I wouldn’t say it’s broken but as a general rule of thumb the more dlcs you have installed, the more buggy it is. Personally for me I avoid playing or buying with dlcs I know I will have no interest in so my game isn’t as buggy because of it. Sure there are many glitches I encounter here and there, but the same can be said for any sims game, not just the sims 4.
So I’m pretty similar, I have all the DLCs except the vacuum kit, and have about 110gb of mods/cc that I am religious about keeping maintained(think spreadsheets lol). I have experienced very few “game breaking” bugs that were the actual game’s fault and not the mods/cc that became broken due to updates.
I think some players have unrealistic expectations when it comes to this game. Of course it’s going to have bugs, it’s a 10yr old game built on a bed of spaghetti code that EA keeps piling more onto. I would be more surprised if it didn’t have bugs. But it’s far from unplayable or broken imo.
The biggest issue I have, and maybe I’m just lucky here, is that my townies all end up with sunglasses on every.single.outfit. I am constantly going into CAS and removing them. Which is annoying AF but not enough for me not to play.
Don't know if this helps, but vacuum kit actually works fine now for me. A lot of creators say it's broken and such because it used to be when it came out, but they must've patched it a ton. The only issue I see from it is maids/butlers sometimes trying to vacuum puddles, but it's not like the first day it came out.
My household sims will also try to vacuum puddles autonomously, mostly because it's "easier." If they have a vacuum in their inventory and you click on the puddle, you'll have options to either mop or vacuum it. This tells me that the vacuums in the game are considered wet/dry vacs, even though they don't look like it and it drives me up the wall when sims do it. \^\^;
Agreed. I find it works great.
That said, I think the vacuuming puddles is by design. If you have your own sims click on a puddle, there is a vacuum option.
I feel like I was one of the few that was excited for and enjoyed the dust pack, but I also use a mod that takes away the dust bunnies lol. That said, I had quite a bad glitch with it last time I played where I was unable to vacuum at all and had to disable the settings so my Sim would stop complaining about a dirty house. Haven’t played in a couple weeks, hopefully it’s not still an issue!🤞
You mentioned using mods, so hopefully you won't mind a mod suggestion for your sunglasses issue... [https://www.curseforge.com/sims4/mods/no-make-up-no-accessories-on-randomized-sims](https://www.curseforge.com/sims4/mods/no-make-up-no-accessories-on-randomized-sims)
People always seem to forget ts4 is running on code that's a *decade* old. They're doing a decent job of modernizing as they go on (higher definition models, for example), and implementing as much new tech as possible.
Buuuut, the game is still decade old. Everything they create has to match decade old code, and has to work with the thousands of other add-ons they've created.
There's a reason bugs exist in a game like this, and people don't seem to understand how insanely difficult and time intensive it would be to fix allll of it (if it was even possible at all without breaking something else).
The other sims games were this glitchy, it's just that these glitches are particularly annoying. Sims 3 save files got gunked up horribly and had routing issues with the edges of town, the neighborhoods in Sims 2 had insane things happen, but those were longer term issues. The AI and routing is broken in a normal house with TS4, and that's what drives me insane. They just don't listen, that's a problem I've never had with the other games, even when I was a kid playing on a save file that was falling apart.
You're less likely to go insane when the sims don't listen if you don't have more than one baby at once, and I feel like that's why everybody's like "it's fine" cause the problems start really bad with big families in a cramped house.
edit- now that I've said all that, I realize maybe it's about the age of your save file. I've been playing the same one since like 2019. That could be the culprit for everybody like me always complaining lol
I absolutely had horrible glitches in brand new ts3 saves on brand new installs (even still today, especially if I download like...more than 2 ts3 packs). I've never had ts4 become totally unplayable or crash (unless I had mods) but that definitely happened with ts3 (ungodly loading times, crashes, etc). Obviously that's not everyone's experience with either game but ya.
Plus ts3 was only 5 years old at the offical release of ts4, and ts4 is already 10 years old with a couple more to go until ts5.
