The Sims 4 will be adding a free skin tone slider in an upcoming update for the base game. This will be rolled out in two phases, starting on 6 October for PC and Mac and 10 November for players on console with an improvement to existing skin tones.
The annoucement was made on Wednesday.
“As we work on expanding skin tone variety, in this first step, we?ll be improving the blotchy artifacts and ashy appearance of darker skin tones,” the team said.
“The bigger change will come in December with the team rolling out “at least a hundred new skin tone swatches in cool, neutral, and warm tones with a particular emphasis on darker skin tones”, the team added.
The Sims 4 team said that they will be adding a slider on “all swatches, both new and existing” to allow each selected tone to be modified.
Make-up in Create-A-Sim will also get a slider and some of the in-game hairstyles will also be improved.
The team added that they will be ” collaborating with external partners, including talented and diverse community members, to make sure we get this right”.
These updates come after six years of The Sims 4. Players of colour have repeatedly raised the issue around the game’s skin tones, but it took until 2020 for the issue to be addressed and seriously acknowledged.