Private Quarters: Locked Doors Come To The Sims 4
Barred
The Sims 4 [official site] will now allow you to make some areas private thanks to a lockable doors update for the game. This happened a few days ago but my patch notes email alert failed to pick it up and is therefore a disgrace. You had ONE JOB.
Okay, so here's what EA have to say about the update on their blog.
"After the release of The Sims 4 Get to Work* we heard the calls for employee-only rooms loud and clear, so we made sure to include that option. There are also more standard locks, like the ability to lock a door so only your Sim can get in, or being able to lock it for a household. If you’re tired of random Sims walking into your Sim’s room and taking a nap on their bed at 2:00AM, you’ll be able to prevent that with door locks. We’ve also added new gender-specific doors to the catalog, which open up some cool possibilities for improvements to some of the Venues in the game."
Essentially it switches on a few possibilities if you want to gate access to any areas of the game which you control using particular parameters like employee status, residence and gender. The point about gender-specific doors is a curious one. I guess it's intended to make the experience of some venues seem closer to reality, although I'd hesitate to definitively describe that as "improvements" given it would presumably require buying into certain assumptions about gender binaries which I suspect not all players do. I'd also say that gender-marked doors in real life aren't the same as gender-gated doors in a game as the latter would need to apply an active enforcement of that binary. Unless they've done something particularly clever with the coding. I don't think they have as the notes just list the item as "The King’s and Queen’s Door (allowing only just the men or women to pass through it)"
Half walls of varying heights are also included in the update. The idea there is to act as options for counter creation and room division. Or, I guess you could recreate the environment from your favourite cover shooter?
"The three medium heights give you a range of options for living room dividers, borders for stoves and counters, or eye-level spots to hold fancy decorations. They’re also a handy place to put your drink! We also added a low (1-1/2’ height) wall that works great as an architectural border piece, as well as a tall wall that can be used to make enclosed spaces within rooms, especially when using taller full-height walls. Half walls are super easy to place, too – if you’ve ever put a fence down in The Sims 4, you already know how to build a half wall."
Looking at the update and the options, I'm thinking that locked doors and half walls would lend themselves to a recreation of the dorms in Orange is the New Black.
I'm also now watching this. A series of small walls.
