No longer will you be able to satisfy your Sim by simply buying new furniture or a new car; Sims 4 introduces more emotional depths than ever before.

In Sims 4, ‘persistent emotional states’ will be introduced, implying new levels of emotion such as anger, flirty, and vulnerable; you will have to be acutely in-touch with your sims to get the most out of them.

As Sims producer Ryan Vaughan said:

Quite frankly I think it’s the best simulator that we’ve created at Maxis, so I’m really excited about that. This is the first one that we’ve got brand new tech, [which] we’re calling it SmartSim, and it’s allowing us to create the most relatable and the most intelligent Sims game ever.

You can influence your sims emotions by altering their environment. From color palettes to works of art, your sims will feel differently based on the tone and mood of their home.

It creates a cascading set of circumstances for you as a storyteller. For example, previously if a Sim caught their partner cheating, there’d be a short term mood hit and then the whole thing would effectively be dropped. Now they’d be pushed into a powerful emotional state by that – it might cause depression.

In addition to the changes of your sims, the creator UI has been revamped and simplified.

We’ve completely rebuilt the creative tools from the ground up to be more intuitive, way more powerful and way more fun to play with. You are now reaching into the game and directly manipulating the things on screen. In Create-a-Sim you are grabbing onto the Sims body parts and stretching and pushing and pulling, and the same goes for Build as well – you’re dragging walls, you’re playing them down, picking them up and spinning them around.

With such fundamental changes coming it’s hard not to be excited about Sims 4. The Sims franchise is the best selling franchise on the PC and Sims 4 is shaping up nicely to add to that legacy.

Sims 4 is coming to both the PC and Mac in early 2014.