The Sims 4 will soon allow you to choose your character’s sexual orientation including non-binary sims in the future.
All players will be able to use the Sexual Orientation Feature when the High School Years Expansion Pack for the game launches on the 28th of July, according to an announcement made by EA in a recent blog post.
SimGuruJessica the design lead on the expansion stated in the blog post:
” With Sexual Orientation, you’ll be able to assign a series of attraction parameters for your Sim.
This is a simple, affirmative statement of who your Sim is attracted to. If a Sim whose gender doesn’t match your Sim’s attraction settings attempts a romantic interaction with your Sim, they will be rejected. You can check any combination of attraction boxes (including all or none) to reflect your sim’s romantic orientation.”
The world as a whole is becoming more inclusive and clearly, the Sims developers have stood up and acted too.
SimGuruJessica said that while this is a good start there is still a lot of work to do. The biggest issue she mentioned was that the gender options are still limited by Female and Male roles and this is due to the game’s code and not the designers.
She continued by stating:
“Further down the line, we’ll be able to expand this to include additional gender identities that we don’t have at this time. I understand that there will be concerns here around the initial options being gender binary.
Mechanically, non-binary Sims don’t yet exist in TS4. While we made great progress in representing non-binary Sims with the pronouns update, we acknowledge that pronouns are not the same thing as gender identities. We recognize that we still have a ways to go in this regard.”
Several attraction boxes will be accessible to indicate your sim’s preference for romance. If you later change your mind about the person your character is attracted to, you may access CAS and manually modify any of the settings by using the “Change Sim” interaction on a mirror or dresser.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to turn the feature on and off and SimGuruJessica says:
“While we try to give players the option to toggle certain gameplay features, LGBTQIA+ identities are a fact of life and not a toggle to be switched on and off.”
All Simmers will have access to the functionality once the High School Years extension is released. The latter is not necessary in order for you to add your orientation which is great news for all The Sims fans.
This is a breakthrough in the evolution of gaming and is undoubtedly wonderful news for fans and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Stay tuned for more information on this exciting topic.