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The Sims 4 Announces New Sexual Orientation Feature

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Electronic Arts have introduced a brand new addition into The Sims 4 as the team has added a Sexual Orientation feature. Revealed during a special livestream event, which you can check the video for it below, this will be a free update for all players that will allow you to decide the sexual orientation of your characters. Being released alongside the High School Years pack, now you will be able to find the new sexual orientation feature within the Create a Sim menu. Once you change the settings for that character, you'll see that Sim experience attraction in different ways. Including but not limited to: attraction to the same or different sex, experiment with attraction naturally through interactions with other Sims over time, feel physical but not romantic attraction and vice versa, or not feel any attraction at all. We have a snippet of the developer blog about the addition, which you can read in full here from SimGuruJessica, the design lead on the High School Years Expansion Pack, and includes instructions on how to access it.

You can now change your sexual orientation in The Sims 4, courtesy of Electronic Arts.
You can now change your sexual orientation in The Sims 4, courtesy of Electronic Arts.

As a team, we hold creativity, discovery, inclusivity and play as core values and strive every day to celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion for our people and community. With that in mind, we're delighted to bring the Sexual Orientation feature to all Simmers. Between this update and the recent pronouns update, we're taking several strides forward into being a game that respects and celebrates the nuance and color of everyday life. It is important to acknowledge that these are steps in a journey that we are still mapping out. There is much further to go, and while I can't get into the details of where exactly we go next, please know that we are committed to continuing to improve our representation of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Authenticity is a point that often comes up in regards to features like this, and rightly so. As such I'll try to peel the curtain back a bit and speak to our efforts in making sure we got this right. Many members of [The Sims 4] team, myself included, are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. That said, each one of us on the team represents only a narrow slice of lived experiences. As such we've worked extensively with GLAAD and the It Gets Better Project to ensure that we've captured the widest possible range of viewpoints on how to approach this feature in a manner that respects and elevates the community.

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Gavin SheehanAbout Gavin Sheehan

Gavin is the current Games Editor for Bleeding Cool. He has been a lifelong geek who can chat with you about comics, television, video games, and even pro wrestling. He can also teach you how to play Star Trek chess, be your Mercy on Overwatch, recommend random cool music, and goes rogue in D&D. He also enjoys hundreds of other geeky things that can't be covered in a single paragraph. Follow @TheGavinSheehan on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vero, for random pictures and musings.
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