First topic at SimsCamp was the new CAS.

Jill Johnson (SimGuruJill) showed us the the most important chances and then we got to try CAS on the computer ourselves.

The new CAS looks very lean and with only a few controls which gives you a bit of a scare at first. The biggest change is that there are (hardly) any sliders anymore. Everything is manipulated directly on the Sim itself.

You can see how that works in the official Sims 4 gameplay video

Create a Sim

Not all aspects of your Sim can be changed but there’s a few new areas like the Sims butt, the size fo of their feet or the size of the pupil.

If you click on the Sim, you’ll see the the usual choices. You can change the tops and the bottom as well as shoes and accessory. The button for accessory was gray, so there was no chance of checking those out but we were told that there are more choices that you had with Sims 3.

There are two sliders to change the body shape and how muscular you want them to be.

Pants now automatically adapt to the shoes your Sims is wearing so the strange effect we saw in Sims 3 when Sims were wearing long pants and boots is a thing of the past. It’s not possibel to choose though if you want the pants to go over or in the boots. That depends on the kinds of pants the Sims is wearing.

Another change is the randomizer. You can now randomize many different aspects on their own. Do you like the face but not the figure of your Sim ? Just change the things you don’t like. You can change the following separately: Body Shape and Size, Face, Skin Tone, Hair, Facial Hair, Voice, Clothing. All combinations are possible.

If you click on the Sims head, the camera zooms on it and you can shape the face how you like it. By double-clicking on it can even get into advanced mode that lets you manipulate even more details. You always work directly on the Sim itself

Besides the choices for hairstyle and facial hair you can finally also combine any hat with any hairstyle. Accessories and make-up was missing from the version at Gamescom but you can see that those aspects are still in the game.

Properties

Hidden at the left hand side of the screen, you’ll find a window you can hide and unhide as you like

Important aspects like name, gender, age group, traits and aspirations can be chosen here.

They didn’t tell us any details on age groups, traits and aspirations so it’s unclear what can be expected of it.

Like before you can give your Sim a unique voice. There’s a slider for the pitch and three choices for the style for of the voice.

Sims 4 Sims now have a default walk style. At the moment there were three different ones. The walk style can be overridden by emotions. You will find more details in the that post.

 

 

 

You can preview the walk styles which are based on emotions directly in CAS. You can do this by clicking on one of three icons in the lower left corner of the screen.

Export/Picture

To finish up you can take a picture and have that send to an email address of your choice or have it saved to the Sims 4 folder.

There are no export options for the Sims at the moment but we will need to put them in our games somehow so that’s just missing and hence could not be shown.

Further Infos

• Sims can be left- or right handed
• CASt is missing at the moment and there were only a few color options
• There’s no info if there will be tattoos in the base game or not.

Conclusion

The new CAS has more room for the actual Sim and the creation is a lot more intuitive. It does still need a lot of work since it was sometimes quite hard to get the desired result since some of the manipulation points were not as smooth as one could hope for. This is still being worked on though.

The height of the Sims is can’t be manipulated but they would need to do a lot more animations if it was possible. Hands and fingers also can’t be changed and feet can only be made smaller or bigger.

The color choices are very limited at the moment but there will be more in the final game and the missing CASt is discussed all over the Internet. EA has noticed the uproar on this and there is a chance that they reconsider. It’s their chance to show that they really DO listen.