LIFE BY YOU
Those stories play out across dozens of everyday actions, including going to work. Most workplaces and leisure spots in The Sims exist as text-only locations in your imagination, or elaborate-looking buildings you can’t enter – what players call ‘rabbit holes’. Life By You has no rabbit holes: whether your character is buying groceries or going to work, you stay in control, guiding them through every ordinary moment and extraordinary decision alike. Following your character while shopping or going to work may sound mundane, but it’s a significant departure from The Sims, where you can’t control or influence them for long periods.
A suite of new interactions and activities opens up when Ronnie clocks in at the gym. They’ve got classes to teach, equipment to clean, colleagues to ignore, and business planning to sort – if they want to. While we suspect you eventually have to do your work tasks to remain employed, for now, Ronnie wanders around the fitness centre and chats with an amorous coworker – an interaction that introduces Life By You’s take on emergent storytelling, where contextual factors converge and result in unexpected outcomes. In this scenario, Ronnie picks a rude response while speaking to their colleague, but a combination of his personality traits and environmental triggers means that, rather than being hurt, he actually falls in love with Ronnie a little more.
Culver says the goal was to recreate as faithfully as possible the space between chaos and structure that fuels real-life interactions – where you don’t know if the person you greet might offer simple pleasantries or, prompted by circumstances you know nothing about, start sharing their life story. Humble built a fully functional 2D prototype of Life By You at the start of development in 2018 so the team could experiment with this kind of simulation, putting scenarios in the system and seeing how they turned out before tweaking them and adding even more.
An unfazed Ronnie heads home for an extended lunch break, stopping outside their house to pick some flowers for an arrangement, which also levels up their gardening skill. The vase they pick is customisable, and the arrangement changes visually depending on which flowers or other greenery you use.
That’s merely a fraction of the granular degree of control you’re afforded. Should you have a penchant for, say, seashells, an expansive crafting system lets you create bespoke items from them by mashing them together with anything else that takes your fancy. And if you’re having trouble locating shells – or any other item you might need more of – you can adjust the parameters for how and where they appear, their size and colour, and pretty much everything else about them. “We’ve taken a maximalist approach,” Humble says. “We push as far as we can, until we hit some kind of hard technical or time limit.”
It seems Humble’s team hasn’t hit that limit yet. Every item and person in Life By You features modifiable scripts like those shells. You can change your cat, your clothes or your neighbour’s cat’s clothes. You can adjust the size, colour and several other traits for any object you see, or create brand-new ones. You can even build your own expansion packs and share them with friends. While that might sound standard for anyone who’s developed or downloaded custom content in The Sims, here you’re using the same tools as the developers while building directly in the game itself. That removes any compatibility issues between mod and game, letting you pick what you want to change rather than downloading a custom pack in its entirety.
There are a few shortcomings and potential sticking points. Dialogue seems flat, and while there are no glaring performance issues in the small suburb we’ve seen, outside the context of a controlled demo there’s no telling how the game’s systems might buckle, particularly under the weight of player-authored elements. If it can fulfil its promise to present a virtual existence in greater depth and detail, though, Life By You could yet grow into the Sims beater its creators are so clearly shooting for.
“We push as far as we can, until we hit some kind of hard technical or time limit”