The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories is exactly what wedding pack fans wanted

Whether you've been planning your dream wedding on a Pinterest board since 2009 or dreading the thought of having any sort of nuptial event in your future, The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories will impress you. The latest Game Pack is incredibly extensive, with tons of new gameplay options, build/buy items, and an entirely new locale inspired by the Mediterranean.

My Wedding Stories has an impressive amount of breadth and depth - it's clear Maxis considered both what players want and how this new Game Pack will interact with existing content during development. Simmers have been asking for the tools to create beautiful, elaborate, and personal wedding ceremonies for years now, and My Wedding Stories delivers. I got a chance to play an in-progress build of The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories, and here's how it went.

Posizione, posizione, posizione

From the moment I load up My Wedding Stories, I'm in love. New location Tartosa isn't just inspired by coastal Mediterranean cities, with glittering blue waters and a perpetual golden hour glow, but its points of interest are actually written in Italian (rifugio dei pirati, la coppia serena, etc.). This is like catnip for an Italian woman who, despite internal struggles with a Catholic upbringing, occasionally daydreams about a wedding in a Tuscan vineyard. But Tartosa is so much more than Italian bait - it's yet another example of how The Sims 4's relationship with its locations has grown, shaped almost entirely by community members.

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Tartosa looks like a small Italian village, but its piazza (town square) isn't just a Disney-lot facade - it's full of interactivity that helps it feel like a lived-in world. Keeping in line with the theme, there are several storefronts you can visit in Porto Luminoso that will help you plan your dream wedding: a shop that takes you to the Create-A-Sim menu to try on wedding looks, a flower stall where you can pick out a bouquet, a pasticceria (bakery) where you can taste-test a potential wedding cake, and a food stall featuring traditional Chinese and Indian nibbles. There's even una fontana (a fountain) where lovestruck newlyweds and future newlyweds can snuggle up and look out across the bay.

The last few locales added to The Sims 4 (like Mt. Komerbi and Henford-on-Bagley) achieve this same level of immersion, adding another layer of believability that helps make the Sims 4 experience a more enriched one. It's great to see Tartosa continue with the trend of adding more playability to lots outside of homes and places like bars and restaurants. And rather than adding gameplay elements for the sake of it, Tartosa's extra features all lend themselves beautifully to the wedding planning process. I decided to recreate the ill-fated marriage of Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci (as played by Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in last year's Haus of Gucci), and having the two sit in la piazza taste-testing cake together was a lovely little distraction from thinking about how Patrizia eventually hires a hitman to get rid of Maurizio. Love makes us crazy, ya know?

Il matrimonio

Patrizia and Maurizio fall in love fast and are engaged less than a half an hour into my playthrough. My Wedding Stories offer the most in-depth take on events yet, giving you a chance to plan the myriad events associated with a wedding (like a gender-neutral "bach" party, a rehearsal dinner, an engagement dinner, and so on) from either the in-game calendar or your Sim's phone. And it's incredibly granular when it comes to planning the wedding day, offering options to plan mini-events within the event like a champagne toast, a first dance, speeches, and more. You can even pick out your Sim's outfits from this menu and set a dress code so that Bella Goth doesn't show up in a tracksuit.

This is the kind of pack I can see future Bridezillas going absolutely feral over, as there are very few Game Packs in The Sims 4 that come so close to a 1 to 1 translation of IRL events. While my in-progress build is a bit buggy (EA promises the dev team has already deployed fixes ahead of its February 17 launch), I still get the gist of just how much you can do with My Wedding Stories - and a sharp understanding of just how stressful wedding planning can be. When Patrizia and Mauricio arrive at their venue La Coppia Serena (the serene couple), a bug persists whereby I can't get them to take part in any of the planned activities. No toast, no cake cutting, no walking down the aisle - nothing. I can't even get Patrizia to go take a leak, and as a result, the bride pisses her pants on her wedding day.

Bugs and wet wedding gowns aside, I'm impressed at the promise of what you can do in My Wedding Stories. Wrangling guests is as easy as clicking on the chairs flanking the aisle and instructing them to gather there and walking up and down the aisle is an actual interaction rather than an attempt to direct your Sim to "go here" over and over. The new pack adds slow dancing and ring bearers and an ability to hire an officiant for your nuptials - there's just so much content. And the crossover between that content and other packs is lovely: Seasons Expansion Pack owners can gather wildflowers to make their own wedding bouquet, paparazzi will show up at famous Sims' weddings, and you can hold wedding events in locations outside of Tartosa (catch me having my next Bach party at Izakaya Ippai). There's so much thought put into My Wedding Stories that there's an innate tenderness here - it's clear the devs love this pack and all that it offers players in terms of choice and representation.

That representation includes Chinese and Hindu-inspired food, ceremonies, and wedding attire that EA created alongside Simmers from those communities. The attention to detail is quite lovely - I genuinely gasp at a beautiful Chinese tea set while scrolling through the new build/buy items, and spend way too long admiring the ornate henna patterns in Create-a-Sim. There is so much love woven into My Wedding Stories that goes beyond planning a Sims wedding. It's so beautiful, it just might make you piangi (cry).

The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories is available February 23 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, and PC/Mac.

EA recently announced will release the pack in Russia despite initially saying would not.

Alyssa Mercante used to be a features writer at GamesRadar+ and is now a freelance writer and editor. Prior to entering the industry, she got her Masters's degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University with a dissertation focusing on contemporary indie games. She spends most of her time playing competitive shooters and in-depth RPGs and was recently on a PAX Panel about the best bars in video games. In her spare time Alyssa rescues cats, practices her Italian, and plays soccer.