2024 has been a strong year for The Sims – we spoke to TS4's Senior Creative Director about the philosophy behind (re-)designing the life sim.
Image credit: VG247
In a vanishingly rare moment of consensus among a modern gaming community, I think most of us can agree that The Sims 4 is ending 2024 on a high note.
The release of the Life & Death expansion pack on Halloween was met with the sort of nigh-on universal acclaim that the franchise hasn't enjoyed in real-time since the golden age of the mid-2000s. It turns out that what we were really all missing was the prospect of a good funeral, which is an ironic way to cap off the year in which EA announced that The Sims 4 – which turned 10 in September – wouldn't be replaced by the long-expected numbered sequel, but would instead soldier on as the flagship iteration of the franchise for the foreseeable future.
Much of the fine-tuning that's gone into The Sims 4 this year has been informed by 2024's two major expansion pack releases for the game: Life & Death in October, and the Lovestruck EP in July. They might not initially seem to have much in common, but look at them together and you'll realise that they've dealt with two of humanity's most overwhelming preoccupations: love and death. Overhauling how both of these are represented by in-game systems has gone a long way to adding a sense of depth that many Simmers had long felt TS4 lacked.
A series as long-running and best-selling as The Sims of course has many, many developers working on it, and a well-received DLC can't be ascribed to the work of a single person, any more than something that missed the mark should be. However, there are roles on the team with oversight of the many moving parts that make up The Sims 4, and whose perspectives on what's working and what's not provide invaluable guidance when it comes to choosing a course for future updates and add-ons. So if you want to know about the creative directions the game has taken lately, there's no-one better to ask than Anna Huerta, senior creative director of The Sims 4.
When I spoke to Anna a few weeks ago, what was immediately clear from our conversation was her dedication to inclusivity – not as an abstract exercise, but as a reflection of the very real people who make up the diverse player base which The Sims has always attracted. Anna and her team make a point of incorporating player feedback into the design process, and this was one of the considerations that helped to inform the overhauled romance system introduced in Lovestruck – which, among other new features, became the first Sims game to majorly incorporate online dating and officially sanction open relationships.
"We were tapping into the players' desire for just seeing more consequence and a little bit more realism into romance," Anna says. "Something that we have noticed players were asking for – and we do ask, there's lots of questions when we go through patch design – is looking for a more modern lens to love. Love has changed… maybe not changed. But how we approach romance and dating, and also the conversations around long-term relationships have really evolved as a human society in the last decade."
The ever-evolving reality of life that the series aims to simulate is something that The Sims – as a franchise rapidly approaching its quarter-century – has had to contend with a few times over the years. The Sims 4 in particular has incorporated some of the seismic societal changes seen over the series' lifespan, especially those in technology: a Sim's smart phone now does the same job a landline plus a newspaper did in older generations of the game (plus much more besides), and Sims can now pursue careers in recently-emerged fields like social media. It only makes sense, then, to think about how people have changed along with our gadgets and pastimes.
"Dating, of course, has changed," Anna continues. "We have dating apps now, and the approach to dating has gone from way back; courtships and dowries, something very traditional. Now people are really empowered to make decisions, and they can go through dating apps and really choose who they go on a date with, and then make decisions along the way on whether or not they want to pursue a romantic relationship. And so we looked at both the beginning of dating as well as cultivating a long-term relationship. And what does that mean? And then what are just some missing relationship dynamics that we simply don't have in the game?"
Sims can be in open relationships now, a welcome addition to relationship anarchists everywhere. | Image credit: EA / Maxis
Indeed, Lovestruck and its accompanying base game update marked a significant shift in the way relationship dynamics are portrayed in The Sims 4, with a movement away from the one-size-fits-all portrayal of commitment and romantic mistrust that's fuelled so many simulated slap-fights over the years.
"We talked about: what are some dynamics of partners that don't get jealous?" Anna explains. "And introducing things like situationships as stories that players can tell. Not quite polyamory, but touching on those open relationship dynamics. And what are some rule sets that we can provide that leave that open for the player to interpret, and decide which type of story that they want to tell?"
Hot on Lovestruck's heels, Life & Death also ushered in some big changes to the way Sims behave. Death, like love, has been a feature of the series from the very beginning; but, as with the many untapped nuances of romantic attachment, the team only recently turned their attention to the different ways that people experience mourning. It feels noteworthy that nearly 25 years after the franchise's first wedding, Sims can now also hold funerals.