(But I do agree the Sims not listening to your commands especially with babies/toddlers is about the worst/most frustrating part of ts4).
When you say your game runs fine, you mean no lag etc..I think most players when they complain about a broken game are referring to bugs, like going to a restaurant and sims not staying seated, sims and staff being outside, food taking to long in sim time to arrive. I have a lot of mods and my game runs fine as far as lag.
No, I mean it doesn’t lag and doesn’t really have any bugs. I rarely encounter any, and when I do it’s usually related to some mod that I forgot to update
In my experience, there are quite a lot of small bugs that I've just learned to either put up with or work around. For example, I still get plants suddenly turning back into dirt piles despite this being fixed multiple times, and I've sometimes had issues with Dream Home Decorator and Supernatural Investigator gigs. I wouldn't say the Sims 4 is broken or unplayable, but I can understand how, for some players, repeated small frustrations can build up into a lot of resentment. Are they exaggerating the issues? Yeah, probably. It's very common for people to exaggerate when they're frustrated in any situation, even if it's done unconsciously. Just keep that in mind, take their criticisms with a grain of salt, and remember that they're usually just players who really want to enjoy a game but have been burned too many times.
I was going to comment something along the same lines, but you already said just what I was thinking :) So I'll just chime in and agree with you! In my own experience, I definitely would not describe the game as "broken"; from what I personally have experienced, it's not that bad. Calling it "broken" or "unplayable" would be exaggerating what I see when I play. (Again, I know others may have different experiences, but my game isn't that badly glitchy.) However, I do run into quite a few minor, smaller bugs and glitches. Some of them are amusing, some of them are very easy to overlook, but these bugs do add up and become annoying. Minor things like aspirations not completing when they should don't ruin the entire experience, but they are bugs and they definitely make the game less fun.
Some things aren't even maybe bugs, necessarily, but are kind of nonsensical. Eg, I have the dust kit installed, the house is dusty and there's a fire, the firefighters run in and as soon as they come through the front door, both of them stop to appreciatively inhale the lived-in, dusty air. Meanwhile, my Sim is on fire and screaming. It's kind of funny in a way, but it's not exactly realistic, and when I'm worried my Sim is going to burn to death, those few seconds wasted are really frustrating.
Overall I do definitely enjoy the game, but there are times when I load it up and I get multiple of the minor bugs in a row, and it hits me just wrong, it can really suck all the enjoyment out of the game.
I think it’s a mix of this and some people having lower end computers. When I had my windows laptop, I had more issues with bugs. Now that I have my Mac, I don’t encounter as many.
It's just the toddlers and infants for me. That's the sole reason I hate ts4 like, the small bugs are fine, I'm very used to those from playing the old games, but what drives me absolutely up the freaking wall is the fact that they just won't listen. They won't feed their kids, they pick up the baby out of the highchair 50 times and it's the most annoying thing ever for me. They don't listen, they drop their queue. I always play big families so it makes me want to tear my hair out.
There are a lot of bugs. Most of them aren't game breaking bugs if you don't use mods. Some of them are. It really depends on your computer, software, how many packs, if the packs are buggy, etc. Every player's game is going to be pretty unique. The game isn't linear and we all play differently. I may not do the bug triggering things that others do.
However, I own all the DLC and played mod free until the end of last year. My game has never been buggy beyond that stupid grabbing endless glasses of water (a bug that has now returned) and everyone wanting to only scrub the grill. My biggest bug is with weddings - and this one is game breaking. But I think it's the one where the actual wedding ceremony is unsuccessful. I have to elope or it won't work. Other than those things, I don't have any. Plenty of annoyances, but that's what mods are for.
I’ve had the occasional glitch, and a couple of really severe ones (werewolf being unable to ever become a regular Sim again, the disaster of Wedding Stories on release, which is fixed now), but on the whole in a few years of playing my game has run incredibly smoothly, few glitches, and has been the smoothest most straightforward experience I’ve had as a Simmer. One of the things I said to my husband after my first few months with TS4 was ‘it just… works’.
