Life By You, Paradox Interactive’s rival to EA and Maxis’ popular The Sims series, simulates every second of every character’s life.

The upcoming The Sims competitor Life By You, goes beyond simulating every second of a character’s virtual life. This is not limited to the characters you control but also includes the various NPCs that populate the game’s open world.

Developed by Paradox Tectonic and published by Paradox Interactive, Life By You is an upcoming life-sim directed by Rod Humble, developer of The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.

The game, announced earlier this month, will launch with early access on September 12, 2023. Paradox promises that the game will be deeper and more expansive than its predecessor. It will offer a detailed life simulation in a seamless open world.

Humble says Life By You’s comprehensive life simulation goes so far as to model every second of every character’s life. The head of the studio talked about this feature in a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. As Humble explained, agents in the game live more than 75 simulated years in the game. There are no loading screens either, so there’s no room for fudging the numbers to fudge the passage of time. As a result, it was necessary to ensure that all the characters in the game existed in the same time frame. This meant that every second of their virtual lives had to be simulated.

This doesn’t stop with the player characters and extends to the Life By You NPCs. Humble explained that most life simulators use a loading screen to isolate different locations. The characters that populate these areas thus cease to exist when players load into the next area. But here, all the characters in the game exist in the same world. They play by the same rules. They have their own homes and connections; players can meet them in town.

Life By You players can also take control of NPCs at any time and let them be free to act, explore or tinker with their lives.

All characters also exist on equal terms. This means that players can do anything NPCs can and vice versa. The characters in the game act on their own initiative when the player does not control them. This includes significant life decisions such as getting married. Perhaps with a character the player has never even met.

The concept of modelling each character’s life is very appealing to Humble. Although this has proven to be quite a challenge for the developers, the years of effort will hopefully pay off when Life By You is released this fall.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun