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This Life Sim Player Still Plays With Life the Old-Fashioned Way

This Life Sim Player Still Plays With Life the Old-Fashioned Way

Stephanie Liu
June 30, 2026

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Every time I play a life sim or life sim adjacent, be it Pokopia or Tomodachi Life, I inevitably drift back to The Sims 3. Despite its tendency to fail on me (I am literally troubleshooting a persistent Error 12 and finding solutions to an insane memory leak issue as I type this), there’s something about the game and everything you can do in it that keeps drawing me in.

For numerous reasons, I am not happy with Electronic Arts. But this dissatisfaction was omni-present since The Sims 4. Now, I’m well aware of all the developmental issues that went on with the game before it even came out, but it’s been over a decade, and EA basically said they don’t plan on ever making a Sims 5 that might be a more stable release than the messed-up spaghetti code monstrosity that The Sims 4 is. While The Sims 3 will surely entertain me until the day I die, I, as well as many others, am looking forward to any other franchise or game that might shake things up and introduce something new to the life sim genre.

inZoi could have been it, if not for the generative AI. Life By You could have been it, but it was cancelled. A lot of people have their hopes pinned on Paralives, as do I. Despite what I said in my preview of it and what I’m about to say here, I still do.

I’ve always been so curious as to the lack of life sim sandbox games. Surely, it can’t just be because The Sims cornered the market. After all, the popularity of Stardew Valley certainly hasn’t stopped people from flooding marketplaces like Steam with their own iterations of a farming sim. I also genuinely do not think that the life sim genre is so “niche” that The Sims alone can fulfil the demand from the entire base of players or interested parties, no matter how many games there are now in the franchise.

That being said, I, for one, immediately went back to The Sims 3 after the Paralives preview, and I’ve stayed there. Stardew Valley is a juggernaut in the farming sim world, but it’s not the first, so the equation of “farming sim = Stardew Valley” simply does not exist. Meanwhile, The Sims was the first mainstream franchise to really pull off this unique sandbox style of gameplay that I’m willing to bet most people immediately think of it, even if they don’t play it, when they think of “life sim.” When I feel the itch to play a life sim, I don’t think, “I’ll play Paralives,” I think, “Let me turn on The Sims.”

This is only my opinion, but I believe the main reason for a lack of life sims is that the difficulty of making a “good” life sim versus the potential rewards is too risky for many developers. Something I noticed in Paralives is the lack of interactivity in a lot of objects. The Parafolk couldn’t put food into the fridge, meaning that if there were leftovers, my only choice was to stuff my Parafolk full or toss away the food. I bought a coffee machine for my Parafolk because they were sleepy before a shift, but I couldn’t actually use the machine… It was just there as decor.

I remember reading how Will Wright and the original Maxis team went about building the first Sims game, and how they would think of objects and everything that a person could do with or to that object. Then, they coded all those interactions into the game. That sounds incredibly difficult when you consider the sheer amount of objects that people interact with as just part of a daily routine! It’s a lot of work put into a game that might flop for a reason as simple as, “I’d rather play The Sims.”

This isn’t even getting into the AI of the virtual people! Once, I made a Sim in The Sims 2, and she married a guy who refused to sleep in the same bed as her whenever she was pregnant. Even when I took control of him and forced him into the bed, he would wake himself up and leave. The moment she popped out the baby, he was back in the bed with her, but if she became pregnant again, he would exile himself to the couch. I still genuinely have no idea what was pushing his AI to do that, but it’s the sort of convincing simulated behavior that made The Sims 2 feel really magical.

I talked about this in my Paralives preview as well, but the lack of individuality in my Parafolk, whether autonomous or controlled, was something that I really hoped (and still hope) to see a fix for soon, mostly because I play life sims to observe the behavior of these virtual people. That being said, I have friends who much prefer to just wreck Sims’ lives, as well as friends who prefer to build and decorate. Life sims need to accommodate those play styles as well, so how do you balance your resources and time? I suppose the broadness of the definition of “life sim” is also part of the difficulty in making a sandbox like The Sims.

Maxis really had something special on their hands (so it’s crazy that the executives almost killed the project out of lack of belief), so it’s sad to see the state the franchise is in now. A saving grace for me is that a lot of players are coming back to The Sims 3, which is fantastic because I genuinely felt like I was in the two percent of Sims players still playing The Sims 3 for the past decade or so. Maybe we’ll go back to that number of players as Paralives receives more updates and works out its kinks. When that day comes, though, I might consider the unthinkable and put down that plumbob.

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