After several years of semi-public development, life simulation game Paralives is ready to nail down a release year. But it's not this year. Though some of the other upcoming competition for The Sims is expected to arrive in 2024, Paralives has revealed in a new trailer that it's targeting 2025 for its early access release. 

Paralives has already done a lot to entice me with its building features like resizable windows and furniture and curved walls, but it's now showing off what the life simulation side of the game will look like.

To start with, Paralives demonstrates parts of its Paramaker character creation with personality stats that you can level up as you play, talents, perks, and a “vibe” selection with choices like energetic, gloomy, or serious. Paras can also have customized sleeping habits and cleaning habits, which is interesting to see separated out from the personality types.

The new trailer spends a lot of time focused on group activities and how they work. To socialize or move as a group you can click and drag to select several Paras at once and instruct them to chat or go for a walk or exercise, among other things. As they're talking, the “together bar” fills up and after an in-game hour you'll get dealt a selection of relevant “together cards” to choose from in the conversation. These are pretty familiar life sim choices like talking about hobbies, choosing to flirt, and other topics sometimes dictated by your Para's personality. 

It feels like this is a control valve for the extreme conversation action queueing that we're all guilty of in The Sims. We've all gotten a Sim date within a couple hours by just incessantly choosing flirt actions over and over, so the hour-long Together Bar seems likely to slow the development of relationships to a less frantic pace.

The other announcement in the Paralives trailer is that though the game itself will be pay-for-purchase, it will never have paid DLCs, only free expansions. That's all still quite a ways out, given that it won't even begin public early access until next year, but is a welcome announcement to throw in the mix of upcoming life sim competition.