Previews: The Sims 4: Get to Work Hands-on Preview

Introduction

On March 12, 2015 I was one of the lucky fansites/YouTubers to be invited at the EA Benelux office here in The Netherlands. I asked Marii to come along with me. And we shared a computer at the event. Small disclaimer up front. We were not allowed to take any videos. And we could only take 10 screenshots. Luckily all of our screenshots were approved. 

The vlog will be uploaded by Marii on her lifestyle/vlog channel later this week. And I will record my Q&A video next week when I have more time and more answers to all your questions! Now without further ado, here's our compact The Sims 4: Get to Work preview. Enjoy!

A New Town

The new expansion pack The Sims 4: Get to Work comes with an additional town called Magnolia Promenade. It's a relatively small town, with only four lots. Three of them are occupied when you install the game, and one is empty. Of course it's possible to remove the existing buildings, and build your own shops. Or, if you like, you can actually live in Magnolia Promenade.

Unfortunately you can't have an at home business. However you could place the basic necessities on your business lot, like a toilet, shower, bed, and such. This way your Sims can take care of themselves while at work. Some things are restricted to the home lot. So you can't do everything on the retail lot.

New UI elements

One of the new things in the game is a screen where you can choose to go to a town. So there's Willow Creek and Oasis Springs, and with The Sims 4: Get to Work you also get Magnolia Promenade. And I think you'll also have an Outdoor Retreat icon later if you have this pack installed! I don't have any footage of this screen, but I loved the illustrations/animations!

Basements and Additional Levels

I should mention that this specific feature is not actually part of The Sims 4: Get to Work, but rather a new feature in an upcoming patch that will be free for everyone who owns a copy of The Sims 4!

We're getting basements back. And not only that, the basements can go two stories deep. Furthermore, the studio has also added an additional floor to the limit making the maximum 6 floors.

New Careers

There are three new careers in this expansion pack. There's doctor, detective, and scientist. The huge difference between the normal careers, and the new careers from Get to Work, is that you can now go with your Sims while they are at work. Not only that, you get to control them while they are at work. For the first time ever you can actually meet your co-workers at work, interact, and build relationships while at work.

Of course we were curious as well, how would this work with a family at home while your Sim is at work? And what about having several Sims with an active career? Well if your Sim has one of the three new careers, and a family at home, the family will just progress and go about their everyday lives while you are actively controlling your Sim at work. If you have several Sims with the new careers, you can choose which Sim you want to follow to work.

As a doctor your Sim gets to examine patients. They can then diagnose and treat them:

Doctors also get to perform surgery, and occassionally he/she gets an emergency call:

Doctors also do house visits for Sims who are too ill to go to the hospital. Doctors also deliver babies. It's optional to have the baby at the hospital.

It's possible for a doctor to misdiagnose their patients. And it won't go without consequences!

As a detective your Sim gets to go out and investigate crime scenes. They have to collect evidence and take photos, collect fingerprints, talk to the community and take citations, arrest suspects, and a lot more.

Note the crime scene, with the broken doll house as well!

In the scientist career your Sim gets to do experiments and invent things. It's also the career your Sim will have to pursue to get your hands on a Wormhole Generator:

(And in the background you can see the new photo studio that comes with The Sims 4: Get to Work!)

This new device will get you to an alien world For more about this, read the Aliens section.

I love this portal like robot. Here's our Sim Seafoam talking to the robot! In the background you can see one of her co-workers at work.

Scientists get to experiment, create serums, use devices on other Sims. It's perfect for a mad scientist kind of story. Some of the serums have benefits, and some of the serums are more mischievous.

New Locations

Each career comes with a work location. While these locations aren't rabbit holes, you can't actually see them in the neighbourhoods. 

As a doctor your Sim gets to work at the hospital. The hospital consists of a lot of examination rooms. Most of them have unique objects in them. There's one where patients get checked by the doctors, there's one with a body scan, another one where doctors perform surgery and also deliver babies.

When your Sim is a detective, he/she will travel to the police station and from there you get to do your job. This happens both at the police station and in the towns. The police station looks pretty rad. There are a bunch of offices where the policemen work. There are several jails where the inmates stay. I noticed in our save game that there were four inmates in one cell. And one of them was doing pushups!

