We knew an announcement for The Sims 4 was coming at Gamescom, so here’s a big surprise for you: an announcement for The Sims 4! From Gamescom!
Actually, announcement doesn’t come close to it. We’ve got approximately 42,000 screenshots, and a pair of trailers – a hopelessly cheesy live-action one that looks like a lengthy TV spot, and one showing off five minutes of narrated gameplay footage.
Y’know what? It actually looks rather neat.
Other than the expected (and slightly nebulous) improvements to general AI and graphics, there are heavy tweaks coming to all of the creation tools. Creating Sims is no longer based around sliders – you click directly onto the character model and drag it around. Want a bigger stomach? Click, drag. Smaller eyes? Click, drag. Sort of like sculpting with clay.
House building has had similar upgrades; you can simply drag out rooms, rather than building them tile-by-tile. You can even move entire rooms from one end of the house to another with a couple of clicks, and all of the furniture will move with it.
The other big reveal is that Sims now have emotional states that can be affected by everything from actions to decor, and these will heavily impact the way they act and feel about things. They can be bored, depressed, angry, flirty, confident, pleased, and all sorts of other bits and bobs, each with varying intensities of emotion. This also sounds like it’s going to lead to an expansion of their whole “memory” thing, with past successes and failures significantly influencing the way they act in future.
Let’s just hope they’ve sorted out the loading times and framerate this time around, eh?
Trailers and screenshots below. The Sims 4 is due out in 2014.
