Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, the saying goes. (This is why so many games journalists are unemployed – ba-dum tish.) Thankyfully the next expansion for The Sims 4 seems to understand the permeable boundary between passion project and career as purely aspirational. It’s called Businesses & Hobbies and it lets Sims open their own tattoo parlour, pottery studio or – if you have the right complementary expansion – a cat café.
Expansion packs are the largest of The Sims various DLC types, adding both new content and new mechanics, and Businesses & Hobbies seems pretty rich. Your new businesses can offer a range of services, from classes to products to services like tattooing, with players able to tweak pricing, hire staff, and denote areas of shops that are accessible to staff only.
Within that template, there’s seemingly a lot of detail been added to the new skills. Tattooing, for example, will let you design your own custom designs, drawing on the skin of your Sims or using clipart-style shapes. You’ll need your Sim to get gradually better at the skill if they’re going to have happy customers, though, and there’s a new mentorship system that allows your Sim to learn from existing experts in the field.
In fairness to the aspirational element I referenced above, the expansion also adds two new cities, at least one of which looks to be somewhat inspired by Copenhagen, here rendered as “Nordhaven”. Northern European countries seem like the sort of place where owning a successful small business or pursuing a creatively fulfilling careers might still be possible.
I referenced cat cafés as one potential small business, but it’s worth noting that this particular flavour of business is only available if you also own the previous Cats And Dogs expansion. There are several other previous expansions that can function alongside this new one, letting you open an acting school (Get Famous expansion), a spa (Spa Day Game Pack), or a laundromat (Laundry Day stufff pack). All of the details of complementary DLC are listed in the announcement on The Sims site.
The Sims 4’s Businesses & Hobbies expansion pack will launch on March 6th. In the meantime why not check out our list of the best Sims 4 expansions.
