Life By You's early access release gets another delay to June 4th

The early access release of Paradox's big rival to The Sims has been delayed by another three months, the publisher has announced. Life By You was originally set to launch next month on March 5th, but will now enter early access on June 4th, which developers Paradox Tectonic say will allow them "to refine the visuals for its human characters and further improve gameplay".

Paradox Tectonic studio general manager Rod Humble goes into more detail about what players can now expect from Life By You when it launches in June in the video update below. He also says they'll be suspending pre-orders for the time being, as well as offering refunds to those who have already put money down for it - and there's more information on how to take them up on this over on their website's FAQ page.

Life by You | Early Access Coming June 2024

As a further apology, the pair of item packs that would have been exclusive to pre-orders - the Life Begins and Nightlife Vibes packs - will also now be available to all players throughout the early access period.

This is the second delay for Life By You since it was first announced early last year. Its early access release was originally set to happen last September, but was then delayed to March of this year to provide "a more robust experience out of the gate", Humble said at the time. Evidently, it's still not quite robust enough for public consumption yet, hence the extra delay.

In truth, I can't say I'm hugely surprised by this. When I saw the game at Gamescom back in August, the build was - to put it politely - still clearly quite wonky, with lots of strange behaviour on show from its controllable NPCs - including a conga line of complete strangers who followed our demo character home and stood around her in an ominous circle while she was trying to do some gardening.

To the game's credit, it does look and feel quite a bit more ambitious than The Sims 4. Unlike EA's life sim juggernaut, Life By You has a fully explorable open world to discover, as well as the ability to jump into the body of any of its NPCs and live their life as you see fit, whether that's following them to work, or just slumming it back at home. Paradox Tectonic are also planning to open up the game to modders from day one, too, letting them craft items and furniture with exactly the same tools the dev team uses.

There's a lot going on under the hood, but hopefully the extra three months will be enough to give it that final spit and polish.