This week, Alex Massé, the creator of the upcoming PC social simulation game Paralives, posted fresh footage of the game’s character generator, indicating that players would be able to use a color wheel to customize their avatars, a popular feature from The Sims 3 but is lacking in The Sims 4. Since the game’s announcement, similarities to The Sims franchise have been made, with some even dubbing Paralives a potential challenger for the long-running franchise. Despite the fact that The Sims has mainly controlled the simulation game industry for decades, Paralives’ enormous customization choices may offer the new game a fighting chance.
Paralives was first announced in 2019, with the promise of being a highly customizable simulation game. Alex Massé, the head of new independent developer Paralives Studio, has been in charge of development. Many Sims fans are excited about the game since it expands on what The Sims 4 has to offer – The Sims 4 has less material than prior installments, and many intricate customization choices from the previous version are missing. Create a Style was a tool in The Sims 3 that allowed players to use a color wheel to create bespoke color and pattern blends for everything from Sim clothes and hair to furnishings. The Sims 4 also removed the sliders that allowed players to personalize their Sims’ facial features and body proportions instead of requiring them to click and drag features to change them. While some players found this to be more natural, others found it difficult to be exact while designing characters.
This week, Paralives Studio (via PCGamesN) released new footage of the “Paramaker” in a video demonstrating the game’s extensive customization options. In Paralives, the studio demonstrated house-building mechanisms, and it appears that they’ve gone into just as much detail when it comes to character creation. Many capabilities of the Paramaker are demonstrated in the movie, including a color wheel and a great number of intricate sliders. The color wheel may be utilized for both clothes and skin tone, as well as “unique patterns,” according to PCGamesN, hinting that there are even more options than color. The video’s slider usage highlights how the player may modify every feature of their character’s body and face, including facial shape, muscular definition, height, and more. Tattoos, mole and freckle placement, and body hair are among the other personalization choices.
Many of the features shown in this video have been requested by Sims 4 players since the game’s debut. Although EA just released a patch for The Sims 4 that brought a slew of new color options to the game’s build mode, no new Sim creation options have been announced. Many gamers lament the loss of The Sims 3 color wheel and the personalization it afforded; many claims that being limited to EA’s color variants makes designing color-coordinated ensembles difficult and inhibits inventiveness.
It’s no surprise that many Sims fans are intrigued by the possibilities provided in the latest Paralives video. The Sims franchise’s fans love it because it lets them construct people and stories in whatever way they want, yet the lack of control over essential details like height and color may be a huge turnoff for gamers. While the complete Paralives experience is still unclear, it appears that it will provide a lot of people with just what they’re looking for.
