GDC 2023 - Life By You Is An Ambitious Life Sim That Aims To Give Players Ultimate Freedom In The Game World
Life sim games have been a genre I’ve played ever since the first Sims game came to PC. I’ve enjoyed creating a world where I can build the house of my dreams, designing everything from the carpet in the house to the exact width of the gaming room I’ve always wanted. I would spend hours and hours pouring over these housing plots, trying to stretch the limitations of what the builder could do, and then put my Sims in there to see what happens.
I’ve since fallen off of life sims, bouncing between The Sims and Second Life before I did finally take a break from the genre. However, after speaking to the Paradox Tectonic team at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, I might have to give them another look thanks to their upcoming game, Life By You .
Headed up by General Manager of Paradox Tectonic Rod Humble, known for his work on life sims such as The Sims and Second Life , Life By You feels like the natural progression in the genre. An open-world life sim, freedom and player agency is at the core of everything Paradox Tectonic is aiming to do, giving the player the tools to create the world and stories they want without anything holding them back.
Humble says that the primary focus was to create a life sim worthy of those who pour hours into playing the genre.
“I wanted to model life sims worthy of the intelligence of the player base,” Humble told me during an interview at GDC 2023 last week. “I wanted to respect the player’s intelligence because this is an incredibly hardcore and intelligent customer base.”
To do so, Humble and the team at Paradox Tectonic set out to create a life sim with the most incredible depth of play unseen by any other in the space. It has all the trappings
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