That's how it's been in the modding community surrounding The Sims series for some time now, particularly when it comes to fashion mods. The principal divide between Sims modders exists between those who prefer crisp photo-realism and those who embrace a softer and more stylized look that blends into the vanilla game (like the dress pictured above from modder Anubis Under the Sun ). But following the release of The Sims 4 this divide has only widened, and now things might be coming to a head. Here's why:

Every community has seams, and video game modding communities are no different. Each modder has their own priorities and its easy enough to see the borders that form around like-minded groups. Maybe one forum focuses more on visual mods, or a certain blog prefers to talk about systems mods. There's no harm in either. These borders don't really isolate anyone, nor do they indicate any inherent animosity between groups; in essence they just paint a line down the middle of the room, creating a superficial and generally unspoken divide.

Visual Fidelity

It has always been possible to mod The Sims. Unfortunately the original game was bumpy, blocky, low-res and low-poly because... Most things still were. It was February 2000, and you could still get excited if a game's textures were bigger than what we would consider a barely acceptable Twitter avatar resolution today. Modders had much less room to get picky about their taste in texturing simply because a lot of the visual detail necessary to distinguish one 'type' of texture from another just wasn't there.

The fork in the modding road came later with The Sims 2, when the graphics were vastly improved and the community expanded dramatically. Even today there are people clinging doggedly to The Sims 2, it was just that popular. This is also when I personally recall noticing more and more of those overly crisp photo-sourced textures, and at the time I didn't think they looked half bad. Sure it was annoying when the folds and features painted on an item did match the underlying mesh that gave it its physical structure but, you know, you overlook a lot of things when you're young. You make compromises because realism is the ideal, right? Realism is the pinnacle of virtual graphics!

It's not. Not necessarily.

The Texture of a Texture

When The Sims 3 came along, the series received a slightly less dramatic graphics bump: Not enough to win over many of those ardent Sims 2 fans, but just enough to make the resolution of the source photos many modders were still using to texture their fashions stand out in a very unappealing way. While everything else was clean and bright and modelled, photo-sourced clothing looked gritty and blurry and... Wrong. It looked wrong to me, that is. Not to everyone. It's worth mentioning that by the time The Sims 3 came out I'd been in Second Life for several years and in SL, as in many other virtual worlds at the time, the divide between photo-sourced and stylized texturing was well established. It's likely my own tastes were influenced by this. There really is no right or wrong here, just your own personal taste.

Even so, the divide in The Sims community deepened. One site in particular, The Sims Resource (also known as TSR, a fixture of The Sims fan community since the beginning), developed a reputation for hosting more photo-sourced Sims fashion than most. Many modders who preferred the softer-looking style congregated on forums, or started sharing their work on their own blogs instead.

Now here we are with The Sims 4, which took a lot of fans by surprise when it was released last year. It made a more conscious choice to lean into its stylized graphics than any game in the series had previously. They still added some modern polish with depth-of-field and other graphical bells and whistles, but they also embraced a cleaner, brighter, and slightly more cartoonish aesthetic than even The Sims 3. Even hairstyles no longer have any alphas to them, meaning that they're textured exactly as modelled without any cut-away half-invisible texturing tricks to imply individual strands of hair. If you want an idea of just how significant a shift this really is, consider that almost every single modded hairstyle for The Sims 3 uses alphas.

Choosing Sides

Plenty of people hate this, and they mod their game specifically to cut more sharp edges into this overly rounded style. Others have embraced it; photo-realism is a harsh goal to meet in any virtual setting, and a game can still look good even if it doesn't look real.

Then there are the people caught in the middle. In previous games maybe they'd sampled a little bit of everything available on the modding platter. They'd installed stylized items, photo-sourced items, whatever caught their eye. But now they have a dilemma, because the photo-sourced items look more jarringly out of place in The Sims 4's hyper-stylized world than they ever did in the previous games. If it bothers them, they're stuck with only using so-called 'Maxis Match' mods, or replacing as many assets in their game as possible with more realistic additions to make it look more cohesive.

And that's how we've arrived at this place where creating a hashtag for people to label their work as Maxis Match could lose you followers, and where the divide between two groups that have been present in The Sims's modding scene almost since its inception has become wider than ever before. That said, we're still quite early in on The Sims 4's life cycle. Time will tell if the line painted down the center of this community will fade, deepen, or even if one side will eventually overtake the other.

Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.