New screenshots from canceled Paradox sim Life By You show off all the fits we’ll never get
On reflection I probably won't be writing the words 'fits' again
It is I, the wound salter. The injury insult adder. Life By You, the simulation life-em-up from Paradox, was canceled in June after being delayed indefinitely. The day after the cancellation - which Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester implied was down to a “lacking”, unfixable development state - designer Willem Delventhal spoke about his time at the subsequently shuttered Paradox Tectonic. He claimed the team spent a month “in purgatory” prior to being told of the game’s cancelation and studio shuttering two weeks before launch, despite being told by higher-ups that work was “exceeding expectations.”
We’ve now got another look at a game we’ll likely never get, thanks to a thread by Twxbbly user SimMattically collating unseen screenshots from portfolios by several artists who worked on Life By You.
Admittedly, the screens aren’t worlds apart from the most recent gameplay shown off by Tectonic, but that’s unsurprising considering how near the game was to release. The character customisation does look sharper and more detailed from where I’m sitting though, and the birds-eye house shots and those of the surrounding area do seem a little more cohesive and crisp than previous looks. There are also many snazzy outfits, which I’m sure are a big part of the reason people play these games to begin with, although I personally do not feel represented in the lack of coffee-stained trackie bottoms.
“Life by You had a number of strengths and the hard work of a dedicated team that went into realizing them,” said Paradox Interactive CEO Fredrik Wester at the time. “However, when we come to a point where we believe that more time will not get us close enough to a version we would be satisfied with, then we believe it is better to stop.”
“This is difficult and drastic news for our colleagues at Tectonic, who’ve worked hard on Life by You’s Early Access release,” Wester said of the studio’s closure. “Sadly, with cancellation of their sole project, we have to take the tough decision to close down the studio.”
“Two weeks before launch we were told we wouldn't be launching, and just now that we've all lost our jobs,” wrote Delventhal on LinkedIn the following day. "We were only informed of this via a public announcement. This industry has become a place in which you can deliver more than expected, have AA money behind you, and still have the rug pulled two weeks before launch."
Again, I likely wouldn’t have spent much time with Life By You, but I was still interested in having a tinker. The Sims could do with a sizeable competitor, especially since recent updates seem to have been plagued by bug woes. So, yeah, bummed for you if you were looking forward to this, and it sounds like the team behind it deserved a lot better too. Paradox themselves have been no stranger to mishaps recently, having just slapped an indefinite delay on Prison Architect 2 after parting ways with the original developer and handing it off to a new studio. Let’s hope it doesn’t meet the same fate.