The Sims’ first real competitor comes at the perfect time

The Sims is a popular and enduring franchise because it appeals to such a simple yet fulfilling fantasy: playing with mock characters in a dollhouse. The player is ultimately in control, but the story can manifest itself in a dozen different ways – or maybe there’s no story at all, and the joy comes from building the perfect tiny house.

Sims developer Maxis recently took a look at the next title in the franchise, tentatively called Project Rene. Maxis didn’t share a release window, but we know it’ll probably be a few years before we can give anything The Sims 5 a twist. Despite the wait, it’s still an exciting time for the life sim genre, especially with competition looming in the form of paralifemade by a much smaller studio.

The Sims fandom has never been a monolith; Some people like the drama that arises in a neighborhood, while others are just there to fret over the furniture and layout of the perfect office. Sims fans can’t even agree on which game to play; A significant portion of fans remain as with previous games in the series The Sims 3 or The Sims 2. The Sims 4 is also getting on in years; With its initial release in 2014, this game is almost a decade old while its predecessors had a lifespan of almost five years. Expansion packs are another controversial topic – to collect all the DLCs The Sims 4a player has to shell out hundreds of dollars.

It’s no surprise that the emergence of a real competitor to the Sims franchise would pique the interest of gamers. Alex Massé started the project in 2018 after realizing that the life simulator genre was filled with games like Stardew Valley, but there was nothing like The Sims. Massé is now the lead developer of the paralife Team funded by a highly successful Patreon making $40,000 per month at the time of writing.

“The project started with small prototypes to showcase new ideas for the house building part of the game, which has always been my favorite part of The Sims,” ​​says Massé. “I was immediately blown away by the positive response on social media, which helped me raise money on Patreon to grow the project into something more ambitious and grow from a solo to a team of 10.”

That paralife team was to share all the progress on social media, share the process of creating customizations, creating custom characters, and now the life simulation elements that make up a character’s everyday life. There are some impressive features to see, like height differences for characters and custom color pickers for furniture. Some of these features even showed up in Project Rene’s preview, which focused on build-and-buy mode tools.

“Everyone on the paralife The team was really excited to unveil Project Rene,” says Massé. “We liked the fact that they brought back customization items that we loved The Sims 3, like the ability to freely recolor objects and choose different patterns and textures. To the paralifewe wanted to offer a high level of customization because we believe that’s really important for making games, and as gamers we’re excited to see Project Rene going in that direction as well.”

With a continuation of The Sims 4 still a way out paralife has a chance to shine – but there is still room for both simulation games at the table. Massé speculates that it will be the everyday simulation that will make it paralife distinguish, not just build and create. Now that the developer has shared the character and building customization on social media, the team is excited to show their take on social interactions and life sims.

“If you think about it, managing your characters in The Sims is a bit like managing your characters in an RPG. There are so many RPGs out there, but people keep coming up with new ideas and gameplay mechanics to keep the genre fresh.”

He adds, “Regarding people comparing The Sims to paralife, we understand that it will always happen because there are no other games in this particular genre. It’s clear that there will be similar features between both games, but in the end I’m sure they will feel quite different in their own way and people can enjoy them both.”