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Wait, was that a baby crawling across the floor in The Sims 4? Not confined to a bassinet, but actually moving freely in the house? Like a real sim? At long last, it's finally happening. The Sims 4 baby update is officially coming and I, like many others, gasped at the reveal during the Behind the Sims Summit stream.
That reaction alone speaks volumes of the demand for baby sims that feel like proper members of the family, instead of being closer to objects or pieces of furniture. There was of course another exciting reveal in the shape of an official announcement for The Sims 5 – codenamed Project Rene – but the news of actual functioning babies have been such a long time coming.
Expecting more
The Sims 5 hype can be summed up with two words: throw pillows
Since The Sims 4 launched back in 2014, I've been hoping for improvements that make the beginnings of a Sim's life more interactive. When the game first released, the absence of toddlers made it all the worse, with babies ageing up to a child Sim. Steadily over the years, though, we've seen toddlers re-introduced as a life stage and more features have been added with a host of updates and expansions to flesh out the overall experience. But when it comes to baby Sims, many interactions were still omitted and they continue to feel like a rather pointless jumping off point to the later stages of a Sim's life. In fact, I often find myself ageing baby Sims up fairly quickly in The Sims 4 because they can't really do much; it's not surprising that so many in the community refer to them as 'object babies'.
As someone who loved The Sims 2 and 3, it's hard not to draw parallels between the way baby Sims behaved and could be interacted with there. It's also got me thinking about how this update could really change the overall experience for the better and really make it feel like we're shaping the early stages of a Sim's development. Unlike the Sims 2 or 3, where you could carry your infant sims around, for example, babies in The Sims 4 can only be interacted with at their cribs. While you can cuddle your little baby and feed them, it feels like such a step back from the simple ability to carry a baby around – be it out and about in a stroller in The Sims 3 or just around the house in The Sims 2. That's why just seeing a baby crawling in The Sims 4 is such a big deal – it opens a world of new interactions for our young Sims and their parents.
We don't know too much about the update just yet, with the short teaser shown during the showcase being all we have to go on. But my imagination is already running wild thinking about the improvements The Sims team might add. It would be great to see baby Sims become a proper life stage not unlike toddlers, where we can actively nurture and look after them. Being able to see their needs clearly would also make them feel like proper Sims again, instead of what is essentially crying furniture that needs to be fed every now and then. If they can roam out and about, it'll also be interesting to discover if we'll be able to directly control them for the first time, or if they'll be autonomous to some extent as we control our other sims to manage their wellbeing.
The future of The Sims is pretty exciting right now, with the next generation of the Sims in the very early stages of development and the new dedicated mod manager CurseForge. And as The Sims 4 shifts to a free-to-play model, it's still good to know that updates will continue to come to the game. It's certainly been a long time coming for this particular update, and there's no doubt going to be a lot of expectations surrounding it. But it already looks as if it could very well be taking babies in the world of the Sims a step further than they ever have before. After all, we've not seen baby Sims that can crawl to begin with, so the prospect of what's in store for them could be a game changer.
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