Surprise Sims 4 update gives your neighbors more choices in their own lives

In The Sims 3, characters that didn’t live in your personal household had more autonomy. They made their own life decisions, went to work, and generally lived their life separately from the Sim family you created. That wasn’t the case with The Sims 4 — until now.

The latest Sims 4 patch brings the feature, dubbed Neighborhood Stories, to the latest game. As Eurogamer points out, a previous update allowed neighborhood Sims to make life-changing decisions only if guided by the player. You could determine if they were going to change careers, start a family, or anything else of that scale. The latest patch opens the floodgates: the rest of the Sims in your town can now live full lives and make every decision completely autonomously.

Fortunately, there are some options for continuing to control all other Sims, if that’s what you desire. EA’s blog post about the update explains that you can toggle certain choices on and off. You can allow neighborhood Sims to retire or adopt a child but not move out of town, for example. Just note that everything is toggled on when the update is first applied.

Prior to the Neighborhood Stories update, The Sims 4 received the My Wedding Stories Game Pack. As the name implies, this was all about crafting dream weddings for your Sims, from the invitations to the ceremony to the reception. It allowed for marriages between any adult Sim, and it included wedding ceremonies from various cultures around the world.