From this images (tweeted by the official Sims account yesterday) we can infer that snowboarding, climbing, and tobogganing with a child will all be on offer. One image also shows two Sims in front of buildings that look like they may be Japanese in design. No confirmations, but it’d be nice to have an expansion that didn’t feel wholly North America-focused. For further demystification, look to the stream of the trailer, which goes live at 4pm BST/8am PT today.
The Sims 4 keeps up a pretty rigorous schedule of DLC releases. Recently we’ve had the Nifty Knitting stuff pack and the universally well-received Star Wars(TM) tie-in Journey To Batuu game pack. Expansions (like wot Snowy Escape is) are the biggest type of Sims 4 DLC, adding a new area to build in as well as sprinklings of new character traits, clothes, items, and so on. The last expansion was Eco Lifestyle, which added a whole bunch of green livin’ themed activities like dumpster diving. This instantly became my new favourite thing to do in the game. Elsewhere in the expanded Sims development universe, the team are still working on improving skin tones for Create-A-Sim. A note from the team outlined how a recent update on existing skin tones improved “the blotchy artefacts and ashy appearance of darker skin tones on mid and high spec machines”. In December they’re adding “at least a hundred” new skin tone swatches in different tones, but “with a particular emphasis on darker skin tones”. These are welcome changes! We must wait to see how the patches implementing them, and the Snowy Escape expansion, will break otherwise unrelated parts of the game. I myself have never been on a Snowy Escape, but my hope is that this expansion will be like the 80s movies I have seen, and that you will be able to get in a feud with a team of ski bullies from a rival high school and suchlike. This hope is fed by the bodacious skiing dungarees that the snowboarding Sim is wearing.
We’ve also got a few guides for the Sims 4, including the all important list of current cheat codes, for when you need to hit that motherlode.
