Features

Heirlooms and Will

All information in this article are based on a non-final version of the expansion pack Life & Death.

This article is marked as sponsored by EA because EA gave me a free test version of the game. This does not influence the content of this article.

Overview

The expansion pack Life & Death adds the two new features heirlooms and wills/inheritance to the game. With this it’s now possible to pass on objects to Sims outside of the active household. You can determine what will happen to children and money when the last Sim in the household dies (Teen and up), how you want your tombstone to look, and which activities you want at the Sims funeral. You can also add a message and a mood to the will that can influence the Sims when the will is being read out loud.

To be able to pass on an object to another Sim, it needs to be marked as heirloom. This is possible with a lot of objects in the game but not all of them.

All objects stay in the house and can be used by the remaining Sims if you have more than one Sim in the household and the testator dies. Exceptions are objects that the deceased has passed on to another Sim. These automatically disappear from the lot. It doesn’t matter if the person inheriting lives on the same lot or not.

Any Sims that inherit dependents or objects but live in another household gets everything when you switch to them. The will will arrive in the mail and the objects will then be placed in the (household) inventory as soon as it’s read out loud. Dependents are added to the household

Heirlooms

Heirlooms have two purposes:

  • They are objects that can be passed on from generation to generation. There are options that let you think about the original owner or even call upon the ghost.
  • Heirlooms can be passed on to other Sim in the will. The Sim that inherits need to fulfill the following conditions
    • They can’t be a ghost (I couldn’t test other occult Sims in this version)
    • They must be aged teen or older
    • They must be known to the Sim.

Kids and older can make objects to heirlooms but Kids have to wait till they age up to teens to pass them on.

Heirlooms don’t need to be passed on. Any heirloom not in the will will just stay on the lot.

You can assign heirlooms a higher value, pass them on to to someone or think about the original owner (the Sim that made the object an heirloom).

Heirlooms that have been passed on at least once have two extra options:

  • Pawn Heirloom
  • Call upon Sim (if the ghost still exists in the world)

You can also pass on heirlooms to Sims outside your household. More details under Rotational Gameplay.

Will

Every Sim can make a will as soon as they become a teenager. There are several methods in the game to start a will. It can be found in the Sims inventory once started. The will can be edited at any time.

A will lets you determine the following things:

  • Assign heirlooms to Sims
  • Assign dependents to another household (babies, infants, toddlers and pets)
  • Assign money to other households or charity.
  • Decide what to do with the remains (choice of tombstone/urn and activities at the funeral)
  • Personal note and mood that are recited at the will reading.

Money and dependents are only acted on if the last Sim (teen and older) in the household dies and is the same for all Sims in the household. If you change the assignments with the father, they will also change for the mother.

Heirloom assignment

Assigning heirlooms to the heirs is not done that well. There are no indications what you have already assigned and you need to assign each heirloom separately.

You can read the will at any point to find out what you already assigned if you’re unsure.

It is also possible that different Sims assign the same heirloom to different heirs. The will of the Sim dying first is decisive.

Reading of the will

The reading of the will isn’t that spectacular but it’s possible you can make it better if you place the Sims better before reading it out load. Some of the Sim in the household will get a moodlet after reading the will which can be influenced by the assigned mood. It wasn’t clear to me what other factors influenced the moodlets.

Bigger objects will be put in the family inventory after the reading. You can then place them in the home normally. Smaller objects go in the Sims inventory and get a specific label that they belong to them. This does not influence the usage of the object. Other Sims in the household can still interact with it normally.

Funeral preparation

The deceased gets the urn/tombstone they wanted automatically. You can still adjust it afterwards though.

The activities for the funeral that were put in the will get a special mark. The player can go ahead and just ignore them and play a different funeral.

Rotational Gameplay

Good news for players that like to play different families. A lot of attention to detail was payed that heirlooms and dependents properly appear in the correct household.

There’s two different scenarios depending on who else lives in the household.

More Sims in the household

If there are more Sims (teen and older) in the household you will continue to play in the household. You will get the will in the mail within 24 hours which needs to be read aloud. The sections for money and dependents do not apply here.

You need to change households for Sims outside the household to inherit the heirlooms. Change to every household that should be getting something and wait for the will to arrive there. Read the will aloud and find the heirlooms in the (household) inventory. You will always be shown the entire content of the will so that you know which households you need to visit. I didn’t test if there’s some kind of time limit to get the heirlooms.

There are two limitations where the process doesn’t work well.

  • The heir doesn’t live anywhere. If you move them into a lot to accept the inheritance, they will end up with nothing. It only works if you move the Sim into a home before the Sim dies. This can lead to issues with neighborhood stories. Mark any household that appears in a will to not move out.
  • The heir lives on a lot but decides to move in between death and reading of the will. The danger for this happening automatically isn’t that great if you don’t wait too long to switch to this household.

No more Sims in the household

You will be given the choice to save and go to manage world or leave the game if the last Sim in the household dies (teen and older)

Any dependents will appear in the household manager as new household If you decided to play on. You can’t play this household (unless you close the game and click on resume but that looks like a bug to me)

You can now either just move the household into another and play on. The will will be ignored if you do this.

the second – in my view much more attractive – method is to let the will reading do it’s thing. Change to the household in which you wanted to have the dependents placed and wait for the will. After the reading all dependents you wanted in this household will be added automatically. This works well with all age groups including babies. The case where there’s not enough room in the household has been considerated as well. You will get a message that the household is full and you need to manually place the dependents. This also happens if there’s only room for parts of the dependents.

You can also send the dependents to different families. All you need to do is to switch between the families. Splitting the dependent household this way works correctly.

The family tree is also kept intact.

The family tree also remained intact as it should during my tests.

Sim in non-active household dies

Inheritance works correctly if a Sim dies while you are playing another household. I only tried the case where I was playing a household that inherited something. The inheritance message came and shorty after also the inherited sofa.

The kids went to anther household as planned.

Conclusion

This feature brings an interesting dimension to the game and works really well. There are a few edge cases that need extra attention but they don’t occur that often and there’s way around them if you are aware of the problems.

I think it’s very nice that rotational players get a feature that works well for them, especially since it’s an aspect that especially interesting to them.