The next update for The Sims 4 is scheduled to release on all platforms on September 22 at around 1 p.m. ET, Polygon reported, citing the patch notes EA published for it. The update concentrates on how Sims behave on their own, alongside a set of stability and bug fixes.
According to the notes, Sims will make eye contact during conversations far more often. After using the bathroom, they will wash their hands at the sink nearest the toilet rather than walking to the kitchen sink. Sims whose Bladder need is very low will move faster, and Sims with a low Energy need will sleep through the night instead of waking to take up unrelated activities.
Relationship balance
The update also changes how relationships behave over time. Polygon reported that relationship satisfaction had been falling much faster than the development team intended, which made couples unhappy sooner than they should have been. The patch addresses that decay rate.
Sims who share a poor relationship dynamic will also try to keep their distance from each other after the update. According to the notes, those Sims will not start conversations with each other autonomously, and when they do end up talking, they will try to wrap the interaction up quickly.
Fixes
On the technical side, the update addresses a problem that has caused the Gallery, the game's hub for sharing player creations, to fail to load search results over recent months. EA's notes also say the team reviewed crash reports submitted by players to track down errors behind stability problems, and that the update includes fixes stemming from that work.
Polygon described autonomy as the update's main focus, part of the Sims team's ongoing effort to make Sims act more realistically. The changes to eye contact, sink choice, movement speed and sleep are each small, but they arrive together in a single patch that also carries the relationship rebalance and the Gallery fix.
