A long awaited feature for The Sims 4, which was one of the big selling points for its predecessor, has been story progression.

You either loved or hated this feature which enabled other households in your game to make life choices when you were not playing with them. It seems this feature is finally returning as “Neighborhood Stories” and will be built on over several updates in the future.

Read the blog post below and learn more, as it’s arriving on the 30th November 2021!

 

Blog Post – “Neighborhood Stories”

Hello, Simmers! I’m Nate, a designer for The Sims 4.

I joined the team during development of Island Living and have worked on several releases since then. Some accomplishments I’m proud of are: Professor Sims in Discover University (SimGuruMorgan and I made those happen together), the Onsen venue in Snowy Escape (it was surprisingly hard to prevent Servos from merrily wading to their doom in the hot spring), and the cows and llamas in Cottage Living!

Today, I want to give you all a behind-the-scenes look into the latest thing I’ve been a part of: Neighborhood Stories, which arrives on November, 30, 2021!

 

Neighborhood Stories

The Sims 4 has so much that your Sims can see and do, leading to interesting, and often unexpected, life moments. All these life moments add up to something very important: life change at an individual level. My team and I have been exploring ways to carry that same kind of life change to the whole world of The Sims 4 through Neighborhood Stories.

Neighborhood Stories are a set of gameplay moments that all revolve around a single purpose: bring more life to Neighbor Sims that live outside the active household. (“Neighbor Sims” refers to most of the non-player character (NPC) Sims in the game, not just ones who live on the same street as your household. Neighbor Sims excludes special NPCs such as Grim Reaper.)

There’s a lot we want to do to add more life to Neighbor Sims, so we’re rolling it out over more than one release.

This first release focuses on Sims connected to your household: coworkers they’ve gotten to know, friends they’ve met at the Gym or Library… maybe that one Sim who welcomed them to the neighborhood with fruitcake, which seems like a bold move, but to each their own, I guess.

In the same way that your Sims change as they move through life, these Neighbor Sims are getting some new life changes of their own such as choosing a new career or having a baby.

Future updates will build on this with more life changes for a wider range of Sims. Find additional info in the “What’s Next?” section near the end of this post, but for now let’s get a closer look at what’s in this release.

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