Alleged Sims 5 Leak Has Fans Worried

A recently emerged The Sims 5 leak has raised questions among the fandom about what Electronic Arts and Maxis have in store for the game. Among other things, some fans are concerned about the art style and general direction of the next entry in The Sims franchise.

EA officially announced the fifth mainline The Sims game as Project Rene in October 2022. Aside from that codename, the occasion also saw the company share a few glimpses of furniture customization from an alpha build of the game. While not much else has been officially revealed ever since, Project Rene, tentatively dubbed The Sims 5, has been the subject of multiple leaks over the past 18 months. That's ostensibly because Maxis has been playtesting it in closed alpha throughout this period, thus widening the pool of potential leakers.

The latest such unofficial look at the game arrived in the form of a cropped screenshot (which could be taken down at any moment with a copyright claim) that started making the rounds on social media in March. The image features a two-person portrait that's said to be present in The Sims 5. Although the picture is clearly not rendered in real time and instead appears to be some kind of auxiliary artwork, a vocal section of the series' fandom has already taken issue with the fact that the two characters depicted in it are heavily stylized. Those fans are all hoping that The Sims 5 will have a more realistic art style, but the cartooney portraits featured in the new leak seem to point in the opposite direction.

The discussion emerging from this leak saw some fans speculate that the heavily exaggerated character features seen in the screenshot could be the result of The Sims 5 being a multi-platform title meant to run on everything from mobile devices to PC and consoles. EA already confirmed as much back in 2022, having even showcased some footage of furniture customization on a smartphone in order to substantiate its claim that the game will play the same across all devices.

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