Players of The Sims 4 can now change the pronouns of their Sims, either by choosing from pre-made options or making their own custom pronouns from scratch.
EA announced this new functionality in the May 2022 update’s patch notes, saying: “This is something that has actually been on our minds for quite some time before we announced it formally.”
The developers added: “As with our vibrant community of Simmers, our development team is an extremely talented and diverse group of folks that brings various perspectives into the content that we create. So, we decided to come forward with information about our investigation into the addition of customizable pronouns in The Sims 4.”
This new customisable pronouns function is live right now in the English language version of The Sims 4, with other languages due to get it later, and you can read on to learn how to make the most of it.
How to change pronouns in The Sims 4
To change pronouns in The Sims, you’ll need to head to the Create a Sim menu. Once you’re there, these are the steps you’ll need to follow to change your Sim’s pronouns:
- Select the option, ‘Hello, my name and pronouns are…’
- On the name input screen, you should see a section for pronouns
- In that section, you can choose between They/Them, She/Her, He/Him or Custom
- If you pick Custom, you will get to decide on your pronouns by typing in the Subjective, Objective, Possessive Dependent, Possessive Independent and Reflexive forms of the pronouns of your choice
- When you’re ready, move on to the next screen and finish off making your Sim
Once the Sim is made, the game will save, and your provided pronouns should be used in all the relevant places.
Note: if you want to change the pronouns of a pre-existing Sim, you can, but you need to go through the Create a Sim menu to do it. Once you’re looking at the desired Sim in that menu, follow the steps above.
Flagging up some potential grammatical situations you might now see, the developers noted on the game’s website: “The feature has been fully tested and works to change out instances of default pronouns to the custom ones you may have chosen, however there may be times where the feature doesn’t choose the correct form pronoun or it uses the default pronoun of the assigned gender.”
The blog post continues: “This is due to several factors such as the complexity of how the feature was implemented, as well as rules around conjugation in English. An example of something you might see is ‘They likes…’. “In this situation, the correct grammatical structure should be ‘They like…’”
Why has this happened? The developers say: “The feature works by replacing the pronoun token itself rather than the pronoun and the following verb. In the future we’ll be working to make sure that the text is crafted in a way that reduces this type of issue, but we will work to fix instances of this when found in previously released content.”
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