Life by You wants to take on The Sims for the title of the best life game around, and with some serious pedigree behind it and extra time before the Life by You release date, it just might. So we took a fresh look at the game during Gamescom 2023, and managed to talk with a developer about one of Life by You‘s most interesting ideas: relationships and interactions.
What really stood out to me about what I saw of Life by You at Gamescom 2023 was how unafraid it is to let your choices have real, adult consequences. If you decide to skip out on your job, the whole screen fills with a passive-aggressive email from your boss labeled as a not-so “friendly reminder” to get back to work, and you can even interact with fellow characters in more ways too.
As Paradox Tectonic senior game designer Hannah Culver took me through a day in the life of her character, Ronnie, she had options to both flirt and swear at her coworker, with Culver going for the latter. This led to Culver’s avatar flipping the bird and telling their co-worker Elijah to “f**k off” for no real reason, which we all found hilarious.
“The exciting part for me as a player is how the AI reacts to it,” Culver tells PCGamesN at Gamescom. “Because, each person, they’ll react according to their relationship, or the place they’re in, or even their traits. So if I had been mean to a different person, that could have gone differently, but he was not having any of my attitude.”
Characters in Life by You all have relationship meters with one another, ranging from friendly to hostile, with their actions moving the meter one way or the other. Once you go all one way, you’ll unlock new interactions and dialogue options between them. You can also play as any of these characters in Life by You with the click of a button, but while not controlling them they’re instead dictated by AI.
“You gain more interactions the more friendly you are,” Culver adds. “There are also some mean interactions you can really only do if you’re enemies with them, so there are different relationship stages.
“It’s a little weird to propose to a person that you don’t know that well, as you get closer to people, you can do more with that conversation.”
This is one of the many ways Life by You intends to stand out from The Sims, as while both have a relationship system, the former wants to be a bit more realistic with your choices and how they’re portrayed, with swearing and giving other characters the bird being just the tip of the iceberg.
If you can’t wait until 2024 for Life by You, we’ve got a list of the best games like The Sims 4 and the Life by You system requirements to make sure your rig is up to running the life game.
