Sims 4 was released exactly 10 years ago, being developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts (EA). It has been getting major and minor updates regularly and currently enjoys around forty thousand players per day according to Steam charts. The most recent update has left players frustrated due to a wide range of performance issues and bugs that they are experiencing.
This is a problem the players have been experiencing with each new update featured and a number of players are speaking out about it on various platforms calling for the developers to take some more time to test everything out before rolling it to the masses.
What Caused The Chaos?
This July update started off with significant changes to the relationships between characters such as they no longer receive an unprovoked flirtation unless they have the Noncommittal Trait and sims that are married will not receive the “Want to Flirt” with other sims. While the update did introduce some fixes for previous bugs such as Sims randomly teleporting when changing their walking routes and the makeup sliders not reflecting the expected changes when exiting Create-A-Sim along with the frame rate stuttering right after launching the game.
The update also for the umpteenth time, introduced a new set of bugs for players to deal with. As reported by a player in reddit, the Parenthood panel for the Child and teen Sims started showing model issues such body parts missing, others reported that some Sims started randomly acting rude and losing whatever relationship they were in and married Sims would also start arguing without any provocation or reason. These coupled with more frequent crashes, frame drops and the game freezing has left many new and veteran players frustrated with this update. Some would say the game freezing or dropping frames is due to subpar hardware but these reports come from players with high-end systems which squarely puts the blame on the bad optimization of the game.
Unfortunately some users have also reported encountering some game-breaking glitches which forced them to start a new save file entirely, these issues include Sims failing to advance their respective careers, aforementioned random problems in relationships and glitches in the “Build and Buy” mode such as objects disappearing and rooms undergoing changes in dimension without any input.
It seems with each new update brought out players get to experience the new bugs and glitches introduced in the update rather than the new content itself. With each new update players get more and more frustrated as they encounter immersion breaking problems or unexplained occurrences with their sims that derail the entire experience.
This update has forced players to make their frustrations known through forum posts and posts on social media which rallied many players to stop playing the game until proper fixes are introduced. Another aspect is the community have started relying on custom mods for the game instead of the official updates as they have increasingly become bland and mods offer various new experiences for the game and these updates can have a chance of breaking the game due to the mods installed.
Ultimately It Is Up To The Devs
First and foremost what is required is more testing of whatever major update is planned for next time both for the vanilla game and modded if possible. As players have kept on mentioning on every recent update that they receive new bugs and glitches with it and some in extreme cases have lost their hard earned save file. These kinds of problems can and will make players not want to play as what would be the point of playing if there is a worrisome enough chance that everything achieved or built gets completely destroyed on a random bad update.
The Sims 4 is no doubt a beloved title achieving a concurrent player count of above forty thousand 10 years into its lifecycle is no small feat to say the least. But if the developers get too comfortable or lazy this number can reach zero. Another thing the developers can do is to release the update to a small set number of users first as a sort of way to test the waters on a user savefile to check how well the update is performing before being rolled to the masses. The developers have responded and are quickly putting out patches to address the new bugs and glitches but the overall system is what needs a change.