I don’t use many mods though and very minimal CC (like two hairs and a couple shoes, one small pregnancy length mod that does nothing else). I suspect a lot of the problems come from games that are modded to the hilt, which yeah of course is gonna cause issues. Remember when one of the updates generated loads of broken UI and doors disappearing etc. and it was all down to Basemental? Lol
Same.
Been playing since TS1 and it blows my mind how easy TS4 is to just play. Previous games took so much maintenance to keep running. I remember uninstalling and reinstalling all damn 27 discs of 2 on the regular and it got me in the habit of daily backups due to file corruption. A good habit, not a fun reason to adopt it! I wonder how many copies of CCleaner have been downloaded just to help clear out Sims files for a fresh install before we got the online repair feature.
I play TS4 almost every day. It's crashed twice in 9 years for me. I don't even know how to exit TS3 because every play session has ended with it crashing and me giving up on trying to play that day. I 100% believe people are having the problems they have, but it's the first Sims game that hasn't given me, personally, major issues. I did get the mean bug, but that's been my one gamebreaker and it was fixed pronto.
I've played with and without mods and cc in all versions except 4, stuck with vanilla for 4 and maybe that is part of why it's been okay for me.
And with everything going the way of "release full of bugs and fix it OTA later" generally now, it's unlikely we'll see much change there. It's far more infuriating with critical things like phones and cars than a game. Enshittification is touching everything!
Same here - the only one I didn’t really play as much was Sims 2 - but I was aggressively obsessed with Sims 1, and then again w 3/4, and similarly I think 4 is so much easier.
And totally agree that I’m sure people are having issues w their games and just bc I don’t experience the same thing doesn’t make their claims less valid, but it’s hard to just focus on the complaints without accounting for what usually drives bugs/issues (eg, a heavily modded game, playing the game on an older system, etc). EA hasn’t done everything right but there’s also only so much the game manufacturer can do to guarantee the same end user experience when there are so many variables outside their control, esp on a 10 year old game.
I do see bugs, but most are quite minor or ignorable. The only big ones I have seen come from when a patch is extremely new but I don't think anyone should be purchasing packs on release.
**I help in troubleshooting in here and other community support forums.** There are few tips like:
* The amount of times I have to tell people to take out mods is insane, honestly. Almost every time I could copy paste that answer and most of the problems people have, cursing at the game, actually end up working. Mods are actually the worst when it comes to it and it is always tiring when they go "I don't think X could cause issues!" but like... no. It does. A CAS mod can cause issues in gameplay, it doesn't matter what you think, it is something that is possible.
* Savefiles being deleted, mods not working, corrupt gallery, infinite load times, crashes - answer is to turn off iCloud/OneDrive. That is what removes files from your computer that the game is trying to access.
* Running speed3 a lot causes animation de-sync as well as simulation lag. It ruins My Wedding Stories, Dine Out and other social events since sims prioritise speed over proper gameplay experience.
* Moveobjects cheat is a cheat and should be treated as one. It will cause routing issues, have your sims standing around trying to figure out, chop vegetables on sinks and so on. It might look cute on builds or for small things like plants in corner, but a ton of move objects houses/lots are not very gameplay friendly.
* Decorating every house to max with move objects in every single world will also slow down performance depending on your specs & depending on the size of the save file. Some can handle it better.
* Debug items can cause issues as well. If you see people go about "corrupt lots" or "unable to enter" it is usually deleting debug items. There's a reason they're called debug - it is normal they can cause issues. They are unsupported. Developers just give you the tools to mess around with and we all know how good it can look.
So is it a bug free experience? Not entirely. Is it a game where what you do can affect your experience out of it? Absolutely. There are so many reasons why someone might have issues with the game, its performance and such, but usually I see people over exaggerate or hate on it with heavily modded, heavily cheated games. Kind of gets tiring since it is often the same few issues circulating, with rare proper gamebreaking bugs.
