The Sims 4 has always been giving its players new updates and expansions since its release in 2014. This time, in its upcoming free update, players are now able to choose their Sims’ sexual orientation—as well as romantic/sexual attraction. But, wait! Haven’t players always been able to choose a Sims’ sexual orientation? Well, not exactly.
Usually, when you create a character on The Sims 4, you will only need to select their gender. And when you start playing, your own choices for your Sims will guide their sexual orientation. For example, if you wanted to start having a romantic relationship with a Sim of the same sex, you would be able to—and every other Sim is just as fluid as yours.
In a new free update, you’ll be able to assign a series of attraction parameters for your Sim. This means that you can choose what gender your Sim is romantically attracted to, if your Sim is exploring romantically, and if your Sim is interested to “Mess Around” with other genders.
A Twitter user pointed out that it “might look like they’re announcing that Sims can finally be queer”. But it hilariously seems like they are “finally begrudgingly allowing you to make straight people” as all Sims had always been “functionally pansexual”.
The Sims is no stranger to introducing more and more inclusivity in the games. An update in 2016 loosened gender restrictions by removing gender-specific clothing, speech, and hair options. They also made changes to bring more diversity to skin tones and hairstyles.
However, there is still a limitation— Sims can only be either Men or Women. Still, Sims 4 lead designer Jessica Croft says that the system was built to be expandable to include non binary Sims in the future.
“I’ll try to be very transparent with this one. This is due to technical limitations. As stated above, mechanically, non binary Sims don’t yet exist in TS4. You still have to make a binary gender selection for your Sim at creation, regardless of pronoun settings. We hope that we’ve shown our commitment to improving representation of gender identities with features such as Gender Customization, which allows you to modify physical frame, clothing preferences, pregnancy and toilet use options. We look at the pronouns update as another important step toward better representation of non binary genders, but we also acknowledge that pronouns are not the same thing as gender identities,” explained Croft.
The sexual orientation update will be added to The Sims 4 later this month, along with its upcoming High School Years expansion pack which launches on 28 July.
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