Sims 4 Announces Upcoming Free Items & Gender-Neutral Pronouns

An Inside Maxis livestream announced new content coming to The Sims 4, including gender-neutral pronouns and new Sims Delivery Express content. Sims Delivery Express drops – known as SDX – are designed to deliver players small amounts of content that aren’t complex enough to warrant a patch. The Sims 4 team recently released a roadmap for the first three months of 2022, announcing a myriad of upcoming celebration-centric content set to release for the game.

Even 7 years after its release, The Sims 4 continues to receive both free and paid DLC, with the development team showing no signs of slowing down. The development team recently teased upcoming content, both free and paid, including collaborations with content creators in the Sims community and celebratory cultural food items. The concept for Sims Delivery Express was introduced in 2021 as a way for the developers to gift players with small amounts of new items, clothing, and hairstyles. Since then, three SDXs have been released for The Sims 4, with deliveries focusing on celebration in different cultures. Alongside these new items, The Sims 4 team recently introduced a new style of gameplay with the addition of scenarios – challenges for players with certain parameters, such as earning a certain amount of money.

On a recent Inside Maxis livestream on The Sims Twitch, members of the Sims development team gave an overview of several new things coming to the game. Players will soon receive two SDXs, the first of which will release on February 2: a collaboration with custom content creator Complex Sims that will add three objects to the game, one of which is shown in the concept art below. The second SDX will have a focus on cultural celebratory foods, such as rice cakes and steamed fish; players will also receive a new braided hairstyle alongside these 6 new foods. A new Sims 4 scenario is also in the works, in which a married couple will compete to see who can reach the rank of CEO in the Business career track first. Additionally, the development team discussed how they will be adding customizable pronouns to the game in an effort to improve representation. The feature will be released in English first with other languages to follow, as the very gendered nature of some languages makes translation more time-consuming.

Click here to see the entire presentation on Twitch.

These announcements, while small, point to The Sims 4 development team’s recent focus on adding more inclusivity and representation into the game. Additions like traditional clothing and pronoun options make it easier for players to see themselves in their Sims, and shape stories that are more representative of their own life. Interestingly, the stream had no mention of the recently leaked Sims 4 kit that’s allegedly slated to release on February 3. It’s unclear whether the release date has changed since the leak, or if the team plans to announce it closer to the release day.

The upcoming content and features focused on in this livestream are all steps in the right direction for The Sims 4. In the past, some players found The Sims team somewhat out of touch with the desires of the game’s community, and a partnership with a well-known custom content creator could signal developers becoming more closely involved with the Sims 4creative community. While the presentation didn’t reveal a huge amount of new content, what was shown did demonstrate a promising focus on representation and diversity.

Source: The Sims/Twitch

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