It’s fun to watch little computer versions of yourself do things that the real you might never get to do, like meeting a ghost or falling in love or dying in a house fire. It’s a game about playing with dolls, at the end of the day, but then again so is Mass Effect.
Taking shape
The effectiveness of any attempt to remake the real world starts and ends with The Sims’ building tools. They’ve always been detailed, and dedicated players have always been able to achieve impressive things with them, but they’ve never been perfect.
Trying to make yourself or your house with any accuracy has always been a trial-and-error affair. Having now had an hour to tinker with The Sims 4’s rebuilt toolset, I’m very impressed with the number of these trials that Maxis has done away with—and, in particular, with how much easier it is to recreate familiar faces and places.
Character creation is based on a single, intuitive—but fairly deep—“molding” system, where you tweak your Sim’s appearance by clicking and tugging on various parts of their body. You don’t need to use sliders to define the type of nose you’re looking for: you just zoom in, grab and manipulate until you’ve achieved the look you want.
The number of tweakable areas is impressive, extending as far as eyelids and the exact orientation of a person’s ears. The only strict limitation is character height—every Sim in a given age bracket is approximately the same size, a restriction imposed by the animation system.
This freeform method is supported by an extensive range of presets, filters and randomisation settings. You can, for example, pick a particular pair of eyes you like from a menu and then fiddle with them until they meet your specifications. Then, you can “lock” particular parts of your appearance and randomize the rest, in which case the game will do its best to pick complementary body shapes and coherent fashions.
If you’re struggling to pick an outfit, the developers will be providing a rotating selection of pre-designed and color-coordinated styles for you to pick from, with new options streaming into your game if you’re playing online. The only sliders you’ll need to adjust affect your Sim’s weight and musculature, variables that will also be affected by the activities you choose to pursue in the game itself.
These don’t just change the dimensions of your character, but the textures they’re actually drawn with—a fitnesscrazed Sim will look more muscular than an otherwise-healthy Sim of the same shape who doesn’t work out, for example.
I appreciated the new sorting filters; you can filter the catalog by style and color. Pick “red,” for example, and the game will display every piece of clothing with red in it—from dinner jackets to argyle sweaters. This system is also used when you’re picking wallpaper and flooring options. Across the board, it’s much easier to pull together a look that you’re happy with.
Once you’ve created a single Sim in a household, it’s now possible to genetically derive their relatives. You can do this up or down the family tree. Unlike The Sims 3, where you could only derive children from their parents, you can now derive parents from children and brothers from sisters and so on. The day I visited Maxis also happened to be my father’s birthday, so having created a passable version of myself I decided to see if I could get the game to randomly generate my dad with any accuracy. Take a look at “Family Affair” to see how well that went.
The new building tools are similarly efficient. While they resemble the old set on the surface—you’re still “painting” walls and floorplans onto a grid-based lot—it’s far easier to correct mistakes and have the game intelligently work around what you’re trying to achieve.
In The Sims 3, trying to recreate a building you knew well meant carefully figuring out the scale in advance. The grid-based structure has always made it tricky to recreate the fiddly details of modern houses—particularly smaller ones—and that sometimes meant compensating with larger spaces that could end up throwing out the proportions of familiar places.
A single overlong corridor could ruin the structure of an entire house, necessitating a total rebuild. This isn’t the case any more. While trying to construct my own house, I made plenty of mistakes—but every time it was possible to drag and rearrange rooms on the fly, with furniture automatically moving out of the way to account for the changes.
The game now recognizes rooms as distinct entities, enabling you to pull a bedroom out of your house, adjust it, and plug it back in somewhere else. You can also adjust wall height, arrange windows at different vertical alignments, and tweak the angle and styles of rooftops to a substantial degree.
I was able to pull together a good facsimile of my own house in about half an hour, and I imagine experienced Sims players will be able to achieve much more impressive feats than they have before. You’ll get to play with some of that talent, too. Online sharing of Sims, houses and rooms is now integrated into the game proper, enabling players with an internet connection to upload their own designs and download ideas from other people.
You can also store local copies of anything you’ve made for later use, which is both a handy convenience feature and a sign that Maxis have learned important lessons regarding players who want to play without an
internet connection.
Little pleasing details stand out. Sims now intelligently follow routes you lay out for them in outdoor areas and gardens—previously, laying out a scenic garden path was a cosmetic choice, something that the AI would ignore in favor of trampling over your lawn. Now, they’re aware enough of their surroundings to take the route that you intend. This might seem like a small thing, but it’s stuff like this that really makes The Sims’ core fantasy work.
