The Sims 4: Growing Together, what about infants, the preference system and life stages? Here is our interview!

• To each of you, what is your connection to this expansion pack? What kind of tasks did you carry out during its development? What are your responsibilities?

SD: My name is Scott Dai. I’m Lead Designer for The Sims 4: Grow Together, which means I oversaw many of the pack’s theme and feature decisions. Then, I translated them into decisions reflected directly in-game and through the player experience throughout the expansion pack. I led a team of designers who also made individual decisions about specific parts of this experience, such as how our stages would work, how many of them, and the design of our new world, San Sequoia, and some of our features of social compatibility.

GN: My name is Graham Nardone and I’m the Lead Producer of Infants. Primarily, this means overseeing the infant experience as a whole. So this is the free update coming soon to all of our players as well as all of the infant-related content in the expansion and the extra depth of infant gameplay you’ll find in Growing Together. . I sort of oversee all of that. This involves working closely with our over-design partners, of course, and other disciplines within the team, but also overseeing the efforts of the production group on these two “strands” of the project.

• During the press event, you showed an overview of life stages. Can you explain how they affect gameplay? Do they look like the memories we could see in previous games?

GN: I’m excited about the infant stages, because in the demo the other day we were trying to show how the expansion makes the experience with infants different and how it makes it unique compared to everything you’ve seen in other Sims life stages before. So if you only play the base game and install the free infant update, you’ll get an infant whose abilities roughly correspond to an 8-month-old baby. However, the Growing Together expansion is interesting because all of a sudden your infant starts out with the skills of a baby at about 2 months old, and throughout this slice of life they will gain additional skills as they grow. measures until it is approximately 12 months old. Then, it grows towards the “toddler” stage. For all this, he will go through stages. For infants, these are grouped into very distinct headings. There are stages of general development, social life, fine motor skills, and each of them makes it possible to evaluate the growth of the child, much like for parents in real life. They see those micro-details that their child suddenly realizes for the first time. Quickly, this turns into a new behavior that is repeated and on which he builds. So it’s really great to see that come to life with the infant experience. They also have categories dedicated to first times, like the very first time they took a bubble bath, the very first time Grandma came to visit them, the very first time they went for a walk in the park, and all this continues in the next slices of life. Besides, Scott will tell you about it.

SD: For Sims who have moved on from childhood, we wanted the stages to last throughout their lives, to really reflect all of the lives our Sims can lead. At this point, instead of just focusing on the growth they experience in their early years, the stages reflect their choices and experiences. And I think one of the great features that the expansion provides is allowing the player, potentially at the end of a Sim’s life, to review all the milestones that Sim has acquired and evaluate his entire life, so I know players really bond with our Sims. It gives them the ability to relive that life through the stages, which I think is really cool. But another cool feature is the ability to explore different events that can happen to a Sim in their lifetime and add a touch of drama that adults can experience that we were able to introduce in Growing Together. So we have stages that can be triggered by some of the extra features we’ve added, like having a midlife crisis, getting laid off, discovering a new personality trait about you. We also have certain stages through which, like in real life, you obtain an object to use to decorate your house and contemplate to remember this memory later, such as a marriage certificate thanks to the “Marriage” stage or the drawing of a child made on the first day of school. These stages are therefore not just UI elements, but they allow us to really enter the life of the Sims and their environment as well.

• We have seen that the preferences system has been improved with the addition of personality traits, which looks really interesting and will definitely add depth to the gameplay and the relationships between Sims. What about physical characteristics, e.g. brown hair, blue eyes, etc. ? Did you choose not to include them?

SD: Yes, for Growing Together, we decided to focus our social compatibility on a more platonic aspect, I would say. We thought some of those traits were a bit closer to how we’re attracted to or our sense of romance, maybe, so we didn’t do that for Growing Together.

• It looks like there are a lot of new features associated with the brand new introduction of infants to the game. You’ve shown that they can discover new specifics about them and new types of foods that they like or dislike. Could you tell us more about these infant-related features? Also, as a young mom myself, I wondered if adult Sims could breastfeed them, like with newborns.

GN: Yes, we definitely have several points to clarify here. […] When it comes to breastfeeding or bottle-feeding, yes, you can certainly choose those options in a very similar way to what was possible with newborns. Of course, this time around you’ll also be able to set a feeding preference for your infant so the player doesn’t have to select that option specifically every time, or if they allow their Sims to act independently, that adults choose the appropriate option for the infant as well. […] I think one point that parents will surely recognize – but I don’t know in the end, because I’m not a parent myself and haven’t experienced this – is that trying new foods in the high chair is not necessarily intended to satisfy the hunger of infants. It’s more about bonding with your infant and letting them grow, explore, try new experiences and find those very first times when they decide what they like, what they don’t like, what they want. he adores. It’s part of something even bigger, going on in the background, where your guardians become attached to their infants. As they grow and create this bond by spending time together, it actually carries over to the next stages throughout the infant’s life. When they move into the toddler stage, they can get several reward traits.

Those very first beginnings, those little seeds that you plant, that’s how you build a relationship with your infant. It controls – or at least it impacts – how the relationship builds and how they maintain it throughout their lives, so it’s kind of fun. Now on the behavior specifics, to be very clear about them, the free infant update adds 6 new personality traits for all players but those who get The Sims 4 expansion pack : Growing together, we unlock many additional personality specifics. For infants, there are 18 unique features. There are actually 18 unique additional specifics for toddlers. One of the things we didn’t mention in the demo the other day is that our newborns too have four different personality types and, you know, before in the game they were all alike. Now you will begin to perceive their personality and the kind of person they will become from the very early stages of their lives, and add an extra touch of originality to your gameplay. Each infant and toddler will get three specifics. The player discovers them by interacting with their infant or toddler, and it gives each additional aspects about their personality, which are fun to discover.