Life sim games have been a genre I’ve played ever since the first Sims game came to PC. I’ve enjoyed creating a world where I can build the house of my dreams, designing everything from the carpet in the house to the exact width of the gaming room I’ve always wanted. I would spend hours and hours pouring over these housing plots, trying to stretch the limitations of what the builder could do, and then put my Sims in there to see what happens.
I’ve since fallen off of life sims, bouncing between The Sims and Second Life before I did finally take a break from the genre. However, after speaking to the Paradox Tectonic team at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, I might have to give them another look thanks to their upcoming single-player life sim game, Life By You.
Headed up by General Manager of Paradox Tectonic Rod Humble, known for his work on life sims such as The Sims and Second Life, Life By You feels like the natural progression in the genre. An open-world life sim, freedom and player agency is at the core of everything Paradox Tectonic is aiming to do, giving the player the tools to create the world and stories they want without anything holding them back.
Humble says that the primary focus was to create a life sim worthy of those who pour hours into playing the genre.
“I wanted to model life sims worthy of the intelligence of the player base,” Humble told me during an interview at GDC 2023 last week. “I wanted to respect the player’s intelligence because this is an incredibly hardcore and intelligent customer base.”
To do so, Humble and the team at Paradox Tectonic set out to create a life sim with the most incredible depth of play unseen by any other in the space. It has all the trappings that have made life sims popular over the years, from building your own home and creating your own avatars to inhibit the world, to crafting a world around your avatars to live within and tell stories. Life sim players, according to Humble, typically fall into one of a few “constituencies” as he puts it: builders, dollmakers, and storytellers.
“What life simulators all like to do is create,” Rod stated. And by the sounds of what the team at Paradox Tectonic is planning, letting players create is at the forefront of everything.
The aim is to provide incredible depth and freedom regardless of how you choose to spend your time playing Life By You. Do you want to create your avatar and explore the world around you? You can do that, literally by taking control of your character and moving them as you might a traditional third-person RPG or even point and click should you choose. Being an open-world RPG, Life By You allows for that type of freedom of exploration. So that also means if you see a hill in the distance, you can go to it, climb it, take in the view, and encounter people, places, and stories along the way.
Additionally, how you get there matters as well. Sure you can walk, but you can also bike, jog, run, catch a bus - there are countless choices you can make on transportation, mirroring real life.
That openness doesn’t just extend to how you control a character in the game world, but rather the world itself. Every single wall, floor, plant - object really - in the world can be changed to your liking. Don’t like the color of the drapes in the neighbor’s living room? Go ahead, change them. Want to rebuild your third floor completely? Go for it. Every element is customizable.
This is because the team has built the game world, but then turned the tools over to the player to truly create the world of their dreams.
“In addition to every data set that we’ve got a tool for, we’ve made sure it’s open up-able or useable by modders,” Humble said in our interview. “We opened up all of the areas that a lot of games close off, including the core mechanics. You can even add your own needs right now if you want.”
This fundamentally can change how players approach a life simulation game, since none of the predefined rules of the genre need apply to your own, specific desired world.
This level of customization extends to every facet of Life By You. You can create your character, build a home, get a job and then decide one day that you want to see things through the eyes of another character in your world. Just take control of them. When you do, you get all their memories, skills, desires, needs and more.
“At any time, if you like, ‘I want to play another character,’ you can click on any NPC and you can just play them. You can go back to your original family and continue to play them forever. When you take over an NPC, you get all of their memories, their relationships, their likes, their dislikes, everything.”
Want to create your own branching dialogue? The full dialogue creator is in the game, even though Life By You will ship with over 1000 lines of dialogue already when it hits early access in September. You can create whole questlines, jobs, career paths, businesses - effectively it sounds like if you can think of it, there should be some way to create it within Life By You.