Small town values
The houses you build will occupy plots in one of several neighborhoods, each with a different purpose. At first, this seems a bit like a technological step backward. The Sims 3 took place on large, openworld maps, with scattered residential areas and large central commercial districts for Sims to visit. Now, you’ll live in one area and use a menu-driven fast travel system to warp to others.
Technology is part of the reason, but the thinking behind the change is also grounded in The Sims 4’s specific mechanics. “We’re focusing on Sim to Sim interactions,” says executive producer Rachel Franklin. By driving more Sims into denser areas, interesting events are more likely to occur—the AI has more material to work with, essentially.
“We’re trying to focus players on what is going on around them,” says producer Ryan Vaughan, “on what the simulation is driving. Giving the player opportunity and space.” You’ll be able to decide which buildings appear in each neighborhood, so if you want to repurpose a museum into a home then that will be an option. Franklin likes the ideas of players reclaiming commercial spaces. “It reminds me of people’s homes,” she says. ‘Oh, this used to be a brewery!’
After you’ve laid out how your Sims will look, you’re tasked with figuring out how they’re going to act. Ambitions and traits both return from The Sims 3, but they’ve been reworked to play into the new game’s emotion system. Previously, ambitions acted as general endgame goals while traits tweaked the types of things that would fulfill or exacerbate a Sim’s needs. One of The Sims 4’s most interesting ideas is the notion of making this system less binary—making the game less about making everybody happy and more about toying with the positive and negative effects that can be derived from the entire span of the emotional spectrum.
In The Sims 4, ambitions are fairly fluid: they’ll still earn you a lot of happiness when you complete one, but you can swap them in and out at any time. Much as I no longer really believe that one day I am going to be Batman, the things that drive Sims as children don’t necessarily carry over into adulthood.
Choosing an ambition at character creation is the first part of a series of choices that defines a Sim’s personality. That initial ambition grants a unique trait—an aspiring writer might be bookish, for example, meaning that they get more satisfaction out of reading than another Sim might.
Then, you pick three further traits according to your preferences. You might try to construct the perfect Sim for the ambition you’re targeting—like a wannabe master chef who is also a neat, fastidious foodie—or try to chase reality by picking contradictory drives. Many of the traits themselves will be familiar to Sims 3 players, but a few are new.
I liked “noncommittal,” a trait that means that Sims get less out of long-term relationships but are also less distressed by breakups. I’d previously attempted to achieve something similar in The Sims 3 by picking “loner,” but they’re not the same, really, are they? Ask anybody.
Food fight
Traits are key to solving a problem I anticipated when I was first shown the emotion system last year. At the time, I was worried that despite the variety of emotional responses on offer, Sims would be essentially similar in their preferences—that the world would be built of absolute emotional correlations.
Traits upset that. I’m shown a demo where a slovenly, gluttonous Sim prepares a meal of disgusting-looking stale sandwiches for a neat, foodie sim. The glutton was perfectly capable of satisfying their hunger with the sub-par food, then happily trotted off without bothering to gather the dishes.
The foodie, meanwhile, was left in an uncomfortable state that necessitated an emergency bathroom visit. Despite having performed the same action, each character’s underlying traits fundamentally changed the nature of the action that followed.
Then, directed to clean up the kitchen and bathroom, their responses diverged further. Scrubbing out the toilet actually made the neat Sim feel better, while wiping down countertops spoiled the slob Sim’s mood entirely. Each of these moods subsequently opened up new interactions in the environment, such as taking a bubble bath to relieve tension.
I like the idea that I’ll be able to create people who clash with one another, that don’t all need to do the same things in order to fulfill their needs—because that’s how people really are. And if there’s an upside to the neighborhood system, it’s that you’ll see these traits influence interactions between other Sims with more frequency.
“People watching is one of my favorite things in The Sims now,” says senior producer Lyndsay Pearson. The only thing dampening my enthusiasm for the game in the months before release is concern about its stability. The version I was shown was alpha software, so problems are to be expected—but there were nonetheless a few prominent crashes and the odd overlong loading screen.
The game seems remarkably complete, content wise—Maxis promises more stuff to do on day one than with any prior Sims launch—so perhaps there’s time to get on top of the issues I saw. I hope so, because what I’ve seen of The Sims 4 has rekindled my affection for the series. I’m looking forward to getting to make myself again.
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