GDC 2014 ended without any revelations of the official release date of SIMS 4 from EA Games or Maxis. However, they have discussed the realistic and unique system used on the game to make it more natural than ever - multitasking SIMS.

SIMS 4 Gaming Experience

SIMS 3 is probably the worst instalment of the SIMS game series due to various bug reports including Windows 8 incompatibility problems, frequent system crash and unable to load to different machines.

SIMS 4, according to Maxis will have a new gaming system to bring out the best gaming experience yet ever on a SIMS instalment. One new feature added to this gaming experience is the ability of a SIM to perform more than one task given at a specific time - even SIMS on the third instalment cannot do that.

Software engineer Peter Ingebretson revealed the feature at Game Developers Conference 2014 to help make SIMS more natural than before. The new feature also explains Maxis' intent to make SIMS 4 "the most natural iteration of the series."

"When we looked at the SIMS and tried to decide what would make them feel more natural and more believable, one thing that we realised is that in the real world, people do things at the same time all the time. For instance, people stand around in a bar drinking drinks, sitting down. Sometimes people will stand and sit and talk to each other. It seems very natural when characters in a game can multitask," Ingebretson explained, quoted by Polygon.

If compared on a scene in SIMS 3, drinking in a bar makes the SIM either sit or stand depending from what source the drink came from or what kind of drink it is - vampires sit when drinking plasma juice most of the time.

Multitasking can also branch on several technical aspects in every SIM when doing actions such as what position would look like and what other gestures they would do while performing actions.

"It also turns out that it's in some ways realistic. In the real world, people's brains work this way. There's a lot of psychological research that shows people multitask by switching between different things," Ingebretson expanded.

Release Date for 2014

Even though EA Games and Maxis did not announce the official release date of the SIMS 4, players and fanatics can really expect the game to be launched by this year or in early 2015 depending on when would be the official announcement.

EA Games and Maxis expect that SIMS 4 will be out by fall of 2014 and intended to be played on wide ranges of machines such as from Mac and Windows PC, and optimised software for machines with mid-range to low-level system requirements.