Presented by EA Creator Network – Software Not Final
The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories adds a total of seven new wedding and marriage-related social events. Engaged Sims can host engagement dinners, rehearsal dinners, bach parties, and family gatherings before their big day. Wedding ceremonies and receptions can be planned as separate social events instead of being lumped together. Vow renewals for married Sims are a social event now instead of just being an interaction on the wedding arch.
Of course, all the planning and pre-celebrations lead up to the big day itself which usually involves a Wedding Ceremony followed by the Reception. Here’s everything you need to know about hosting a Reception.
Planning the Event
There are two ways Sims can plan a Reception; through the phone and the calendar. Planning a Reception through the phone will start the event immediately. Using the calendar to plan the event will allow you to schedule the event for a specific date and time in the future. On the phone, select Plan Wedding Event in the social tab and select the Reception. On the calendar, select the day you’d like to plan the event for. Scroll down in the left sidebar and select Add a Wedding Event then select the Reception.
Invite Sims
The Invite Sims tab has four roles; your newlywed Sims, guests, mixologist, and entertainer. Only the newly married couple and guests are required. The mixologist and entertainer are optional. If you’re hosting the reception at a nightclub or another lot type that already has entertainers and mixologists, you probably won’t need them. If you want friends and family of both newlyweds to attend the reception, make sure the Sim planning the event knows all of their new spouse’s friends and family, too. Otherwise, they won’t show up in the invite list.
Plan Activities
The next tab will let you select the activities you’d like to have at your Reception. All wedding events have customizable activities so you can tailor all of your wedding celebrations to your Sims’ preferences and cultures.
The available activities to choose from for Receptions are:
- Cut Cake
- Dancing
- Celebration Feast
- Walk Down the Aisle
- Blow Bubbles
- Throw Rice
- First Dance
- Spousal Kiss
- Drinks
- Have Speeches
- Tea
- Have Toasts
The activities you select are purely up to your own tastes and preferences. Choose all of them, only one of them, or an assortment somewhere in-between.
Select a Place
You can select the location and time of your event on this screen. Wedding Ceremonies have a variety of lot types they can be hosted on. The following are all the lot types that showed up as being available for us in the venue list:
- Residential (Engaged Couple’s Residence)
- Bar
- Nightclub
- Lounge
- Library
- Museum
- Park
- Pool
- Café
- Chalet Gardens
- Karaoke Bar
- Island Bluff
- Ancient Ruins
- Centre Park
- Community Space
- Beach
- Wedding Venue
We did place a restaurant and spa down in our world just to see if they would be available venues for this event but they did not appear in the list of venues.
We noticed that Wedding Ceremonies can’t be scheduled on the same day as the Reception. This struck us as odd. It’s typical in many cultures to host these events on the same day, with the ceremony in the morning or early afternoon and the reception in the evening. We got around this by scheduling the Ceremony event late on Saturday and then scheduling the Reception event at 12am on Sunday so the ceremony led directly to the reception.
Hosting the Event
Before we get into how things went for us at this Reception, we need to stress again that this is not the final software. Which is a very good thing because both the Wedding Ceremony and the Wedding Reception were completely unplayable from start to finish. We were not even able to complete over half of the activities we selected and Sims for the most part were not responsive to any of the commands they were given. Again, this is not the final software but we do have to be honest and admit that it was extremely difficult for us to even cover these events at all because they were not functional on even the most basic level.
If you planned the event using the phone or social interaction, the event will start immediately. If you planned the event through the calendar, you will receive a notification one hour before the event starts to remind you about it. If there’s any setting up that needs to be done beforehand, it’s a good idea to head to the venue an hour early to do any prep work, like filling buffet tables, drink fountains, and adding any objects needed for the activities you chose.
When the event starts, you will be prompted to travel to the venue you picked if your Sims are not already there and any Sims you invited will show up. During our Reception, other Sims still showed up on the lot and crashed the festivities. While they didn’t necessarily interfere with the reception itself, it’s still weird to show up to a stranger’s wedding. Still, people can and do crash large wedding receptions where they aren’t likely to be noticed amongst hundreds of guests so maybe this isn’t so unrealistic, after all.
You’ll see the typical social event goal tracker pop up in the top left corner but it works a little differently than other social events. There is no bronze, silver, and gold progress bar listed at the top and no main goal to complete; the success of the social event just depends on whether or not you are able to complete all of the activities you selected for the event.
You may want to spend some time familiarizing yourself with all the options and planning out the specific order you would like to have things happen in. There are a lot of wedding-specific options here and you will have to micro-manage every single aspect of the reception. Luckily, almost all the objects will have a bunch of options available on them to help you tell your guests when it’s time to cut the cake, time for the first dance, time for the bouquet throw, etc.
The following is how a typical reception might go when the features actually work properly…
- Click the aisle and tell Sims to Gather at the Aisle
- Direct Sims to walk down the aisle in your preferred order if you’d like to have a Reception processional to kick things off
- Call Guests to come and eat
- Give Speeches
- Make Toasts
- Call guests to the cake for the cake cutting ceremony, then have the newlyweds cut the cake together
- Invite guests to come get a slice of cake
- Call guests to the dance floor to gather for the first dance, then have the first dance with the newlyweds
- Invite all guests to dance
- Call guests to gather for the bouquet throw, have your Sim hold the bouquet and then throw it
That is not at all what happened at our reception. Guests were not responsive at all to being told to gather for specific things like the first dance and cake cutting. Give Speeches didn’t work at all; every time we tried to give speeches, the action canceled itself. The newlyweds could not cut the cake together. They kept route failing even though the cake was in the centre of an empty buffet table as seen in the trailer where Dom and Cam did cut their cake together. We tried moving the cake to a different table and trying again but the Sim just grabbed a slice of cake on their own and walked away from it without even attempting to wait for their spouse. We also had to purchase a second cake last minute because there was no cake at the reception even though we set the cake for the wedding beforehand. Maybe this was because the cake is tied to the ceremony event, not the reception event but the cake was nowhere to be seen at the ceremony event, either. The bride attempted to call everyone over for the bouquet toss but only two Sims showed up to catch it, one of them being her husband. Then they all got stuck in an endless loop of acting like they were getting ready for the toss but the bride didn’t ever actually toss the bouquet. This went on for 3 or 4 in-game hours before we gave up and canceled the whole reception. We could not complete over half the activities.
With all of the complications and problems we experienced trying to get this reception off the ground, we ran far past the six hours that the other events ended at. Luckily, the event did not end after six hours so it does seem that wedding events will not end before all activities have been completed; however, if all activities are completed quickly, the event will still run for six hours.
While throwing a Reception is not technically required of newlywed Sims; they could just combine the Reception activities into the Ceremony or forego it altogether, it’s still a shame that one of the big highlights of the entire game pack is not functional at all. Since we were not playing with the final software, we hope these bugs will be cleaned up in time for the big day when everyone gets the opportunity to play. It shows a lot of promise but unfortunately needs a lot of work.
