Seasons Gamescom Information

Splash! The kid jumps from the diving board. Yes, that was a jump not a dive and a splashy one too. His mom who’s standing nearby is got all wet. Kiddo needs to practice a lot more until he gets those different dives down. Luckily the boy is still young and rather skinny for the bigger and heavier the Sim, the more will get wet around the pool when they do a splash bomb.

In the background we can see the summer gnome (in the presentation, not the pic). There will be one for each Season.

The rest of the presentation is about the same as the Live Chat one but we get the opportunity to ask a few questions. The Add-On is still pre-beta and there are many things the producers Ben Bell and King Choi can’t or don’t want to show us.

Option menu

King briefly shows us the options menu but only one tab so the announced option to turn off the memories completely is not visible. We do get to see the options to turn off the seasons and how to set their length. There is a checkbox and a slider for each one. If we want a certain seasons and the check mark is set, the slider can go from 3 to 28 days in length. 7 days is the default. They did say earlier that this options were per savegame and not for the whole game as all other options settings but this was neither confirmed or denied.

There’s also options to turn off some of the weather conditions such as Hail, Fog, Snow and Rain and you can choose if you want your temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Summer activities

Apart from football/soccer (new skill), Hot Dog eating contest (with a week supply of Hotdogs as prize) and rollerskating (new skill), Sims finally can swim in bodies of water. Only water added to the world itself (not lakes and ponds on lots) are swim-able. Corresponding to that there’s also fins and a wet suit and new swim wear available. They also mentioned goggles.

While in the water they can pull out a swim raft out of nowhere and can read a book while enjoying the sun.

How far they can swim depends on their athletic skill and energy. If they get tired they do tend to rather wanna go home though. They can’t drown (and won’t get eaten by sharks either). The producer thought that would be to cruel. Through this new feature Sims are now able to explore new territory and swim out to islands (BlackyPanther from the German Site Blacky’s Sims Zoo and I were pondering the consequences for CAW worlds that made their islands and bodies of water unroutable. Chances are that those will need updating to work properly with this new feature that will come with the Seasons Patch).

Sims that don’t want to lay around in the sun to get a tan, can use the special tanning both to get a spray tan which in bad cases can malfunction and leave your Sim with all kinds of weird patterns on their body.

To show that all festival objects can be used on any lot, the beach now has a food stand that serves different foods which change with every season and a Snow Cone Stand where Sims can buy different kinds of Snow Cones – including a flavor only for adult Sims.

There’s finally a actual purpose for those face paintings we have in CAS since the beginning (there well be new ones added as well): There’s a new face painting booth where Sims can get a face painting.

Outerwear

Clothing gets a new category: Outerwear. Outerwear is only important in fall and Winter but you can change your Sim in warm cloth in the Summer. I’m unsure what consequences that will have.

In cold weather Sims need warm clothing to not get sick.

In warm weather Sims can start to sweat and even spontaneously combust. Wearing swimwear helps prevent that.

They did not show us any of the new outerwear so I’m unsure on how it all works and if they change into outerwear automatically when they leave the house on a cold day.

There are no plans to update existing Store Cloth (at least there wasn’t until I asked about it)

Festivals and Holidays

The festivals run throughout the seasons on one designated lot but it is possible to use the festival objects on any lots you like.

Holidays occur at the end of each Season and there’s a different one for each.

Misc

A new sun symbol next to the Sims portrait shows the current weather. Hovering over it shows the current temperature and how much remains of the Season.
Seasons change gradually and when it starts to snow the world will get whiter and whiter. Depending on the temperature, snow might not stick on the ground.
There are different levels of snowfall
There are new traits such as fan of warm or cold weather
Sims can become resistant against sun burn and freezing to death but I’m unsure if that’s related to their trait or if that goes for everyone.
There’s gonna be a weather channel

Remarks

I liked what I saw very much. I would buy this EP for the diving board alone and as soon as my swiss store decides to change their release date of November 30th to the correct one, I’m gonna pre-order.

Please note that things can still change and there might be stuff there was simply misunderstood (either the question or the answer). Since we were not allowed to take pictures or record at the presentation, we all have to rely on our notes and memories.

I will allow comments here so if you have any questions, feel free to ask (don’t know if I can answer them though)

A diving board for Crinrict