Up until now, much of what Maxis has shown us about The Sims 4 has been centered on the changes made to Sims' behavior. With rich emotions and deep and unique personalities, The Sims 4 allows you to tell all-new stories with your sims. But that's not all the new game has improved upon.
Creating and sharing content has always been a major aspect of The Sims franchise. But there's never really been an easy, simplified way to do so. In The Sims 3, if you wanted to share content or find content online you'd have to leave the game, go to the Sims 3 website, find the content you want, download it to your game, install it through the launcher, and finally start a new game to access that content. It was a lengthy, clunky process to say the least.
Thankfully, that will all change in The Sims 4 thanks to the addition of the Gallery. Shown to us in a presentation at E3, the Gallery is basically a hub built within the game that includes all of the user-created content that has been shared online. This hub allows you to browse content and, with the simple click of a button, instantly download and add it to your game. No need to exit or restart your game to access it. In the presentation, an entire house — which was fairly large, I might add — was downloaded and added to our game in a matter of seconds.
In addition to adding new content with the simple click of a button, The Sims 4 also includes another fan requested feature: the ability to personalize and share individual rooms. So instead of adding individual objects from the traditional Sims build catalog, you can find entire rooms that are already decorated in the gallery. Once you select the room, you can add the room to your house and it'll automatically reshape your wall structure to accommodate the room. Again, downloading and adding a room to the house took just seconds.
Maxis noted that the demo was connected to EA's live servers, meaning the speed in which content was added to the game will be the same "fast and fluid experience" we'll get when the game launches. I'm a little skeptical about the speed — especially given EA's history of servers — but I sure hope it's that fast.
