If you watched some of the early access videos from the Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle, you probably noticed that the balcony in the Pinecrest Apartment #404 was editable. It was very exciting and sparked some hope that perhaps these kinds of apartments will become a lot type and that they would be available in other worlds in the future. But that wasn’t to be.
Since the launch of The Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle expansion pack, editing the balcony in the Pinecrest Apartment isn’t possible anymore. Some builders might have thought they’re just not doing it right – or that it was some sort of glitch.
But as it turns out, this was something the Sims developers had to change before the pack launched. The early access content was created from the so-called “Alpha” version of the expansion pack. That simply means that it’s not quite the final version yet and there might still be changing.
The Pinecrest Apartment #404 balcony was an issue and the developers have revealed why they opted not to keep this as part of the expansion.
Before we get to the answer, can we all just appreciate the amazing relevance of the apartment number 404 in this case? A 404 page is rendered when content is removed from a site and can’t be found. Editing ability for the balcony… not found. Just us? OK.
Explaining the decision as to why the balcony cannot be edited, Sim Guru Paul wrote on AnswersHQ:
When we initially designed and built that apartment, we planned for the balcony to be buildable space to make up for the real-life limitation of not having a yard. We ran into some challenges along the way and we?d like to share with you what happened.
We learned during production that the tech for swapping the apartment exteriors with gameplay could not accommodate this due to complications with the apartment exterior dynamically changing with the neighborhood. The balcony also had a bug in which neighbors looking for the front door would walk through the apartment uninvited to get to the balcony and then knock on the sliding glass door. How rude! We tried a fix that enabled items to be placed on the balcony, but this resulted in more bugs:
When the town enacted the Modern Development Neighborhood Action Plan (NAP), the balcony wall did not update to match the wood paneling from the rest of the building. If you tried to fix the pattern manually, the wall did not respond predictably.
That NAP caused the window and the door to disappear erratically.
We explored and attempted multiple fixes, but when they didn?t pan out, we decided the best option was to return to a static balcony and adjust the logic for determining the front door. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused and we hope this at least gives some insight into what went into the decision.