The Sims 4 plans to make it easier for players to create Sims that better reflect their experiences. With the High School Years expansion coming in a free update at the end of the month, players can now choose their Sim's sexual orientation and romantic/sexual attraction.
The new feature will work like this: On the “Create a Sim” screen, you will be able to figure out how your Sim experiences sex and romance. First, you will be able to choose whether your character will be attractive to men or women. The Sims 4 team realized that making this choice based on binary options is not ideal.
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SimGuruJessica, design lead for the High School Years expansion, wrote in the dev diary, “I understand there will be concerns here about binary first choices. Mechanically, Sims whose sexual orientation is not one of the binary options do not yet exist in the game. While we've made great progress in representing these Sims with the pronoun update, we acknowledge that pronouns are not the same as gender identities.” he wrote.
In addition to choosing whether your Sim is attracted to men or women, you can also choose how to show that attraction through romance and/or sex and whether that attraction will change.
With the “romanticly explore” setting, you can lock in if your Sim is only attracted to one gender, or if they're actually still figuring it out, potentially allowing them to shift the attraction from one gender to the other.
Lastly, the 'WooHoo' setting determines what gender the Sim is interested in… The WooHoo setting, along with the romantic environment of exploration, allows players to create aromantic or asexual Sims. Unchecking anything when checking a box in the WooHoo setting, or leaving the option to explore romantically unchecked, or vice versa, will result in Sims engaging in complete asexuality, sex without romance, or romance without sex.
Even with all these new ways to customize your Sims, you can also choose to leave things alone to let your Sim behave like they did before this new patch.
SimGuruJessica says, “If you don't change any of the Sexual Orientation settings, your Sim will act romantically as they currently did before this feature was released. They don't have a natural attraction to a particular gender, their attraction can change through play and they can WooHoo with any gender." said.
However, it will be critical and somewhat encouraging to note that this new sexual orientation feature cannot be turned off. SimGuruJessica explained this decision in a very firm and affirming language.
“As we try to give players the option to change certain game features, LGBTQIA+ identities are a fact of life and there will be no toggles to turn on and off.”
In February, EA announced that it would not sell the My Wedding Stories expansion pack, which focuses on promotional videos and marketing materials for a lesbian couple, in Russia due to concerns over the country's anti-gay propaganda law. After the backlash from the fans, EA reversed its decision and sold the package unchanged in Russia.
The sexual orientation update will be added to The Sims 4 this month, and the High School Years expansion will launch on July 28.
