Buggy

The Sims 4 has been going through a bit of a mid-life crisis lately. A wayward patch issued in July triggered a rampant pregnancy epidemic, while the most recent Enchanted by Nature DLC received a less-than enthusiastic response from players. Now, it seems the community is generally fed up with the increasingly buggy state of the base game, with EA revealing plans for two solid months dedicated to bugfixes and quality-of-life support.

“We see your feedback on technical issues and game performance. And we want to assure you that your concerns are heard,” the publisher wrote in a post on Monday. “Over the next 8 weeks, our dedicated teams will dive in to resolve current issues and get ahead of unforeseen technical disruptions.”

Those plans kicked off in earnest with a big update to the base game that arrived late on Thursday. The headline feature of this patch was a newly added playpark for kids to run themselves ragged on, as well as a ‘play pretend’ interaction for kids who presumably can’t get to said playpark for whatever reason. The update also adds a prototype “memory boost” feature to eke some extra performance from your PC, though you’ll need to opt into this in the game settings.

The meat of the update, though, is a voluminous list of bug fixes. These address a mixture of issues, some raised by the community, others selected from EA’s existing “bug archive”. There are far too many to list here, but a couple of highlights include pets being straightened out so they “no longer get deformed when traveling to another lot after aging up”, while unfortunate child sims “now show up as ghosts when they die due to over heat and freezing”.

EA plans a second round of bugfixes in October, and is asking the community to upvote their most desired fixes in The Sims 4’s bug report section of the EA forums. “Each upvote you cast on a reported issue helps us determine which problems are causing the biggest disruptions across the community,” the publisher points out. “The earlier we receive votes, the better. We’ll provide an update on our progress if we’re unable to address all of the top-voted issues in our October Laundry List.”

(Image credit: EA)

It’s good to see EA working to tidy The Sims 4 up a bit, but I do wonder whether part of the problem is simply that The Sims 4 is now 12 years old, and wasn’t designed to be the platform that EA has decided it is going to be. There was supposedly a fifth Sims game in development under the codename Project Rene, which would seem like an ideal opportunity to create a more robust launchpad for the all-encompassing Sims experience that EA wants.

EA president Laura Miele has since ruled this out, claiming that it wouldn’t be fair to existing fans who have invested lots of time and money into The Sims 4:

“What I wouldn’t want to have happen is you have to start from day zero and start from scratch and give up all of the things that you have created, give up all of the content that you’ve purchased over the years,” Miele said during an interview with Variety in July. “We put out over 85 content packs over the last 10 years on The Sims 4, and so resetting that is not player friendly and not a good idea for our community.”

It’s a reasonable line of argument, but players are well accustomed to new games supplanting old ones, and the existence of a Sims 5 doesn’t stop them from playing The Sims 4, unless EA decided to withdraw the game from sale.

In the same interview, Miele mentions that EA is planning a technology refresh and additional modes of play for The Sims 4, the former of which might help with all the bugs and other issues. Alternatively, it might break the game entirely, especially given the sheer amount of additional, optional stuff players can plug into the game.

Moreover, such an approach doesn’t offer the opportunity to address some of the more fundamental issues with The Sims 4. While it certainly has plenty to offer players these days, it was never the deepest of Maxis’ simulations (The Sims 3 had far richer AI, for example) and stubbornly sticking with it seems like a missed opportunity to create a strong foundation for a new era of Sims play.

Nonetheless, for now EA is sticking to its plan of retrofitting The Sims 4 with platform heels, so we’ll just have to hope the next few weeks of hardcore bug-fixing gives them a sufficiently clean foundation to work with.

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Smart glasses are an exciting idea right now. In theory, they’re a new gadget that does lots of the stuff that our phones do, but in an always-there form factor. They can take pictures, make calls, translate menus, and—if the tech and the investment get there—they might slap a screen right onto eyeballs for notifications, navigation, and maybe even augmented reality à la Pokémon Go.

I say “in theory” because just because smart glasses can do all of those things on paper doesn’t mean they can do them well, and if they can’t do them well… they may as well not do them at all. We’re still in the early stages of the grand ascension of smart glasses as a device category, but a brave few are venturing to do it all right now, and one of those few (at least in the U.S.) is a company based in China called Rokid (pronounced rock-id).

