landscapes like in GTA or Zelda? Because geography anchors immersion. Even if you don’t actively walk from point A to point B, the sense that your Sim lives in a place that makes sense — where the beach connects to the coastline, mountains rise at the edges of the valley, and the big city grows naturally out of the suburbs — makes the world feel believable.
In Sims 4, worlds are disconnected bubbles; you leave Willow Creek and suddenly find yourself in a desert, then a tropical island, then a snowy mountain, all without logic tying them together. By contrast, a growing world landscape would feel like a real region, where expansions slot into an existing geography.
Think of the second Assassin’s Creed, where Venice flows into the countryside, and the countryside flows into Florence, each connected by roads, rivers, or checkpoints. Or GTA, where you can drive seamlessly across the city and fast-travel when you don’t want to trek. Or Zelda, where regions are distinct (a desert, a mountain, a village) but stitched into one living landscape, connected through paths, passes, and terrain that makes sense.
Project Llama could work the same way. The base game might start with a suburban town and a nearby city. A farming pack could add a rural valley to the outskirts. A tropical expansion could place islands offshore, reachable by boat. A snowy update could extend the map north into a mountain range with ski lodges. Over the years, the landscape would grow into a larger, more cohesive world that feels alive rather than pieced together. Exactly how EmilyJayneDraws conceptualized the collective Sims 4 worlds.
Transitions would still exist, but they’d feel embedded in geography, not abstract loading screens. They would be more similar to transitions in Zelda. A world map view would still let you skip directly to where you want to go if you don’t want to “follow the journey” every time.
Pros:
- Geography feels immersive and cohesive, inspired by Assassin’s Creed, GTA, Zelda, and even The Sims 1’s Unleashed expansion
- Each expansion grows the same world instead of creating disconnected bubbles
- Natural travel options (roads, ferries, mountain passes) help transitions feel grounded
- Over time, creates the sense of one big, living landscape that expands with the game
Cons:
- Requires long-term planning to avoid pigeonholing (e.g., filling the coastline before deciding to add tropical islands)
- Less flexible for last-minute creative ideas that don’t fit the established geography
- Expansions would need to be carefully staged so the landscape grows logically, which could constrain design freedom
- Risk of overwhelming the map as more and more regions are added over the years
- You’d still have full control over lots and their placement, but the larger geography would be locked to what Project Llama designs, leaving limited space for custom regions or player-made” worlds.
How this differs from Tiles and Clusters:
The Growing World Landscape concept sits on the other end of the spectrum. Instead of modules or towns, it treats the whole map as one continuous geography that expands outward over time. Each new pack doesn’t add another module or town, but extends the edges of the same world. This creates the strongest sense of cohesion — everything belongs to the same place — but at the cost of flexibility. Unlike tiles or clusters, once you’ve committed to a coastline, a desert, or a mountain range, you’ve defined the map in a way that’s hard to change later.
Personally, I’m not convinced this is the right approach for the type of sims game we’re used to playing.
In short:
- Tiles = flexibility and modularity
- Clusters = immersion and self-contained towns
- Growing World = cohesion and continuity across one evolving landscape
Closing thoughts
This decision shapes the entire foundation of Project Llama. Whether we go modular with tiles, more immersive with clusters, or ambitious with a growing landscape, the choice will determine how every expansion, every save, and every story fits together. It’s not a small call to make.
I don’t have the final answer — and maybe I’m not even seeing all the possibilities yet. Game design has evolved so much, and there are surely models I haven’t thought of. That’s where you come in.
So the question goes back to you: what kind of world system would you want to live in? Something modular and flexible? A handcrafted town that feels whole on its own? Or one vast landscape that grows with time?
