The Sims 4's next update lets you meddle with your neighbours' lives
Play god even more in Neighborhood Stories next week
I've always seen The Sims series as the ultimate life-meddling games. It's one of those, well, sims, where it's all too tempting to recreate friends and family you know in real life and send them on a path you've chosen. Right now in The Sims 4, players are limited to making life choices for these Sims they've created, doomed to watch Neighbour Sims do their own thing. But on November 30th, the Neighborhood Stories update will let you influence what these NPCs do, from starting families to changing careers.
EA's announcement says Neighborhood Stories is designed to "bring more life to Neighbour Sims that live outside the active household." To that end, Neighbour Sims will soon have life changes they'll consider themselves, as well as things you can convince them to do, including: changing their current career, having a baby, or hanging out with other Sims to form (or deepen) relationships.
While there are some decisions they can make autonomously, Neighbours will never go ahead with anything without asking for your input first. For example, they'll always give you a call to check whether or not they should accept a marriage proposal or career promotion. To be fair, those are big decisions! I'd probably call a friend or family member about that sort of stuff.
Some life changes can only be influenced by you, however, and they're all rather manipulative. You can make Neighbour Sims trash talk others to sabotage relationships, play matchmaker and tell two Sims to get together, or even convince an existing couple to split. On a slightly more friendly note, you can encourage unemployed Sims to find jobs too. Will you be the destroyer of relationships? Or the supportive pal? You decide!
There's a lot EA want to do with this, so the update will come in multiple parts, with the first one focusing on Sims connected to your main household - coworkers, friends, randos they met at the gym, that sort of thing. After that, they'll roll out these changes to all Neighbour Sims. They don't give a date for that just yet though.
Neighborhood Stories arrives next week, on November 30th.
EA recently added challenges to The Sims 4 too, as well as hundreds of new colour swatches to pretty-up items you can build. They seem to be pretty focused on expanding the base game at the moment, which is nice to see.