The big day has come!
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; the Wedding Ceremony. Here’s everything you need to know about hosting a Wedding Ceremony.
Planning the Event
There are three ways Sims can plan a Wedding Ceremony; through the phone, the calendar, and as a social interaction on their engaged partner. Planning a Wedding Ceremony through the phone or as a social interaction will start the event immediately. Using the calendar to plan the event will allow you to schedule the ceremony for a specific date and time in the future. On the phone, select Plan Wedding Event in the social tab and select the Wedding Ceremony. You can also click on your Sim’s engaged partner and select Plan Wedding Event. 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 Wedding Ceremony.
Invite Sims
The Invite Sims tab has a large number of roles to fill for this event; two engaged Sims (of course), a Sim of Honour, A Flower Pal, A Ring Bearer, Officiant, and Guests. Only the engaged Sims and at least 1 guest are required. The other roles are optional. You can assign all the special wedding roles directly through the menu but you can also ask the Sims in person if they would like to fill these roles. The Sims may say yes or no depending on their relationship with your Sim. If you want friends and family of both engaged Sims to attend the ceremony, make sure the Sim planning the event knows all of their betrothed’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 Wedding Ceremony. 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 Wedding Ceremonies are:
- Cut Cake
- Dancing
- Celebration Feast
- Walk Down the Aisle
- Blow Bubbles
- Throw Rice
- First Dance
- Spousal Kiss
- Drinks
- Have Speeches
- Tea
- Exchange Vows
- 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. The list of available activities for Wedding Ceremonies also allows you to combine the reception with the ceremony if you don’t want to throw two separate events. This actually might be the more ideal option because you can’t schedule two wedding events on the same day which struck us as odd. Having a wedding reception on a different day than the ceremony is not typical in many cultures; the reception is usually held a few hours after the ceremony later 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.
Select Style
This tab is unique to planning Wedding Ceremony events. In this tab, you can select the style of your wedding. You can select the outfits for the engaged couple here. You can also dictate whether the guests must wear a specific colour to the wedding or whether they should show up in their own formalwear. This tab also displays a preview of the wedding cake you’ve selected for the wedding.
Outfits for your engaged couple can be set within this menu but your Sims can also select their wedding attire by browsing the interactive boutique shell located in downtown Tartosa. The cake must be selected through gameplay; you cannot pick your cake in this menu. It just displays a preview of your cake once you’ve selected it. Cake samples can be tasted at the Patisserie Stand in downtown Tartosa but the wedding cake itself will have to be ordered through the computer or baked at home with the Gourmet Cooking skill. Toppers can be purchased and inscribed for the cake by clicking on the cake as well.
There seemed to be a lot of issues with planning things in this tab for us. The engaged couple’s wedding attire would not show up here even after we made our selections in CAS. The wedding cake preview would not show up, either, even after confirming the cake as our wedding cake.
Select a Place
You can select the location and time of your event on this screen. Wedding Ceremonies have a limited number 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)
- Park
- 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.
Hosting the Event
Before we get into how things went for us at this Wedding Ceremony, 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. Remember to purchase a wedding bouquet from the flower cart in downtown Tartosa beforehand if you would like your Sims to have one at the Wedding Ceremony!
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 Wedding Ceremony, other Sims still showed up on the lot and crashed the wedding. While they didn’t necessarily interfere with the wedding itself, it’s still weird to show up to a stranger’s wedding. We hosted our Wedding Ceremony on a Wedding Venue lot so this seems like odd behaviour for a lot designed specifically for hosting weddings. Also, our engaged couple did not show up in the attire we set for them previously. We still had to manually change them into their wedding attire.
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 ceremony, right down to when your Sim should hold the bouquet and when they should put it away. For the ceremony itself, most of the commands you will need will be on the arch or the aisle.
The following is how a typical ceremony might go when the features actually work properly…
- Click the arch and select Ceremony Activities > Gather at the Aisle
- When all Sims are near the aisle, click the arch, aisle, or any of the seats available and select Ceremony Activities > Please Take Your Seats
- When all Sims are seated, click the aisle and begin sending Sims down the aisle in your preferred order. Send Down/Walk Down will send the Sims towards the arch. Send Up/Walk Up sends them away from the arch. If you built the wedding lot yourself, make sure the hearts on the aisle in Build/Buy are closest to the arch.
- If you would like your Sim to hold a bouquet when walking down the aisle, remember to click the bouquet in their inventory and select Hold Bouquet before sending them down the aisle. Click the Sim again to have them put the bouquet away.
- When all Sims have made their way down the aisle in your preferred order, click the arch and select Exchange Vows. You can choose to exchange vows with or without a kiss and with or without an Officiant present.
- After the Sims are married, click the arch and select Ceremony Activities > Gather for the Recessional and send Sims back up the aisle in your preferred order.
That is not at all what happened at our ceremony. What actually happened was guests were so engrossed in conversation with each other, they would not take their seats when told. We had to reset all the Sims so that they wouldn’t be talking to each other when we told them to sit. Only then did they take their seats. None of the guests with special roles would walk the aisle after being told to take their seats. We had to, again, reset them first. The bride would not walk down the aisle if she was holding a bouquet. She also would not walk down the aisle with her father. Eventually, we gave up on even trying to finish the processional and just had our bride and groom exchange vows and kiss with the Officiant… except the Officiant left the ceremony to go dance by himself outside. We had to give up on that, too and just had the couple exchange vows with a kiss. That didn’t work properly, either. They got stuck in a long loop of just putting the rings on each other over and over again and did not even kiss when they finally finished their vows. The groom also kept turning to chat with his friend during his vows. We had to manually make them share a Spousal Kiss which they walked away from the arch to do. Then they bonked heads. This would have been cute had the ceremony gone to plan but as it was, it just felt like the rotten cherry on top of a melted sundae.
With all of the complications and problems we experienced trying to get this ceremony 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 Wedding Ceremony is not technically required of engaged Sims; they could just elope on the spot or get married at City Hall in Tartosa, it’s still a shame that the big highlight 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.
I’m so sorry for your troubles but that was WAY funnier than it had a right to be! Especially the part with the Officiant. Oh goodness, I had tears in my eyes. That visual was just great! This’ll either be a great story for future Sim years to talk about, or these two were never meant to be. (I know it was the game acting up, but still.)
Yikes, I hope this is fixed in the official release. I was really excited for this pack, but seeing the issues makes me kind of worried. Let’s hope this is just in the early access version and they worked out these issues in the extra week before release.
They did not