The Sims 4 Royals & Legacy Review main

Thank you The Sims for giving us CFE access (Early early access) for us to write this review with.

CFE access means that we get temporarily access to an early build of the game. In this case The sims 4 Royals & Legacy + base game.
For this early access we do not have access to any of the other packs that are available for The Sims 4.
So this review will focus on only base game + The Sims 4 Royals & Legacy. We will update with relevant cross pack interactions.
Since expansion packs are so big we struggle a little bit to compress it to just 1 review article.
So to make it easier, we split it in multiple articles and allow it to grow.
During CFE we were also able to report bugs we encountered directly, and many of them will be fixed before the official launch. Though I don’t think we should expect a bug free launch, the team really worked hard on getting as many of them out as possible.

General review

As the title and the trailers have said and showed, this pack focusses on Royalty and creating legacies.
Becoming a royalty is actually a career. But family members will also inherit titles if your parents are royals or your spouse is.

I think this pack is really great for legacy players or players who love to create drama in their households.
The scandal system will allow you to have secrets and discover secrets.
The Sims 4 Royalty and Legacy will launch globally at the same time. This is on Thursday Feb 12th 2026 around 10am Pacific Time. This means for the UK that is around 6pm.

World

The new world is called Ondarion.
There are 3 neighbourhoods in Ondarion, each with their own style and stories

All neighbourhoods have some fun things to discover, like treasures hidden away. You might find the spot marked X, but the treasure is not always there.
Since all neighbourhoods are by the coast, they all have swimmable areas and some even small islands you can visit by swimming, or taking a little sailboat.
These sailboats are similar to the once we have from Island living. You can fish from them, lounge in them or just cruise in them. 1 thing I do find annoying is that they have to swim up to the boats and are therefor always in their swimwear.

Verdemar

Top left you have Verdemar and is based on Portuguese styles.
This neighbourhood houses the royal family Thebe and decedent of Queen Cordelia I. One of the families with a rich family tree.
You can also start in this neighbourhoods in the starter house “Fisherman’s hut”, created by Emerald Stories, or on the empty lot “The Lair in the Open-air”.
The other houses are occupied by other families and there is 1 lounge.

Bellacorde

Bellacorde you can find in the top right corner and this area is inspired by Northern Italy.
Here you can find the Capp family as well as the Monty family.
If you want to start in this neighbourhood, there is a really cool 64×64 starter house called “Giardino Del Grandioso”. This is actually not built by one of the creators but by The Sims team themselves. The small house on this lot is perfect to start on, but the large area around it give a lot of opportunity to build your own castle as you move up on the royal career ladder.

Here you can also find another lounge an apartment complex with 1 empty apartment and the other occupied.

Dambele

And the third neighbourhood is Dambele. This area is inspired by Western-African cultures like Ghana and Nigeria. The main Noble family in this neighbourhood the Darong Family.
There is no starter house in this neighbourhood, but if you want to start out here, you can move into one of the apartments.

This pack also has 2 new lot types and you can find both in Dambele.
The Backroom lot type, is a lot type that will have 1 function during the day, and another during the night. “Hardcover” is a library during the day, but has a secret floor that will lead you to the nightclub.
The second new lot type is community market. I am not 100% now if it’s completely new, but it’s not base game. Could be that this works together with the Eco living pack.

In Dambele you can also find the spider well and the ancient tree. These will give you lore interactions

Legacy and dynasty

Now, this pack revolves around legacies and dynasties. The families in this new pack will have a more worked out family tree where some of them intertwine or have some secrets.
If you open up the Capp family tree, you can see they are related to both the Thebe family as well have links to the Monty family.

*this family tree has a slight edit because I forged some family connections through gameplay, more on that later

You can create your own family dynasty, or try and marry into an existing one. Only family members through bloodline, adoption or marriage are eligible for joining a dynasty.
But you are not restricted to your household. Dynasty members can live in other households and in other worlds.

When you are in a Dynasty, certain behaviors are encouraged and some are not. When Sims in the dynasty act on the ideals of the dynasty, then the prestige goes up, as well as the rank of the Sim that is active in those activities.
This can be interactions with other Sims, activities or skills, but also certain careers are preferred.

By following these ideals, you collect Perk points, and with those you can select perks that will apply to either all your members, or earn new inheritable traits.

Traits and aspirations

No new traits in CAS, but there are a few you unlock through gameplay
There is also only 1 new aspiration in CAS.
Some may be dissapointed by this, but personally I don’t mind. Since Royalty is a career, I would find it to be too limiting having something like that as an aspiration. And often with new packs, the aspiration are more like a guide through the new pack than they feel like a real aspiration. But this is my personal opinion.

Aspiration

Social puppeteer; this aspiration really delves into the new scandal system. And while I think this is a valid aspiration, it is also one that guides you through the workings of the scandal system. It is a fun one to try though.

Inheritable traits

You can earn these trough dynasty perks, but only once you reach prestige level 3.
There are 4 inheritable traits. Mental Affinity, Social Affinity, Physical Affinity and Creative affinity.

It won’t have an immediate effect on your Sims, but it will go down your line. The first generation born after earning this trait will gain level 1 of the selected trait, and the generation after that level 2 and then the final level you can earn is level 3. The higher the level, the more ‘powerful’ the trait.

Build Buy

The build buy is to me, very specific. There is a certain cohesiveness between the pieces, so that is good.
But I have a hard time to really get excited for this, since the style isn’t really my style. It’s regal/royal. So very fitting for this pack.
You can also see the West African region style with the patterns, and the classical from Royal Europe.
It’s hard to really show the items in a screenshot, since you can now see that on the official website as well.

If you want to see BB more in depth, I will link you to Ninni’s videos once it’s available.

Create-A-Sim

The items in CAS are pretty cool in my opinion. Most of the items are of course very specific for the Royalty theme. And you can definitely reenact a little Bridgerton in it. but there are a few items that will work for your day to day Sims as well.
Here is a list of number of styles.

I am a little surprised only the feminine adults got a styled look, you would think the masculine styles had enough items to create one as well.
And one full outfits really looks like a school uniform, and you’re not incorrect, kids and teens change into this uniform when going to school, but only when they live in Ondarion.