Highlights
- The Sims 4 's Create-a-Sim has made significant improvements since its launch in 2014, offering features such as click and drag editing and customization of pronouns, orientations, and gender.
- The diverse range of options in The Sims 4 's CAS, including skin tones and representation for disabilities, has been a result of community demands and is crucial to be included in The Sims 5 .
- The Sims 5 's CAS needs to continue the franchise's tradition of noticeable jumps and innovation, addressing concerns about disability representation and providing more clothing, hair, and personality options for Sims to make them feel unique.
The Sims 4's Create-a-Sim, or CAS, has come a long way since the game's launch in 2014. The Sims 4 already had several innovations from The Sims 3, including the ability to click and drag features on Sims in a detail edit mode, described by Maxis as "Sculpting a Sim". Additional features such as editing pronouns, romantic and sexual orientation, and other gender customization make The Sims 4's CAS a major step up from its previous iterations. If The Sims 5 launches with the current features of CAS, it could become a serious game-changer, even in the wake of life simulator competitors in development.
As technology develops and video games are better able to combine realism with creative art direction, character creators will better be able to create characters that both mimic life while being able to attain a distinct art style. This is important especially for The Sims series and its CAS, which has never aimed to look realistic, but still needs to capture the diversity of people in real life across various intersections.
The History Behind The Sims 4's CAS
The Sims franchise has improved on its CAS with each iteration, and the jump from one iteration to the next has been incredibly noticeable. The Sims required players to create their Sims by choosing one of a selection of premade faces, with only one body type available. The Sims 2 introduced customization options that became the foundation for future games, with these options just becoming more detailed in The Sims 3.
The Sims 4 built on these options and included click and drag, the detail edit mode, and many more options for editing gameplay options that went beyond appearance. Some of these options include whether the Sim could breastfeed, their romantic and sexual orientations, editing pronouns, and relationship dynamics with family members. Many of these features were included in updates after repeated calls from the player community.
How The Sims 4's CAS Will Affect The Sims 5
An example of an improvement to CAS thanks to pressure from the community is the range of skin tones now available in The Sims 4's Create-a-Sim. When The Sims 4 launched and for many years afterward, there were only a few skin tones available, with the darker skin tones looking unnatural in-game. It was only after a collective effort from the community and demands for more representation that more skin tones were added. More representation options for disabilities have also since been added, such as hearing aids and glucose monitors. The sexual orientation and pronoun update was also welcomed by many as a step for a more inclusive and representational CAS.
These are all good additions to The Sims 4's CAS, and they all need to be present in The Sims 5's CAS. Anything less would be a step backwards for the franchise. To be a true innovator in the field, The Sims 5 CAS needs to have all of these features and make the same noticeable jump from one game to the next that all the other games in the series had. It also needs to address concerns about disability representation in The Sims 4 CAS, as well as more clothing and hair options for masculine-framed Sims, Children, Toddlers, and Infants, and options to create more dynamic and interesting personalities and relationships so that Sims feel more unique. Sims has gone in some good directions, but it can't stop pushing itself now.
The Sims 5 is in development.
