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.
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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.