Everything we know about Life By You: Release date, gameplay features, system requirements, and more

When is Life By You going to be released? Speaking as a fan, I'm the first person to acknowledge that it's super weird how there's never been a major competitor to The Sims, the blockbuster life simulation franchise that's closing in on its quarter-century of dominating the genre. That's all starting to change, though, thanks in no small part to the recent announcement of Life By You: a Sims-inspired sandbox from the studio behind Cities: Skylines.

As RPS' in-house life sim fanatic, it is my pleasure to bring you all the latest news on this game as soon as I learn it. So read on below for everything we know right now about Life By You, including the release date, system specs, gameplay and development details, and more.

Life By You release date

Life By You will be released into early access on September 12th, 2023 via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Given the scope and ambition of the game, it seems likely that early access will be a lengthy process, and I wouldn't expect Version 1.0 for a good while yet. However, given that games like this are basically works-in-progress for their entire active lifespan thanks to a regular combination of paid DLC and free updates, September 12th is really the most important date to mark on your calendar for this one.

Life By You developers

Life By You is being developed by Paradox Tectonic, a team helmed by Rod Humble, best known among life sim fans for his work on The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and Second Life. The publishers are Paradox Interactive, known for previously knocking off EA's crown when their lauded 2015 city builder Cities: Skylines put 2013's SimCity reboot to absolute shame.

Life By You system requirements

Life By You is expected to carry the following system requirements on PC:

These requirements are a hefty ask, and mark one of the major differences between Life By You and The Sims series, the latter of which has emphasised accessibility to players on lower-spec systems throughout The Sims 4 generation, and seems set to continue doing so with The Sims 5. Life By You is taking a different path, and it's no secret that you'll need a pretty darn good gaming PC in order to take part in the fun.

However, one definite saving grace is the confirmation that Life By You won't require a constant internet connection in order to play.

Life By You gameplay

It's immediately obvious to anyone who's played The Sims 3 that Life By You is cut from the same cloth: a broadly photorealistic, open-world life simulation that aims to be a seamless experience (read: no loading screens once you're in the game proper). The boast of being able to switch instantly to any NPC and control them is a one-up on the basic premise offered by the most recent games in The Sims series too, with the rest of the simulation continuing on under the command of each character's AI until you elect to swap once more. So yes, that does mean that your favourites will make choices you might not like if left to their own devices for too long. Choose wisely, I suppose.

The big boast of Life By You is that every aspect of the game's script will be customisable and moddable, with the central draw of the game being complete freedom for the player to create the world they want and tell the parts of any given character's story they find the most compelling without resorting to cheats. The trailer suggests that even things like character skills and traits will be freely adjustable by the player, although we haven't got much of an idea of how exactly that will work yet.

Katharine observed following her interview with Rod Humble that this seems to come at the expense of goal-oriented play for those who like their life simulation with a bit of challenge, since the promise of a sandbox without restrictions does by necessity remove some of the requirements for lateral thinking and careful planning that management-oriented Sims players thrive on. Humble seems confident, however, that test players have responded very positively to the game's flexibility, often choosing to set their own boundaries to tell stories in their own preferred way.

How does it compare to The Sims?

While it feels unfair to lean too hard on the Sims comparison, it's not like Life By You is going out of its way to hide its biggest influence, with a lot of emphasis being put on the places where Life By You will differ from The Sims.

While in The Sims your characters progress through "life stages", with a varying number of in-game days representing a whole chunk of the human lifespan, Life By You aims for more realistic ageing. An "agent" (the work-in-progress name for the game's simulated characters) will display their age in years lived, much like a real human. Although it's not yet clear quite how long each in-game year will last in terms of gameplay time, it does seem that impatient players will be given some freedom to skip forward (but not back) through a character's life span if they don't feel like waiting around for the next lifetime milestone.

Another big departure will be the inclusion of real conversations. Instead of pleasant babble in a made-up language with just enough variation to keep its repetitiveness from hitting the ear, Life By You aims to present dialogue between its characters in the player's language (albeit seemingly in text boxes rather than recorded speech). Characters will respond to various contextual factors like pre-existing relationship, the location in which the conversation is taking place, and the personalities of the interlocutors to result in what the developers hope will be a unique exchange every time.

You'll also be able to switch from a pulled-back view to an over-the-shoulder camera while you control your little simulated people in third-person, a feature which hasn't been seen in The Sims series since they stopped making console-only spin-offs.

You'll be able to pick up to 10 traits for your character, and one trait category will be "Family Background". This looks to let you establish what sort of childhood your adult characters had and how it affected them, which is certainly something new! Screenshots of a conversation between two characters working in an office seem to suggest that you'll be able to accompany your agents to work, a feature that has been available throughout The Sims series but only sporadically (and never for anything as prosaic as an office job).

That's all we know about Life By You right now, but we look forward to bringing you more details as they emerge! In the meantime, you might be interested to compare and contrast everything we know about The Sims 5 with the first-look at this game to see how the competition's shaping up.