The next Life by You release date is fast approaching as the first Paradox Tectonic game promises to change and reinvent the very essence of the life games genre. To mark the occasion, we at – Game News caught up with studio head and industry veteran Rod Humble at GDC 2023 in San Francisco, and learned a lot about how Paradox approaches the genre with Life by You.

Humble is also known as the former CEO of Second Life Creator Linden Lab and for leading The Sims label at EA during development of The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, so he has quite the pedigree for the genre. We spoke to Humble about Life by You in 2020, but now he can tell us a whole lot more.

“In most life simulations, you turn 20 and it doesn’t matter how old you are today,” Humble says with a smile in our small meeting room. “If you’re 18 you’ll be your 20s, if you’re 50 you’ll be your 20s. People love that mid-twenties! You will make yourself and then you will play a little with your life.

It’s the game everyone’s been waiting for from Life by You, and Humble explains that if you go looking for it, you’ll “find it”. That’s not all, because Humble understands that those of us who stick to life sims find their niche and can focus on it for thousands of hours. The new game development tools, which will be available in early access, will allow us to customize our Life by You game to the nth degree, just as Paradox Tectonic created it.

“It’s the oldest game for most life sim players,” says Humble, “you tend to specialize a bit.”

Humble acknowledges that some players will create houses, some will create characters, and even more will specialize further, adding that Paradox hopes “with all these new tools” that some will “just create games”, with clothing designers being their specific example.

“You might say, ‘All I want to do is make sample t-shirts, and I just share my sample t-shirts in-game, everyone loves my sample t-shirts.’ You can just be a fashion designer thinking, “Yeah, I do sample sundresses.” That’s all I do.

The clothing samples are just one of many examples from Humble, another involving turning bushes into working toilets. He calls all of these different groups of lifesim creators “groups,” from builders to filmmakers, and describes how he wants Life by You’s dev tools to help everyone create exactly what their niche is known for.

“All the tools we use to make the game are built into the game,” Humble tells me, “and we share them with players, there’s no hidden developer mode where we do things they don’t. can’t, all mods can use the same tools developers use.

“For each of these groups, we want to spend time in Early Access to make sure the game features are fully robust and also to develop them in coordination with player creators going forward,” adds Humble.

If you want even more while you wait for Life by You to release later this year, our list of the best games like The Sims 4 is sure to keep you busy. You can also check Life by You system requirements to see if the open-world game can run on your PC or laptop.

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