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The Sims 4 Devs Add Genealogy And Treats For 15th Anniversary

By Erin Staley
Published on: 05:20 PST, Feb 3, 2015

Are you still reeling from the news that the first expansion pack for The Sims 4 has been delayed until at least April 2015? Well, the latest announcement from The Sims franchise developer Maxis may take away some of the sting.

Maxis just announced that the monthly update for The Sims 4 will come early this month. How early? Today! What could spur such a sense of urgency? In a move clearly designed to appease and please fans, Maxis will officially add genealogy to The Sims 4.

Longtime fans of The Sims 4 who focus on “family play” will no doubt be pleased with the new patch. Fans of family play typically focus on story telling through generations of a particular family. One The Sims 4 player explained as follows on the official The Sims forums.

“I’m a family player-I’ve always loved creating families in sims, starting a family from scratch and watching as my family progress over multiple generations. I can play one family for years-and I loved seeing their progress from the original sim down to my current sim with a family tree. I love how different each family can be from another previous family-they all have different traits and it’s so funny to watch the family dynamic in each family shift. I used to look at my family tree with pride-I would look back at all their photos with fond memories of the time I shared with those sims. [sic]”

According to the patch notes, genealogy in The Sims 4 will not only show who a sim is related to for up to 4 generations back and 5 generations forward, it will also allow players to see how to sims are related, and how any particular sim died. Genealogy isn’t the only change to The Sims 4 brought by the latest content patch. Many of the features are specifically targeted to fan requests via Twitter and the official forums for The Sims 4. Whims have been updated to refresh automatically if a sim sleeps for more than 4 hours. There are also new achievements to reward players who focus on family and legacy play. There will also be fewer pop up tutorials, a which had been a major source of complaint for longtime players. There is also new content to celebrate Valentine’s Day and the 15th anniversary of The Sims franchise.

There were two more gifts for fans of The Sims 4. For players that sampled the game via the Game Time feature on Origin, a 33 percent discount will be waiting for them when their trial period ends. The discount will bring the hefty price tag of The Sims 4 down to $40. For long suffering fans of The Sims franchise who own a Mac, the official release date for the Mac version of The Sims 4 is set for February 17. According to International Business Times, Mac users will need to meet at the following minimum specifications for the game to work:

  • Minimum OS Required: Mac OS X 10.7.5 (Lion).
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or better.
  • Memory: 4 GB of RAM chipset or higher.
  • Hard Disk: Total of 11 GB free storage space. 10 GB for the game and 1 GB additional space for custom content and saved games.
  • Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro or better. Video memory size, or VRAM, must be at least 256 MB.
  • Origin account and Internet connection are required for product activation.
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