"We're always trying new things; we definitely hear players when they're asking for something that has more breadth," Anna explains. "We've had [funerals] in our list of what we'd like to do for a long time. I work with the team not just not on a surface level solution, but really understanding the context around what the player is asking for. What we know about death gameplay as it existed before this update was that we do have players that play long lifespans, that are not allowing their Sims to die. I mean, I like my Sims to live forever! So we think about why players don't do this. Are there players that are kind of like 'I would if we had something more interesting'? But then we're still gonna have players that don't want to engage in death gameplay. So how do we still tell the story from a living Sim standpoint?"
A light approach to death is sometimes necessary. | Image credit: VG247/EA
Understanding that Simmers have very different approaches to death in-game informed the wide-reaching approach taken in Life & Death, which tackles the idea from a number of different angles: introducing funerals and mourning (as well as expanded ghost gameplay for the supernatural Simmers), but also lifelong bucket list goals for living Sims that sit alongside their long-term aspirations. "We experience death as a living person. What does that story look like in life?" Anna muses.
"And then it gets really philosophical. How does the concept of death influence our approach to life, and how we live life? Something that resonates with me is living life to your fullest, taking things with a certain level of gravity, but also, you know, lightweight at the same time – and what some of the stories [were] that we could tell around that was important for a pack like this."
Anna makes the point that Simmers often aren't people who would be labelled as "gamers" in a more generic sense, although she disagrees with this categorisation – but acknowledges that Sims players often have a very distinct set of priorities when choosing which games they want to play. While the stereotype of a "gamer" is unfortunately still quite narrowly centred around combat, she feels that Simmers are primarily driven to seek out games that channel their own creativity. Unsurprisingly, this prioritising of underserved perspectives has drawn a lot of marginalised people to the franchise over the years.
"It's literally a dream job for me on the diversity standpoint," Anna says. "I'm Mexican-American; I grew up in Southern California. I went to grade school in Orange County, and I know what it's like to feel different. I know what it's like to be othered and not to be seen because of how I look [...] and so I got really into more of how people perceive themselves, and how do we make them comfortable and confident in their own skin?"
Life, death, love, and... ghosts? | Image credit: EA / Maxis
And indeed, widening representation has been a preoccupation of The Sims 4 for the past several years already: while still not perfect, there are certainly a lot more options than there were in previous iterations of the franchise, or even at TS4's own launch, with choices ranging from customised gender presentation to the addition of medical wearables allowing more and more players to create Sims who authentically reflect themselves. "We have a goal to be inclusive, and as much as it is honouring players and what they're asking for, I also have a personal connection to just wanting people to be seen. There's a philosophical and values alignment of where I work, and that's really important to me," Anna tells me.
When it comes to overhauling some of the core systems underpinning TS4's 10-year-old architecture – especially now that work on the title is confirmed to be ongoing indefinitely – Anna takes a measured viewpoint. Technical limitations might mean that better representation isn't an overnight job, but that's no reason not to make a start right away.
"They're pretty intertwined," she says of the technical and creative demands of improving representation, in response to a question I posed specifically about TS4's ongoing attempts to disentangle its Create-a-Sim from underpinning assumptions about binary gender. "Computers are largely built on a binary, but the world is not binary. There's a lot of everything in between. People are a matrix of different representations. Not one person, not one group is a monolith. Games traditionally were built that way, [but] now we're now in a space where we have more thoughtful conversations. How do we provide more options? How does that scale? What has to be uplifted about our technology to make that work?" With the benefit of indefinite development time, Anna is very clear that work on improving inclusion and representation in The Sims 4 will continue, both when it comes to expanding into new areas as well as fine-tuning existing ones.
Is the future of The Sims going to be one big party? | Image credit: EA / Maxis
Anna is also a passionate advocate for these inclusive advancements being made available to everybody via updates to The Sims 4's base game, regardless of whether they purchase the latest expansion pack or not. She points to the sexual orientation update that accompanied the High School Years expansion pack – a long-term project for the team which found a natural starting point in an add-on focussed on teenage self-expression – and regards the developments made in Lovestruck as a natural continuation on the theme.
"When we did Lovestruck, it was like, well, what couldn't we tackle in High School Years? And should that be a base game update? We want some things to be dedicated to the pack, but we also want to make sure that we're not gating certain content," Anna says. "I would hate to have locked the jealousy feature behind the pack. Everyone should have that in the base, especially because it's still representative of how people live their lives."
There are many avenues that The Sims 4 can – and arguably should – still take when it comes to further diversifying its characters and stories, of course. But with what Anna describes as "fundamentals" like romance and death now benefitting from much deeper and more varied mechanics than before, the framework for channeling that creativity feels more stable than ever heading into 2025.
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