Fan-made remake of The Sims Online: first launch attempt fails, but the creators are not giving up

The good news is that The Sims Online has been recreated as a fan-made modification. The bad news? Its servers went down after the first attempt to launch it.

Given its popularity, it’s a bit strange that The Sims failed twice as an MMO – once in 2002 with the release of The Sims Online, and later in 2008 with its reactivated free-to-play version called EA Lands, whose servers were shut down just several months after the launch. If, however, you liked the idea of playing The Sims with friends, you will probably be happy to hear that a fan-made remake of The Sims Online is a thing. It’s called FreeSO (Free Simulator Online), and here is its launch trailer:

FreeSO is based on The Sims Online engine and built with C# and Monogame. In order to install it you must first download the free version of the original game still available on EA’s servers and get the latest version of the mod from this place. You can find more details on the project’s official website.

Unfortunately, FreeSO’s debut on last Friday was a bit of a false start. Suprisingly, large interest around the project caused its server to go down. And while they are offline right now, it is not the end for FreeSO. Its creators admitted that they did not expect that over thousand of players would be eager to play their game on day one and promised they will rewrite the servers’ API using ASP.NET instead of less powerful Nancy. There is no telling when FreeSO will relaunch, but it is not happening very soon. The most likely scenario is a closed beta, which would allow the developers to gradually fix major issues. Keep an eye on the official blog to get the fresh news on that.