Codenamed Project Rene, Maxis officially announcedThe Sims 5last October. Unfortunately, the game is still many years out, though developers promised that there would be an early access period ahead of its full launch. Still, with no release date or even a complete list of new and returning features, fans will have to wait for quite some time beforeThe Sims 5releases.
WhileThe Simshave always let players create custom families, they have also featured a variety of preset households for players to manage their lives.Bringing some of these families back inThe Sims 5might be a fun treat for series veterans, especially if Maxis can expand upon or refine their roles in various ways. One of the original game’s more interesting, if a bit disturbing, families is the Agent household introduced by a DLC for the original game.
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The Sims' Agent Household
2000’sThe Simshad several small DLCs available directly from the game’s official website. Among them was “The White House,” a large two-story residence with some resemblance to the real building of the same name. Six unrelated adult Sims inhabit it with the names CIA Agent, INS Agent, ATF Agent, NSA Agent, FBI Agent, and Intern Agent. The first five start with medium to high-level positions in the Life of Crime, Business, Military, Politics, and Law Enforcement Career Tracks respectively, while the Intern starts at the bottom of the Politics Career Track. All the Agents except for the Intern also start with levels in various Skills.
The Simsnever provided a backstory for the Agent household, though fans can pick up the gist of it from context clues. The Agents are operatives from their respective agencies, with their progress in the different career tracks presumably representing either cover identities or the game’s closest approximation to their government work. These secret agent Sims likely moved in to monitor the neighborhood, though the specifics are up to the player’s imagination.
The Agents haven’t been a preset household since the original game, butthe “family” might be ready to return inThe Sims 5. The new game has an opportunity to build upon the Agents' unused potential. While gameplay limitations prevented Sims players from really getting in on some surveillance state shenanigans, the new game has an opportunity to expand on this aspect. PerhapsThe Sims 5’s version of The White House starts with some interactive objects that let the agents spy on their neighbors to collect information. It might even add options for the Agents to mess with other Sims in various ways.
This beingThe Sims, it would not be out of place for Maxis to insert a fair bit of comedy into the Agents' activities. Six obvious government agents pretending to be one extended family is good comedic material. Additionally, a group of presumably undercover Agents living in the most conspicuous house in the neighborhood also seems like an incredible canvas on which to paint a bit of visual comedy. PerhapsThe Sims5 could lean into this by decorating the house with poorly-disguised satellite dishes or similar things.
Any new Objects, Careers, and features wouldn’t need to be unique to one preset household. After all,The Sims 4already had a Secret Agent Career Trackwith its own set of Objects and Interactions. Presumably, most or all of the Agents would have started somewhere along that Career Track, had Maxis included them inThe Sims 4.The Sims 5version of the Agents could give players a head-start down that path while playing up the slightly uncomfortable surveillance state aspect that had always been in the subtext of the original DLC.
