The Sims rival Life by You heads to Early Access in September

thesixthaxis.com:

Paradox Interactive has announced that Life by You, their life-simulator rival to The Sims, will be heading into PC Early Access on 12th September. The release date reveal came at the end of a lengthy gameplay showcase digging into a bunch of the game’s broad features.

Life by You takes the life-sim genre by the horns, with all of the standard features that you would expect from The Sims, but with a far deeper degree of customisation and control for the player. You’ll naturally be able to build their home, with ingrained customisation for colour palettes and designs, and then guide your humans through life, through careers, love and more. You’ll be able to take direct control of people (any person in the world) and move them in the world, and be able to engage in contextually generated conversations with other people.

One point of emphasis is that this is a large open world with no loading screens. You can jump between characters in your household seamlessly, head over to another house and more, and the camera will simply pan through the world. You can also skip forward in time, apparently by an entire decade if you wish.

However, the game is also deeply moddable, from creating custom styles to writing your own dialogue, create events, items, shops, mods, careers, skills, traits and so much more. It sounds seriously impressive.

The game is made by Paradox Tectonic in Berkeley, California, having been founded in 2019 with Rod Humble as the studio lead. Humble has a storied career, but is most notable in this context for his contributions to The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.

Paradox has a little history in eating EA’s lunch, with Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines surpassing Sim City in 2015 to become the preeminent city building game