Life By You’s lived-in open world sets the bar for The Sims 5
pcgamesn.comLife By You wants to be one of the most open-ended, customizable life sims, yet despite its broad simulation it’s already looking like it captures the kind of lived-in vibe that The Sims 4 often falls short on, setting the bar for EA’s next project. In a new gameplay demo, general manager Rod Humble shows off how the upcoming project from Cities Skylines 2 and Crusader Kings 3 publisher Paradox Interactive is shaping up.
It’s still a while until we’ll be able to get hands-on with this upcoming life game, with the Life By You early access release date pushed back into March 2024. However, a 20-minute walkthrough with Humble, who is best known for previously heading up The Sims Label at EA during the time of The Sims 2 and 3, shows off how far Life By You has come in the past three months since we last got an in-depth look at it.
By far the most striking element to me as a long-time Sims fan, and something echoed by other commenters both on the YouTube video and on the game’s Reddit page, is how Life By You manages to balance its open-world simulation of the whole town while still keeping individual locations active. Watching it from a distance, you see individual members actually going about their lives, while zooming in on a location reveals the activity within.
The Sims 3 might still be my personal favorite of EA’s series because of the way it lets you explore the town more freely than The Sims 4 does. Yet jump into any of its establishments while you aren’t there and they can often feel rather empty; furthermore, it often feels like other NPCs in Sims games exist largely to revolve around your controlled characters, rather than functioning on their own schedules.
Life By You’s still in a relatively early stage of
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