After Yearslong Wait, ‘The Sims 4' to Finally Add Fairies in Expansion Pack Set for July Release
One of 'The Sims 4' fans' biggest wishes has finally been granted: fairies are coming to the life-simulation game this July.
While werewolves, vampires, aliens, plant-human hybrids, mermaids, witches and wizards and more supernatural-esque characters have all been added as playable options throughout the the decade that 'The Sims 4' has been available, fairies have long been at the top of the list of demands players have had for new updates.
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'The Sims 4' to Launch 'Life and Death' Expansion Pack Featuring Grim Reaper Career, Funerals, Afterlife and Reincarnation (EXCLUSIVE)
Per 'The Sims 4' developer Electronic Arts (EA), 'In The Sims 4 Enchanted by Nature Expansion Pack, players can become one with the natural world, with Mother Nature calling them into the beautifully lush and wonderful land of Innisgreen. Whether players are experiencing a fairy new time, are interested in achieving balance with the all-new Apothecary table or experiencing an ailment—it's just the beginning of their fairytale, full of new adventures, skills and traits.'
The 'Enchanted by Nature' expansion pack will be released on July 10 across the EA app, Epic Games Store and Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S and Xbox One systems. The current retail price for 'The Sims 4' expansion packs is $39.99.
Watch the trailer for the new expansion pack, 'Enchanted by Nature,' in the video below.
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Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Inside the ‘Dragon Age' debacle that gutted EA's BioWare Studio
In early November, on the eve of the holiday shopping season, staffers at the video game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard,' and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video game publisher Electronic Arts had been under intense pressure. The studio's previous two games, 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' and 'Anthem,' had flopped, and there were rumors that if 'Dragon Age' underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA's many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new 'Dragon Age' had reached only 1.5 million players, missing the company's expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, 'EA Sports FC 25,' was also subpar, compounding the problem. As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson said, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA's share price promptly plunged 18%. ''Dragon Age' had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,' Wilson said on an earnings call. 'However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.' Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare's staff at the studio's headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard,' there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switch that muddled development and inflated the title's budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA's potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment. The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, such as 'Madden NFL,' and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released 'Dragon Age: Inquisition,' the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title won the Game of the Year award and sold 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA's diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next 'Dragon Age' installment, aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio's focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released 'Mass Effect: Andromeda,' the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft's Casey Hudson, an alumnus of BioWare's early, formative years. Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as 'Destiny' and 'Overwatch,' in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into 'Anthem,' a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whiskey. The next 'Dragon Age' sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. 'I wish that pivot had never occurred,' Darrah would later recount on YouTube. 'EA said, 'Make this a live service.' We said, 'We don't know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.'' Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of 'Dragon Age' while everyone else helped to finish 'Anthem,' which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a 'pulpy,' more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series. In February 2019, BioWare released 'Anthem.' Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare's second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of 'Dragon Age' continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would experience only once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn't die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of 'Anthem' hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building ''Anthem' with dragons.' Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game's already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare's new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next 'Dragon Age' would no longer be multiplayer. 'We were thinking, 'Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?'' McKay told Bloomberg News. 'No, we need to get back to what we're really great at.' In theory, the reversion back to the series' tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game's fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they'd be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an 'alpha' build of 'Dragon Age' to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game's biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games. But the multiplayer roots of 'Dragon Age' limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game's release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish game, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next 'Mass Effect.' For decades there'd been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the 'Dragon Age' crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the 'Mass Effect' group was called the USS Enterprise, after the 'Star Trek' ship, because commands were issued straight from the top and executed zealously. As the 'Mass Effect' directors took control, they scoffed that the 'Dragon Age' squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the 'Mass Effect' team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating 'Dragon Age' leaders who had been told they didn't have the budget for such big, ambitious swings. 'It always seemed that, when the 'Mass Effect' team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,' said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the 'Dragon Age' franchise who left before development of the new game started. 'But 'Dragon Age' always had to fight against headwinds.' Early testers and 'Mass Effect' leads complained about the game's snarky tone — a style of video game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman's vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that 'Dragon Age' could face the same outcome as 'Forspoken' — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game's dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game's poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors' strike limited the writers' ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next 'Dragon Age' seem more like 'Fortnite' than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn't know how to market the game. When 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard' finally premiered on Halloween after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game's new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered. 'The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,' said Caitie, a popular 'Dragon Age' YouTuber. 'Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.' Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is working on the next 'Mass Effect.' After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA's commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA's annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits such as 'Cyberpunk 2077,' 'Elden Ring' and 'Baldur's Gate 3.' In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. 'That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn't be totally surprised,' Creutz added. 'It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.' Schreier writes for Bloomberg.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Video: Celebrity Cruises ship nearly collides with Carnival ship
