The life sim scene has really grown over the last decade, there's more choice these days than ever before. The Sims 4 is still leading the charge, but we've seen a swath of indie games with life sim elements, alongside bigger upcoming projects like Life by You, Paralives, and inZoi. But for the newly formed Midsummer Studios, spearheaded by 20-year veterans of Marvel's Midnight Suns and XCOM developer Firaxis, Jake Solomon and Will Miller, the team are looking to "revitalize" life sims with their own story-led spin that's driven by players. The move to found a studio and step into a new genre was a big one for Solomon, but the idea for the debut sim game they're now currently working on just refused to leave his mind off of the back of Marvel's Midnight Suns.
"It felt pretty strange when I left [Firaxis]. You know, I spent 23 years there. And I never worked anywhere else, I started my career there. But I got this idea in my head about the game we're making," Solomon says. "The games that I designed first, XCOM, they had a lot more emergent player narrative in them, where the soldiers were random, there are all these complex systems that whenever you go on a mission, there was no way to predict what was going to happen. And there are these really high stakes, your soldiers could die. And so players generated these really powerful stories about these characters. And I loved it, I absolutely loved it."
