Personality

Much of the personality system in the Gamescom build of CAS are disabled but we were able to glean a lot of further information out of the Producers. I should point out now that a lot of the community have picked up on CAS images and assumed that there are only 5 ages in Sims 4. I can confirm that these images are placeholders and do not represent all ages at all, there are likely to be more. Notice they are all the same size, the game doesn't show ages like that, they are smaller to bigger and then smaller again for Elder. We heard Producers mention Teens, Kids and Elders. Right now, the demo and all media assets only show Young Adult.

So you can see from my image here that as well as Gender and Age you can still choose Traits. We're told there are over 50 in the base game (more in the Emotional Gameplay section later). Sims also have Aspirations and the one you see here is linked to the Astronaut career in the game (you will see the spaceship in the Gamescom demos and media assets).

Walk Style is new and a great addition to the game. You can choose the way your Sim will walk in game, from Perky, Snooty and Swagger. These are 'basic walk cycles' which can be overridden in game if the Sim is grumpy or happy or any other emotion takes over them. I also found out that children can inherit a walk cycle from one of the parents, depending on which traits they also inherit.

Voice Style isn't exactly new, we could pick Voice 1 or 2 etc., and change pitch before. For female Sims you can now choose either Sweet, Melodic or Lilted. For males you can chose from Clear, Warm or Brash. For Sims 4, the studio selected voice actors for the broadest range of content to keep Sims unique and gameplay less repetitive.

Other features are missing from this build. Producers talked about favourite colours and we know there are many food types, so I would expect to see those options appear as well at some point.

So that's my quick rundown of CAS. One last point on the look of the Sims; we have been talking among our Featured Artists about how the game looks and we realized that looking back, if you compare the core Sims 3 game images that were released at launch, the Sims (especially hair) don't look anywhere near as good as we have come to expect today in our game, thanks to later patches and custom hair from the community artists. We plan to jump in to Sims 4 looking forward and with an open mind. You might choose to hold off on that now, but you just wait until you see what we can tell you about Build/Buy and other aspects of the game in September when our embargoes are lifted!