This week "The Sims" released a free update that gave us toddlers on "The Sims 4." Considering how much from real life went missing from the game since "Sims 2" came made many Sims players weary. When I saw the announcement come up on Facebook and Twitter, I knew that I would have to go home and play it as soon as I could, because was a major game changer. We needed toddlers in the game because it’s just weird having a baby jump out of a crib and become a nine year old instantly.

In "The Sims 4", the toddlers have a good amount of characteristics and traits that you can choose from. They can be angelic, inquisitive, clingy, fussy, wild, silly, and independent. These traits affect their behaviors a lot. For my test family called the Sunny-Blossoms, I had a toddler named John. John was given the clingy trait, which I thought could be cute, but it changed the gameplay a lot. Whenever my sims would have to leave the room to cook, sleep, or use the bathroom, John would get sad and start to cry. His moodlets would quickly change when the parents came back into the room, so the traits were captured very well to me. I personally liked how they organized it and gave the toddlers more complex emotions than in game's past.

With the complex emotions coming into play, they also gave toddlers more that they can do. Toddlers can be spiteful and yell at parents to go away, hit them, or cry. They are capable of asking for potty help, diaper changes, food, a drink, and attention. They can also talk about their favorite color, play card games, learn from cards, be tucked in and read to, show affection, and go up to a baby crib and wonder what is in there. Toddlers can also get sugar crashes which are annoying, but very realistic. This can come as a pain when trying to help your Sims kids bathe in the bath tub, because they get very mad when they have poor hygiene and are hungry, like real toddlers.

Unlike the other games, you don’t need the set skills for them to grow up normal, like if I didn’t potty train, teach my kid to talk or walk in "The Sims 3," the game would just give any random trait, and it was almost always a bad one if you didn’t do it right on that one. On "The Sims 4", you have to teach them until they can do certain things for themselves. You teach them in levels, like potty training. They have to be taught a certain amount until they can be on their own, and for talking, after a while they can talk about more and converse past the babbling stage which was realistic for milestones, or at least from a gaming perspective.

In my opinion, I really loved the update because we waited a long time for this. The only glitch I had was that my toddlers didn’t stay asleep and always passed out. The game kept having them wake up and run around the yard which irked me after awhile, because when they had low hygiene they were too irritable to be bathed, which then caused the whole sims family to be cranky. Other than that they did well in every way, even with their high chairs, toddler beds, and toy choices. They made the furniture better and less tacky than previous packs, so I definitely approve. Thanks EA for finally making "The Sims 4" have more realistic stages of life.