It helps too that conversations are generated by your own circumstances in the game world, with real language, as well as your relationship with the person you’re speaking to, meaning that in theory conversations should be unique each time. Every choice you make in dialogue will affect your relationship in some way - in our video presentation the player character made their friend mad, who decided to flip them the bird - but the freedom in these conversations really helps to make them fresh and meaningful each time.
I can already see the various television shows making their way to YouTube through this dialogue-creation tool.
Equivalency is also important in Life By You. Anything a non-player character can do, you can as well. Additionally, the idea is that anything a player can do, the NPCs can also do. Humble mentions that as a result, they effectively have created a world where all the NPCs are people, like the players, because they are all operating exactly the same way.
Players will still have needs they have to satisfy, from hunger, thirst, energy, and more. Players can get a job in the world or even start and build their own businesses. The world operates like a real one would, with starting hours and closing hours for your jobs, salary ranges you can set to pay the employees you hire for your store, and more. It even operates down to the delivery driver bringing items you ordered in an online shop operating in the game world (or even maybe your own online store). Heck, you can even take over the delivery driver should you choose and live out their life. This is life, by you of course.
This doesn’t even get into the fact that every single item is scriptable, meaning you can adjust how that item operates. An example Humble gives is a bush where the team has attached the toilet script to the bush, allowing players to, well, pee in the bushes. Players can adjust items for different reasons as well, including giving a chair the script that gives anyone who sits on it inspiration.
The full visual scripting language is also available to players, making Life By You freely moddable by anyone. In fact, Paradox Tectonic is hoping for that, looking forward to seeing all the various mods put up on Nexus Mods, or even Paradox’s own mod-sharing platform. And regardless of how you decide to share your work - whether it be a mod, live stream, video series, Rod states that you as the player own everything you create. You’ll never see a DMCA come from Paradox.
I think, for me, one of the most compelling aspects actually sounds like the job system. One of the things I hated was that when my Sim would go to work in The Sims, I would just be staring at an empty house as time accelerated past me. Now, in Life By You, if you have a job, you go to that job. I’m not meaning that you wake up, click a button and then appear at your job. You physically move your character out of your house, down the street, and go to the job - all without loading screens.
Have a retail business? You decide what is being sold there, for how much, how the store is laid out and more. Want to start a career as a writer? It’s actually the first career path that the team is working on ahead of the early access launch. It’s a career that takes your creativity and various skills into account when deciding how good your work is.
This is all down to how building skills can work and how they influence your character as well. You can literally observe someone do something and grow more knowledgeable. Want to write a compelling romance novel? Spending time around romantic people can help with that. Need to get some inspiration for your next cook book? Watch a chef at a nearby restaurant. You’ll literally learn a thing or two to help your book. While the number of skills that will be available at the early access launch isn't locked down, the sheer amount of things to do already on the table makes me think it's not going to be a short list.
And this is just one application of how these observables might work to help with your career in-game. Learning by observation and not just study and practice opens up so many avenues in my mind for emergent gameplay and inspiration, I think.
Don't want to work? You don't have to either. Every character gets a universal basic income, but, like everything in Life By You, even that is customizable. Don't want to stop your hike to get your avatar a drink? Just fill their thirst meter to full. Again, full player agency to create the experience you want to have, in any way you want.
"That was our focus, the depth of the gameplay. That's what we think we're bringing to the table out of the box," Humble said to us when we asked what really makes Life By You different than the other titles in the space. "And then we went a step further and we said, 'well, we've been able to make these really, really deep experiences. Let's also hand over the keys to the players[.]"
It all sounds rather ambitious, and that’s because it truly is ambitious. Life By You sounds like the most detailed, in-depth life sim game experience to date. It sounds like everything I wanted when I was still playing life sims over a decade ago. Whether or not the team can execute the vision is still the question, though with the studio boasting industry veterans with experience in the genre, as well as Paradox’s reputation for putting out some of the best games that excel at player agency and freedom, I’m optimistic that what we’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg.
Either way, September 12th is when early access kicks off for Life By You, and I’m already eager to get my build on.