As a scientist your Sim will travel to the Science Lab, as seen on the picture below. Mind you I had the walls down. But I really liked the fence haha!

New Skills

There are a couple of new skills in The Sims 4: Get to Work. One of them is the Photography skill. Good to know is that the photos by your Sims are transferable to the gallery. So that's funny. You could be playing with a photographer Sim, taking very unique photographs. And when you upload a lot with those photographs on the walls, it will appear in someone else's game. How cool is that? There are also two new cameras in the game. You can buy them from the Buy/Build catalog and place them into your Sim's inventory.

The other new skill is the Baking skill. Your Sims will need this skill if they want to open their own bakery. Learning this skill earns your Sim the ability to bake:

• Cheesy bread
• Whole wheat bread
• Donuts
• Cookies
• Bagels
• Cream Tarts

And probably a lot more than I managed to write down.

Shops!

It's Open for Business for The Sims 4, but better! No serious though. In The Sims 4: Get to Work Sims can have their own businesses where they can sell anything you've created or collected, and most of the items from the Build/Buy catalog.

For our preview Sim we decided to quickly build a humble bakery. And even though she didn't have a single skill point, she managed to prepare a display full of bread and snacks to sell. Without burning the place down haha!

You can have up to three employees, from what I've seen. At first you can only hire one. The rest needs to be unlocked as you progress.

You need to assign tasks to the employees. For example helping customers, answering their questions, clean the shop et cetera.

Employees can get a uniform that you get to pick for them. This is optional, but it looks cool if all the employees wear something that fits the store.

You don't necessarily have to hire employees. You could try to run the shop by yourself. But it's very hard to do. And I think the next time I'm going to play the expansion, I will get a family ready, skilled and everything, so they can run a shop together. Because The Sims 4: Get to Work may look a bit like The Sims 2: Open for Business. But you won't sell anything easily without persuasion. And you can't convince your customers to buy anything if you are taking on the role of cashier as well. And who is going to clean the place? And how about restocking the items that have been sold? Needless to say it's not easy to run a shop. I thought it was hard in The Sims 2: Open for Business. But I think it's actually much more challenging in The Sims 4: Get to Work.

As for the prices in the shops, you can really decide all of this yourself. You can make it really cheap, really expensive, and a number of variations in between. We decided to go with normal, the medium one.

Some of the interactions between seller and clients are: Discuss Shopping Preference and Ask about Price Range.

You can have pretty much any kind of shop you'd like. So if you want to have a furniture store, that's possible. Want to sell toilets? Sure why not! Of course there is the favourite of many of us; Bakeries. But maybe you are more into having your on gallery. Imagine your masterpiece creating Sim opening up a gallery. It sounds like something I'm going to try very soon. Sims can also open up their own clothing boutique. For this type of shop the studio added perfect new mannequins like the ones we had in The Sims 3: Into the Future. Your Sims can try on the outfits the mannequins are wearing, and if they like them, they can also buy them.

If your Sim is at work in their own store, but has a family at home, the family will continue to live their lives. They will take care of themselves, go to work and school, and so on. So time at home will continue.

Aliens

The special creature in this expansion pack is the alien. You might wonder if this is just a copy from the aliens in previous versions of The Sims, and I can tell you it's not. Because in this pack, your Sims can actually go to Sixam, the alien world. On Sixam, your Sim's cellphone won't work. On this location your Sim can collect and harvest a bunch of foreign things. What all these items are for, I can't tell for sure, but I bet it has something to do with the new science career.

Fun fact, Sixam is actually Maxis reversed, and this name has been used many times in previous Sim games (SimCity, Simsville et cetera). So it was fun to hear that name again!

Besides the fact that Sims can now travel to an alien location, aliens can still visit the normal world, using the same portal. This portal is the Wormhole Generator. This device is something your Sim has to invent and upgrade before he or she can use it. And to do this your Sim will need certain materials first. By using the Wormhole Generator, Aliens can go "home" and human Sims can travel to outer space.

