Life by You is an open world take on The Sims
During Paradox Interactive’s and Paradox Tectonic’s livestream of Life by You, gamers got the chance to see whether this upcoming life sim would be the answer they were looking for. Does Life by You have the essential ingredients necessary to be a competitor for EA’s The Sims?
The answer proved simple: yes, and in ways that has life sim gamers more than a little excited.
“When we started making ‘Life by You’, open world was at the center of our game design.” Rod Humble, general manager at Paradox Tectonic, said. “That’s because life didn’t have any loading screens, and we didn’t want any loading screens either.”
A cheeky pop at The Sims maybe, but not exactly a lie because Life by You is open world. You can control the life of anyone you come across, and travel wherever you like (by bike, by car, hell, even by skateboard), interact with whoever you want. There’s no loading screen between buildings, and it doesn’t matter if you have a household where one character at work miles away, another at the beach, or one that’s just simply chilling at home. You’re able to swap between these characters at a click of a button, with not a single loading screen included.
Players are also able to move away from their household and jump into someone else’s life instead, whether that be a passing NPC, or one of your character’s friends. It doesn’t matter, you can jump between lives if you want to mix it up and as Humble explained in the stream, there’s plenty of things to explore that you can do at your own pace by clicking with the mouse, or even using the arrow keys to move your character directly. This direct action of movement even works for vehicles like cars, motorbikes, etc.
The stream also gave viewers the opportunity to look at customization through the Lot and Region Editor tools. You’re able to re-design whatever house you like, and even move it around if the location doesn’t suit you. An example given during the stream was if you didn’t like that your character had to walk to work every day, why not just move your office block next door to your house? If only it was that simple in real life…
But what was most exciting for us is the inclusion of real-life conversation in Life by You, vastly different from the Simlish speak in The Sims. With this conversation system, you can talk to anyone, and anyone can talk to you and doing so will help build your relationships with the people in your household and in the world. Each conversation is generated depending on your own unique situation, such as who you’re talking to, where you’re talking to them, and the type of relationship you have with that person.
With the conversation system, Paradox Tectonic want to create an immersive world that feels real and authentic to you. You’ll be able to form close relationships yes, but there’s also the option to create enemies and, as expected in the life sim genre, lovers too. And, according to Paradox Tectonic, there are “countless choices in thousands of unique lines of written dialogue”, making sure that no conversation will ever be the same.
But conversation and dialogue doesn’t just stop there. Life by You has its very own conversation creator, where modders can mess around by creating their own dialogue, and telling their own stories.
And, just like The Sims, players will be able to create fully customized humans and design their families in the Human Creator, which allows player to develop their personalities and character traits.
Life by You will launch into Early Access on September 12. Players can pre-order Life by You on the Epic Games Store and Steam for a suggested retail price of 39.99USD / 39.99 EUR / 34.99 GBP.
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