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Over the past few decades, The Sims has offered players no shortage of real-life scenarios, from attending college to celebrity clout-chasing. Now, the game invites you to partake in its newest lifestyle simulation: polyamory.
The update will be available as part of the new Sims 4 expansion pack Lovestruck, which drops on July 25. With Lovestruck, players can enter the romance-themed city of Ciudad Enamorada, which has three neighborhoods — Vista Hermosa, Plaza Mariposa, and Nuevo Corazón — where their Sims will be able to become romance consultants, create dating profiles to help your characters match with our Sims, and even (gasp!) date multiple people.
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The Lovestruck pack also features the patch “Romantic Boundaries,” in which you’ll be able to control your Sims’ exclusivity settings.
“[The Romantic Boundaries system] will allow you to customize your Sim’s experience with boundaries and jealousy,” the official Sims 4 blog reads. “You can now define how your Sims approach romantic relationships in terms of physical and emotional romantic exclusivity. This allows for Sims to date multiple Sims without impact to other relationships.”
Polyamory has been a highly-requested feature among The Sims players for years, even inspiring some players to create “open love life” mods so their Sims could handle basic open relationship storylines. It took the Sims team long enough to listen, but hey! At least it arrived just in time for your Sims to have a Challengers summer.
Over the past few years, The Sims 4 has finally taken steps to make the game more inclusive and generally true to life, especially for queer gamers. In 2022, The Sims introduced an update with the option for players to select nonbinary pronouns. Then, in 2023, The Sims added a patch introducing trans-affirming medical wearables, such as binders, top surgery scars, and shapewear.
These are small yet long overdue changes that will hopefully make the fan-favorite game more trans-inclusive to whole new generations of little sickos exercising their nascent god complexes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a messy queer Sims polycule to plan.
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