Life By You says yes to sex mods and privacy, no to gender roles
After EA's live-servicey SimCity reboot cratered in 2013, Paradox swooped in with Cities: Skylines, a good ol' fashioned offline city builder, and became the new monarch of the genre. Apparently, that was just round one.
We want to sell a life simulator that I think the community has been asking for for a long time.
Later this year, Paradox will release a Sims competitor called Life By You, which is being developed under the leadership of former Sims studio head Rod Humble. It sure feels like Paradox is trying to repeat history here. Cities: Skylines was everything SimCity wasn't, and now Life By You promises to give Sims 4 players everything they've been asking for, and nothing they don't want.
Mainly, that means lots and lots of freedom to customize. Instead of grappling with unofficial tools for extracting Python scripts, Life By You modders will enjoy visual scripting tools directly in the game—some of the same tools that the Berkeley, California studio is using to build the game, and will use to make expansions in the future.
The tools look powerful: Players can design custom jobs, social scenarios, conversations (the residents speak real languages, not gibberish), and more. There's an object editor, and support for importing custom 3D models and animations.
«If you want to make an expansion pack that's better than ours, go for it,» Humble told me during a meeting at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week. «The game is yours, and you don't need to ask anybody's permission to stream it, to do whatever it is you want with your creations. And that's the way that our business model is. We want to sell a life simulator that I think the community has been asking for for a long time. It's theirs, and we
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