The Sims 4 is currently available for free

[kaberett]

Until May 28th, 10am PDT. Hat-tip to armaina; my interest in this is primarily people enthusing at me about how gender is handled. :-)

(Criticism also welcome! But mostly I want squee. I... cannot afford to disappear into A New Timesink right now, but A has downloaded it, so maybe at some future point I will pootle around in his copy.)

Comments

[batrachian]

*takes squirrel note*

[delight]

ngl, I'm really excited to be able to make a house full of NB people. I'm not sure yet if you can actually set someone to BE nonbinary or just LOOK it, but "free" is a fantastic price point to find out!

[armaina]

You still have to choose either male or female symbols as a base in order to determine the rig skeleton. There are no options for pronouns in the game but I admittedly cannot recall where I've seen pronouns used much in the first place.

[kaberett]

Oh hmm, I seem to recall us Talking About That but I can't remember the conclusions we came to/advice we gave.

[armaina]

For what they've done with the game, the gender options are pretty robust. There's only a few tweaks I'd make to it but otherwise, there's a lot of thoughtfulness put into it. The thing I think that still has the most impact, to me, is that they did this of their own volition, don't see a lot of large game titles going out of their way to do that.

[kaberett]

Yeah, exactly, that's some of why I was willing to volunteer time to advise them on How To Do The Thing!

I'd be super interested in what your outstanding tweaks are -- at this point my memories of the discussion are... hazy, but I'm curious about what I might have missed (i.e. what I might be able to advise people to do differently in future).

[armaina]

The most significant change I would like to see is something I'm aware may not be actually feasible due to time/money. But truly ideally, I'd change the whole male/female body choices into categories more akin to endomorph/exomorph or lithe/broad, and have breasts their entirely own toggle that could be attached to either body. The rest of the body options for the sims I think are perfectly fine as is.

But I'm aware that this would require a whole new set of rigging for both bodies so that's why it's not something I really expect them to do. Because it's not just the bodies they'd have to change but all the clothes as well and that's a tall order and would likely change their entire workflow going forward. It's just something I'd like to see in, well, any character creator.

[kareila]

I enjoyed the Sims back in the day... I tried to download this but I keep getting told that "online sign-in is currently unavailable" and I can't get at it without signing in.

[kaberett]

Huh. I... have very little idea what's going on there, but Poor Show That Electronic Arts.