The Sims 4 has made some steps in letting the life sim to simulate the life of other Sims that are not the played household in the form of Neighbourhood Stories. This system is already available in the base game, but requires input from the players and doesn’t affect Sims with no relation to the current playable household.
In a new blog post, The Sims team has revealed how the Neighbourhood Stories system will be further enhanced.
For one, this will affect all NPC Sims, regardless of their relationship to your current playable household. And some of these changes can happen without your input. These life-changing events can be as simple as switching careers to literal life-changers, as in, they can die from accidents.
The list of life-changing events that can happen with the Neighbourhood Stories system includes the following:
- Adopt young Sims into their household, aged between infant and children.
- Become pregnant with their Significant Other, and eventually deliver. (likelyhood depends on Sim Traits like Family-Oriented, Noncommital or Hates Children)
- Some Sims may instead adopt a dog or cat (requires The Sims 4 Cats and Dogs).
- Join and leave careers. Sim Traits heavily influence these decisions. Elder Sims may decide to retire.
- Households can move into and out of lots.
- Die in different kinds of accidents, depending on risk factors such as Age, Traits, and Career.
However, you still have control of how much you want Neighbourhood Stories to affect your save. Each of these options can be turned off individually (say, you don’t want Sims to die off off-screen, or have Sims move into empty lots).
You also can manage whether Neighbourhood Stories only affect other households or also effects your played households. This is nice for players who rotate between different households of the same save, and you can have those other families have Neighbourhood Stories events triggered (and which ones specifically) when you are away. Or not, should you wish to retain complete control.
Plus, there’s a handy way to check in on what’s happening in the neighbourhood. The mailbox now has a “Check Recent Neighborhood Stories” interaction, which lets you know what Neighbourhood Stories event has triggered.
This should make your Sims 4 neighbourhood livelier than ever, and will further evolve as you put more time in your saves without you having to make all those changes manually. But thankfully this is an option, so long-time Simmers who might not want such changes can still play the game like they used to.
The update is now live on PS4, PC (Steam, Origin) and Xbox One. The update also adds seven new scenarios. The full patch notes can be found here.