See Rokid Glasses at Amazon

I got a chance to try Rokid’s plainly named Rokid Glasses, and while there was a lot that intrigued me, I can say for certain that the kinks are still being worked out. One thing that these smart glasses have that big-time entrants from the likes of Meta and its Ray-Bans don’t have is a screen. That screen is a very simple dual-micro LED display that only shows things in a very Matrix-style green. I got to use the Rokid Glasses for 15 minutes and was surprised at how sharp the screen was, even if the display functions were fairly basic. And look, you can see the screen from outside the glasses. And that’s good because sharpness is crucial for some of the things that make the Rokid Glasses unique.

One of those distinct capabilities is a teleprompter feature that displays a presentation in front of your eyes, so you can read along and not sound like a total moron during your big keynote. A thing that I found very cool is the fact that the Rokid Glasses actually use the onboard microphone to listen to your words and scroll the prompter in stride with the words. Even in a crowded room with lots of noise, the feature worked smoothly, which is no small feat.

Another screen-centric feature I got to try was translation, which—though my conversation was fairly brief—seemed to work better than you’d expect. My demo companion spoke to me in Mandarin Chinese, and the Rokid Glasses were able to translate his speech in small snippets and slap them onto the screen. Again, the microphone did all of this in a noisy room, which was legitimately impressive. The microphones on Rokid’s smart glasses work so well that I’m pretty sure you could use them for spying—it picked up bits of conversations across the room that I wasn’t even able to make out with my own ears. Cool! Also scary!

To use all of this stuff, it’s best to couple the Rokid Glasses with an app (Android-only right now) where everything you’re doing is displayed. As sharp as the screen is, it’s also quite small, and words are pushed off when new information arrives at a fairly quick pace. If you need to see something, it’s best to have the app ready, lest you ask someone to repeat themselves multiple times. And in case you’re wondering, you can control the display from the smart glasses by swiping the right arm and using a tap to select things like settings, translation, and other stuff, but it’s not exactly the smoothest experience. That’s why voice assistants—for Rokid and any company making smart glasses right now—are also critical. That brings me to a not-so-bright spot.

The Rokid Glasses voice assistant, which is supposed to activate with the wake phrase “Hi, Rokid,” was basically broken. No matter how many times I screamed “Hi, Rokid” into the smart glasses, it wouldn’t answer my calls. Others around me were also having the same issue, which is not great from a UI perspective. The interesting thing is that when a native Mandarin-speaking represenative said the phrase, it seemed to work every time. American English-speaking people, not so much. I thought maybe it was the loud, crowded room at first, but after noticing that strange quirk, I think it may be a problem with how the voice assistant is trained. I can’t say for sure without testing the Rokid Glasses more thoroughly, but it’s definitely a concern for anyone buying a pair in the U.S.

Like Meta’s Ray-Bans, the Rokid Glasses can also use AI for computer vision-based tasks like asking your glasses to read a menu in a different language using the built-in camera. I wasn’t able to launch that task myself, given the aforementioned voice assistant issues, but when a Rokid representative asked the smart glasses to translate a menu in Finnish, it did so (at least I think) fairly well, displaying the translated Finnish words in the Rokid app. Again, I’d need to test this feature out more thoroughly in a better environment to verify the translation separately and determine how well (or terribly) it actually works on a consistent basis.

As long as we’re talking about computer vision, I was pleasantly surprised with the camera, which is a 12-megapixel sensor from Sony. Just one sensor, not two, though. I would say it’s on par with Meta’s Ray-Bans, but I didn’t get to test video recording out in my demo. I wouldn’t try and use the Rokid Glasses to win any photo contests, but then again, I wouldn’t do that with any pair of smart glasses.

I won’t know until I get to try Rokid Glasses for a longer period, but I get the sense that they’re smart glasses with some peaks and valleys. Translation could be impressive, as could computer vision, and they’re incredibly light (as light as Ray-Bans), but if there isn’t a functional, English-ready voice assistant to tie it all together, that’d be a big problem for anyone in the U.S. who wants to buy a pair. That’s potentially not the best news for smart glasses enthusiasts in America, but I assume Mark Zuckerberg would welcome that quirk with open arms.

See Rokid Glasses at Amazon

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The Sims 4 gets a much-needed update to the increasingly buggy base game, as EA assures players that ‘your concerns are heard’ over issues like deformed pets and missing ghost children

Smart Glasses, Buggy Voice Assistant