I’ve always viewed The Sims series as the ultimate life intervention games. It’s one of those sims where it’s all too tempting to recreate the friends and family you know in real life and send them down your chosen path. Right now in The Sims 4, players are limited to making life choices for the Sims they’ve created, doomed to watch Neighbor Sims do their own thing. But on November 30, the Neighbor Stories update will let you influence what these NPCs do, from getting married to changing careers.
EA’s announcement said Neighborhood Stories are designed to “bring more life to neighborhood Sims living outside of active households.” So, Neighbor Sims will soon have life changes that they consider for themselves, as well as things you can convince them to do, including: change current careers, have children, or hang out with Sims other to form (or deepen) relationships.
While there are some decisions they can make on their own, Neighborhood will never proceed with anything without consulting you first. For example, they will always call you to check on whether they should accept a marriage proposal or career advancement. To be fair, those are big decisions! I would probably call a friend or family member about that sort of thing.
However, some life changes can only be influenced by you and all of them are quite manipulative. You can turn Neighbor Sims into trash telling others to ruin relationships, play matchmaking and get two Sims together, or even convince an existing couple to break up. On a slightly more friendly note, you can also encourage unemployed Sims to find work. Will you be the destroyer of relationships? Or the person you support? You decide!
There’s a lot EA wants to do with this, so the update will be multi-part, with the first focusing on the Sims connected to your main family – co-workers, friends, the randos they have meet at the gym, that sort of thing. They will then roll out these changes to all Neighbor Sims. Even so, they have yet to give a date for that.
Neighborhood Stories premieres next week, on November 30.
EA recently added challenges for The Sims 4 as well, as well hundreds of new color swatches to beautiful items that you can build. Looks like they’re pretty focused on expanding the base game at the moment, which is great.