Sixam looks very alien. To me it looked like a perfect mashup between The Sims 3: Lunar Lakes and Darkspore. It's beautiful!

For the first time ever, aliens are not only playable, but you can disguise them as regular Sims, and the neighbours may never know that their ordinary looking neighbour is in fact an alien. Now don't think aliens all look like regular Sims. Alien Sims can choose to look like an alien, or like a normal Sim. They can just switch it on and off. I love this, it's perfect for storytelling! 

Sims can get abducted by aliens in The Sims 4: Get to Work, and male Sims can also return pregnant!

Alien Sims have their own interactions as well. It's up to you to discover what these interactions are when you get your hands on the game!

Create a Sim

We immediately checked out the new items in Create a Sim as we needed a Sim to play with. We ended up creating Seafoam Shea, a seafoam haired lady which you can see throughout several of our screens. Seafoam tried out opening a bakery among other things. She also tried to become a scientist, but we didn't have enough time to get her there and check out all the other stuff. But back to CAS! There were a lot of new hairdos, a lot of them I really liked. I think you guys will appreciate it too. As for the clothing, a lot of new stuff there as well. Our Sim is wearing some new items in the screens in this preview. I personally love the ombre shirt. I made a similar item for The Sims 3 last year. XD

Build/Buy Mode

There were so many awesim new items in this expansion pack. But seeing as we could only take about 10 screenshots, we decided to focus on the gameplay rather than the objects.

But believe me when I say there are a lot of new cool items in this pack. A lot of modern objects.

The displays for stores look amazing. There are some fantastic basic items which I'm sure will come in handy in many future builds.

There were a lot of cool industrial objects (both build and buy!) And I also spotted some MySims objects, which always makes me happy.

For aliens we saw a cute sci-fi crib. I think all babies can sleep in it, but it just looked perfect for an alien baby.

There were also a lot of awesome prison objects which only unlock during the detective career. Which is something I get, but at the same time really dislike as a builder. Because when we builders use those items and put the houses on the gallery, the items will disappear if the other user's Sim hasn't unlocked these items yet.

A major new item in the game is the photo studio. This object allows you to have Sims pose for pictures, either alone or with family/friends. You can change the settings. We tried several, but one I can remember vividly is the Beach one. For a photo, see the Wormhole screenshot in this preview.

Death?

In our Q&A with SimGuruAzure we learned that there aren't any new death types, however, scientists should be really careful when it says not to press the red button. So keep that in mind!

Release Date

In the US The Sims 4: Get to Work will be released on March 31, 2015. In most of Europe the game will be released on April 2, 2015. In the UK it will be released on April 3rd, 2015.

Special Thanks

I would like to thank EA Benelux for the wonderful event and the invite, for the lovely goodies and the good time had by all. We not only got hands-on time, but also a cool Sims pen, a fancy Sims headband, a lovely calendar with artworks from Geek-Art.net, a USB bracelet, a new Sims 4 mug, a test tube with candy in it, and a green highlighter disguised as a syringe.

I'd also like to thank the other fansites that were present. I loved meeting everyone again; Rens (Simlicious), Sara (Sara de Moor Games), and Marii (ByMarii) for example. And I loved seeing some new faces like Sandra (Sims Online) and Mari (Eskimari/SimsPlanet2). I didn't get a chance to talk to everybody. Although it might not be obvious seeing as I can be quite hyper during events, I'm also a bit shy and tend to wait until other people talk to me. Perhaps next time!

Here's a fun photo with Sara and Marii, and all three Freezer Bunnies that I took with me to the event:

Photo credits go to Eskimari.

Finally I had to mention that the 15th anniversary cake looked very pretty, and I really appreciated that EA went out of their way to get me a gluten free piece of vlaai (specific type of Dutch pie)! On the picture below you can see the 15th anniversary cake. I heard it was quite delicious.

Apologies for the relatively short article this time. I promise we'll tell you more once we have the game ourselves and have more time to discover everything there is to discover! Furthermore we will upload a Q&A later on. So be on the lookout for that one.

Will you be buying The Sims 4: Get to Work? I can't wait to start playing it for real!