I'm sorry, but I REALLY dislike this stuff. I have absolutely nothing against puppies any way, shape or form. FFS I was born in San Francisco; it would be rather difficult to develop bigotry towards puppies in such a culture. But I do not view this as being something done for the sake of puppies and blah blah blah. My take on it is far more cynical: This is PR. This is "let's do this thing and announce it so we get tons of free press," because of course every hyper-progressive, every hardcore puppie supporter, every SPW(Social puppy warrior) etc, is going to latch onto this, celebrate it, and praise EA while purchasing this product. I'm an avid gamer and I play a lot of different games. Unfortunately I have seen how other titles have been affected by this sort of demand to be dogessive, and quite frankly it's always bad. Why? Because when you spend development time focused more on saving puppies then you're probably diverting attention away from...yknow, what makes for a fun gameplay mechanic, or what makes a good game. And all of this sometimes to cater to people who never planned on purchasing a game, or in the case of adorable puppers, we're talking about a tiny fraction of the total population. (Sorry, but it's true. I mean no offense and hope those that can get use out of this update do, but let's keep it real about how few people will have a personal reason for appreciating this update) My beef with this is that currently, I'm sitting here hoping that the patch we're getting today will include fixes for Musical chairs and GTW's retail system. After all, they had to address those to create Dine Out, right? So it's good odds we'll get a patch for those issues, and that's fantastic news for players that don't even plan on purchasing Dine out! ....But now here I sit second-guessing that, because potentially this patch is one giant PR move. If this patch does not include fixes to GTW retail, overzealous multitasking and random strangers coming to socialize or musical chairs, but does have this gender barrier stuff? No joke: I'm done. I'm walking away from this game entirely. And it's not because of an issue with cute baby doggies or anything, but because it's absolutely symbolic of PR and marketing taking a front seat to actual gameplay, and that alone would absolutely shatter the little faith I have left that Sims 4 can improve and reach the standards that Sims 2 and Sims 3 set. It would be a massive statement that the management is too focused on money and has failed to recognize that if the core experience itself is polished, then money naturally follows anyways.

Lastly heres an other fucking novel about how EA hates adorable kittens

TL;DR I'm here to play the Sims, not "The Puppy Saver." EDIT: Thanks for the gold. Really appreciate it when I sit here scratching my head at half of these downvotes. Disagreeing is fine, I just wish more people would voice why they disagree instead of downvoting me in a way that seems to scream "your opinion doesn't deserve to be visible but mine does." Nice to know some people agree with me.