Paralives Promises No Paid DLCs, a Perfect Competitor to the Sims Franchise
Paralives has been out for a week now, and already, it’s made waves in the simulation community. The life sim genre is hard to get into with the giant franchise of Sims looming over fresh new titles.
But so far, Paralives is proving to be the perfect competitor and has already made great promises to fans. For instance, Paralives promises no paid DLCs, unlike the controversial high-priced expansions with the Sims franchise.
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While it’s only in Early Access, it’s already proving to be a contender in the genre. In fact, fans are already seeing what it’s doing better than the popular Sims franchise. One of those things is the fantastic customization options. Not only are there variants to multiple items, but resizing items is incredibly easy. You can shrink, enlarge, or even widen items. And you can also place them wherever you want, in whatever orientation.
They also have amazing color options: A color wheel! Not a fan of color schemes and want to create your own? On both items and customizing your actual Para, you have freedom of all kinds of color combinations. It truly is up to your imagination.
Along with that, it’s truly an open world, which means you don’t have to worry about a load screen to travel to the park. And there are so many more options when it comes to going places, as shops and restaurants can be loaded into to explore.
Gameplay is also more exciting, as tons of features aren’t in the base Sims game. For example, your characters, or Paras, can get sick, which will affect their appetite and productivity.
And speaking of base game Sims, a lot of content is opened after purchasing expansion packs, add-ons, and more. But for Paralives, the devs have promised they’re not going to offer paid DLCs. In a recent AMA on Reddit, the developers confirmed that “There will never be paid DLCS, only free updates! Even after the Early Access.”
Which begs the question, how are they going to keep development going if they’re not going to get paid content like that? Thankfully, they have the answer. “We wanted to make a game we would like to play ourselves without the need to purchase a lot of extra content and we are happy to deliver that.”
“Because the team is small (only 15 people) the sales we made so far will sustain us for many years, even if we increase the size of the team so we’re safe and really grateful for that!”
This is a huge change for those who have dealt with Sims. Each expansion pack, which does offer new content, averages around $40, while add-ons can vary between $5 to $20. It’s almost like buying a whole new game each time you want a bit more content, which just seems egregious for many fans.
Free content in the future is an amazing move when competing with the Sims, though, I wouldn’t even mind if they offered reasonably priced bonus content in the future for $5 here and there, just to help support them further.
To say the least, the game is familiar enough, yet unique enough to become addictive, and for many longtime Sims fans, it is their new favorite life sim. While the game is only in Early Access and will be for a few years, I’m excited to follow their journey in creating one of the best life sim games in the genre.
