Why Life by You’s Lack of Loading Screens Could Be a Game-Changer

Highlights

• Open world in Life By You eliminates loading screens, creating immersive gameplay.
• The Sims 4 has faced criticism for excessive loading screens, impacting player experience.
• Life By You’s innovation may set a new standard for life simulation games, sparking competition.

Many players of life simulation games such as The Sims 4 will have encountered the barriers to gameplay that loading screens bring, especially if they’re so prolific that they interrupt gameplay and movement from place to place. Life By You, a life simulation game by developer Paradox Tectonic, has showcased in its launch trailer an open world without loading screens.

This is instrumental in the life simulation genre because, while open worlds have become the norm in other genres of video games, loading screens can create a massive break in immersion. Life By You‘s decision to remove loading screens also makes it stand apart from its competitor, The Sims 4. With the ability to not only create entire worlds and have characters live out 75 years, players will be able to watch the other characters who exist in the town live their lives. This is important for creating a game world that feels alive and lived-in.

Life By You and The Sims

Loading screens are necessary for video games to process and render large video games, and are especially important for PCs at the lower range of the required specs to run the game. As technology improves, this has become less necessary. Life By You will give players a complete open world experience. This may mean that loading Life By You on older PCs will take longer, but some gamers may be happy to make that concession if it means removing loading screens within the actual game.

Eliminating loading screens will fundamentally change the experience of playing Life By You because the player will have access to the entire world at once. The announcement trailer for Life By You showcased switching control of different characters from across the world, with the characters living in the game freely moving rather than being locked behind a loading screen. All of these aspects make the gameplay experience feel more natural, while the game world itself should feel like a living world where the player is able to see the impact of their actions. While this is possible on a smaller scale in a game with loading screens, removing them creates a world of potential.

The Impact of Removing Loading Screens in Life By You

Life By You is one of the few life simulators that have launched as direct competitors to The Sims, a series which has changed significantly over its many iterations. While many of the changes have been positive for The Sims as a whole, some of the changes that were positively received have been reversed. The Sims 4 has walked back many of the innovations that The Sims 3 made, notably the open-world that came with minimal loading screens.

Despite The Sims 4 launching with loading screens to minimize loading times, the number of loading screens that have been added in the years since mean that much of the time playing The Sims 4 is spent triggering and watching loading screens. With the introduction of The Sims 4: For Rent, loading screens are worse than ever, rivaling The Sims 2 in creating delays when switching or traveling between lots.

Life By You‘s removal of loading screens is a bold step forward that sets it apart from The Sims 4. Committing to an open world in a life simulation could set a new precedent for the genre, and set expectations for some that other games in the genre such as Project Rene will follow suit.