The sticking point for me on Life By You is that it's a bit ugly-it's got big 'virtually staged Zillow listing' vibes. That freedom of creation is enticing, so long as it can grab and sustain players willing to feed each other new content. It's also going to be highly moddable, with scripting tools available to go so far as building your own jobs, objects, and maybe your own expansion. There will be a default spread of skin colors, sexualities, and other characteristics but you can tweak those yourself to create a world 'full of people who just fall in love with me,' or where other traits are predominant. Humble talked about letting players get granular with the rules of their worlds, even. 'We want to sell a life simulator that I think the community has been asking for for a long time,' creative director Rod Humble said in our Life By You interview earlier this year. The name Life By You is drab, but it does communicate its core values of extreme customization. Life By You is being developed at a Paradox Interactive studio, the publisher who's responsible for other deep simulations, notably SimCity destroyer Cities: Skylines. What's the pitch: 'One of the most moddable and open life-simulation games' When it's coming: Early access on September 12, 2023

Here's what they're bringing in an attempt to usurp the throne: Life By You: The Sims but customized This is the moment (and by moment I mean the next three-ish years) that would-be Sims-killers need to strike. The Sims 4 feels like it's drifting into retirement on a cushy pension built by yearly expansions without any major systematic shakeups. They both still feel far away, but so is The Sims 5. Both contenders are singleplayer and will have a character creator, a live mode life simulation, and a build mode, and are offering some features they think The Sims hasn't been. I love the Sims, but it desperately needs a challenger and finally there are two games queued to take it on.įormer Sims developer Rod Humble is working on Life By You while the indie team behind Paralives continues public-facing development. It's been a steady staple, but I'm not alone in feeling trapped by it. The Sims series has enjoyed decades of uncontested dominance in the dollhouse-core simulation genre.

She's looking off to the side with a scared expression.

A close up of a female sim in The Sims 4 with medium-length black hair and an off-the-shoulder orange top.

Sims 4 extreme body sliders