Video: Celebrity Cruises ship nearly collides with Carnival ship originally appeared on Come Cruise With Me. In recent weeks, several cruise ships have been caught off guard by unexpected high winds while docked in ports around the world. Although cruise ships have advanced propulsion systems and stabilizers designed to withstand rough seas and intense weather, they aren't completely protected from Mother Nature's multiple recent incidents, extreme winds have caused cruise ship's mooring lines to break — even ripping the heavy bollards holding ship's mooring lines right off the pier in some cases. In one such accident that was widely covered in the news, Norwegian Epic suddenly drifted from the dock in Catania, Italy on May 30, causing one passenger to fall into the water from the ship's gangway as a result. But Norwegian Epic isn't the only ship that's struggled to stay docked as winds have recently whipped through cruise ports. That same weekend, MSC Seascape broke its moorings in The Bahamas, and Holland America Westerdam's lines snapped while docked in Ketchikan, Alaska. In every case, capable cruise ship captains and crew members quickly sprang into action when their ships broke free from their moorings, keeping their passengers safe and preventing more serious accidents. As the latest weather-related cruise port incident unfolded during a sudden, unusual storm in Juneau, Alaska's Gastineau Channel on June 16, a witness caught a video of the moment Celebrity Edge went adrift, nearly colliding with another ship in the crowded Celebrity Edge began to rapidly drift from the dock, witnesses reported that its gangway fell into the water as its mooring lines snapped. The ship began to drift quickly toward Carnival Luminosa, which was anchored nearby in the channel. The captains of both ships reacted quickly, but narrowly avoided a collision. Carnival Luminosa swiftly backed up to make space for Celebrity Edge in the channel as it powered up, stabilized, and dropped anchor. Thankfully, no injuries were reported as a result of the video shows that the storm swept through the channel suddenly and dramatically, with the wind picking up first before heavy rain set in. A rare severe thunderstorm warning with wind gusts up to 60 mph and penny-sized hail was issued for the Juneau area by the National Weather Service. Thunderstorms very rarely occur in Juneau and southeast Alaska during the summer season — on average, only once every two years — making the severe weather incident even more Alaska cruises now through mid-September, Celebrity Edge is currently sailing a seven-night Alaska Dawes Glacier cruise from Seattle visiting Ketchikan, Tracy Arm Fjord, Juneau, and Skagway in Alaska as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Hailed as the most immersive ship in Alaska, Celebrity Edge features a unique outward-facing design that's ideal for glacier viewing. Celebrity Edge Series ships are specifically designed to create a closer connection between passengers and their Edge is one of three Celebrity Cruises ships sailing in Alaska this summer. The ship is joined in the region by Celebrity Solstice and Celebrity Summit, which sail from Vancouver and Seward, Alaska. Carnival Luminosa is cruising alongside Celebrity Edge through the Last Frontier this summer, sailing similar Alaska Inside Passage & Glacier itineraries from Seattle. (The Arena Group will earn a commission if you book a cruise.) , or email Amy Post at or call or text her at 386-383-2472. This story was originally reported by Come Cruise With Me on Jun 19, 2025, where it first appeared.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Ranking Top SEC QB Below Arch Manning Slammed as ‘Malpractice'
Ranking Top SEC QB Below Arch Manning Slammed as 'Malpractice' originally appeared on Athlon Sports. This year's crop of college football quarterbacks is full of a lot of talent, especially in the SEC. Between the returning talent and the potential of new starters, forming a cohesive rankings list from the available signal-callers in the SEC is no small feat. Advertisement During the "Crain & Company" podcast, the hosts of the show argued their rankings on where and why certain SEC quarterbacks appeared on their respective lists. Jake Crain came out swinging when he reacted to Blain Crain's decision to slot the Texas Longhorns' Arch Manning over the Florida Gators' DJ Lagway in his SEC QB rankings list. "I just think putting Arch above DJ Lagway is malpractice," said Jake Crain. Blain reasserted his belief that Manning could project as a top-five SEC quarterback and that he would be willing to put money on it. That comment seemed to spur Jake further. "But we've seen DJ ball. ... You may be right. I just feel like I want to go off things that I know." Advertisement Co-host David Cone interjected and asked if Manning would "go into Columbus and win in Week 1," to which Blain answered in the affirmative. Texas Longhorns quarterback Arch Diggins / Austin American-Statesman / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images Texas is on the road to start the season at the Ohio State Buckeyes on Aug. 30 at noon ET. The exercise of this podcast episode was that they were participating in draft where each host took turns selecting the top 10 SEC quarterbacks. 'Crain & Company' Top 10 SEC Quarterbacks LaNorris Sellers, South Carolina Garrett Nussmeier, LSU John Mateer, Oklahoma Arch Manning, Texas DJ Lagway, Florida Diego Pavia, Vanderbilt Marcel Reed, Texas A&M Taylen Green, Arkansas Gunner Stockton, Georgia Austin Simmons, Ole Miss Manning is taking over the Longhorns' offense after earning limited playing time in 2024 during stretches where last year's starter, Quinn Ewers, was injured. With Ewers now in the NFL and a member of the Miami Dolphins after being a seventh-round pick, the opportunity to start has opened up for Manning, along with all the hype that comes with his legendary surname. Advertisement In 10 games played with two starts last season, Manning passed for 939 yards, nine touchdowns and two interceptions. He also rushed for 108 yards and four scores. Florida's Lagway had his moments last year, too. As a true freshman, he entered the year as the Gators' backup but was the starter in Week 2 when Graham Mertz was placed in concussion protocol. Lagway would go on to pass for 1,915 yards, 12 touchdowns and nine interceptions. Lagway was On3's No. 3 player in the country and the top quarterback in its 2024 recruiting rankings. Manning was the top player in On3's 2023 recruit rankings. Related: College Football Analyst Issues Blunt Opinion on Arch Manning Related: Florida QB DJ Lagway Makes Bold Prediction Ahead of 2025 Season This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 19, 2025, where it first appeared.
