The Sims 4 adds over 100 new skin tones and sliders to customize them

It sure took a while, but The Sims 4 has finally added new skin tones to allow players more options when creating characters. This free update comes as a response to long-time fans of The Sims 4 who have been asking, for years now, that a wider range of skin colors be made available during character creation, especially darker skin colors and tones.

You can get a little taste of the update in the brief trailer above. There are over a hundred new skin tones in the update, as well as a slider that allows players to change the light to dark value of each. In addition to the more realistic skin tones, there is an additional category called "miscellaneous" for fantasy and sci-fi roleplayers. You can also save your custom skin tones so you don't have to recreate them each time you customize a Sim.

We've been expecting this update since August, when The Sims 4's executive producer Lindsay Pearson responded to the requests with a video on Twitter, where they acknowledged that The Sims 4 had fallen short on the goal of being an inclusive game. "We hear you, and we recognize we have not done enough to address the variety of skin tones and hair styles you expect to find in The Sims 4," Pearson said,

There are a few new hairstyles in the update, and makeup has gotten an overhaul as well. "Hue, saturation, value or brightness, and opacity are now available to modify on the makeup," reads a post on The Sims 4 forums. "We have locked some of the sliders where it did not provide an optimal experience or make sense for the makeup. Expect us to continue our work on these issues into the future to provide you with more."

There's a lot more in the update, including bug fixes for both The Sims 4 and many of its expansions and add-on packs—though a number of responses to the announcement on Twitter say these bug fixes have broken other things. If you have mods installed for The Sims 4, they may be disabled due to the update, too. Read the full patch notes here.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.