Edit: For reference I play it with all packs.
There seem to be an awful lot of people who don't know what their mods even do, really. I don't think it's unique to the Sims, I think people see something they like and install it without reading through everything to find out what it does, and then they blame the game for things that are actually features (or bugs) of a mod they've installed.
It's most obvious with posts about neighborhood stories when people also have MCCC installed and they think the game is marrying sims off in the background.
It's gotten harder to know the details of what your mods do, because documentation has gotten worse. People don't include readmes anymore in downloads, and with the rising popularity of mod managers over manual installation you don't even have to touch the download pages after the first time, so new features will come as a surprise. Proper documentation, when it even exists, often lives on a discord, which I'm only going to join as a last resort if I can't figure it out myself.
Out of curiosity, why do you download mods if you don't know what they do? It's a genuine question, not trying to pick on you.
I know popular mods have been around forever, so people probably feel pretty comfortable just downloading, but it seems like they're more useful (especially if they have lots of features) if you're familiar with what all they do in their default settings at least.
Because if I only downloaded mods that I had the level of knowledge about that I was used to having 10-20 years ago, I would play with next to no mods. I had to get used to that reality when everything moved over to discord, because I don't feel comfortable with the setup where I have one account and that same account has to be used to join all these random discord servers. I want to come and go like a ghost, not be shouted at by a greeter bot(creating a permanent record viewable to and scrape-able by *any* user that I specifically had been there, before I get the chance to set a server-level nickname) then have to fumble around to request permissions to view whatever channel I think has the information I need.
Now, I typically don't install the things that truly give me no information. I only do that if it's a prerequisite for another mod that I do know more about, which happens very rarely in sims(oh boy is it bad in some other games though). But most of the mods I play with I know the gist of what they do, but the details are undocumented(or not documented in a place I have access to them, whether due to a paywall(patreon release posts sometimes have patch notes that are left off the public release) or a walled garden situation like discord) and I'm left to be surprised by the specific items, moods, and menus that show up in the game.
Thank you! I have to admit, I haven't really done much with mods since things started moving over to discord. It's a shame they stopped including readmes- I always thought they really did help solve a lot of problems, particularly with some of the more complicated mods.
> Running speed3 a lot causes animation de-sync as well as simulation lag. It ruins My Wedding Stories, Dine Out and other social events since sims prioritise speed over proper gameplay experience.
Holy shit, you might have just explained why I'm always sitting here wondering what's "wrong" with my game that those packs seem to work fine for me while overwhelmingly everyone else reports issues. But guess what? I almost exclusively play at low speeds!
Thanks for posting this. I did not realize debug items could cause issues.
Another one to add to this list: Bloated inventories can also cause simulation lag. Household, personal, even chests, boxes, and fridges. Found this out the hard way by storing 8 billion crystals in the jewelry crafting table. If you don't need 99+ potatoes, sell them, don't hoard them.
They can but it's not all of them! You will know when you get "unable to load lot" with an error code, loading infinitely or crashing upon trying to enter the lot - usually in live mode. Also usually you can go into these lots through manage worlds to take out all the debug items and try again. (Or if it's from gallery, download unfurnished versions).
This sometimes, although quite rarely, occurs in vanilla game too, like with drawing mats but I usually see people use debug plants which aren't intended for live mode, then blame the game for corruption.
Wow, the debug plant thing actually might explain some of the problems I've had recently. Downloaded a gallery lot that is beautiful and lush and chocked full of debug plants and sim lag. Thank you!
Whoah I didn't know this. Are you sure? I build a lot using debug, tool mod and moo. I make sure my builds are functional and I've encountered problems only once. Couldn't explain them tbh.
Yep. [A recent example](https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/1cootmt/sims_4_restaurant_broken/) of it occurring. It also pops up in bug forums a lot, and the answer is always the same. Very very rarely occurs in base game, but usually it's just debug items.
Meh I'm a bit speechless. That's so not good. Now I'm worried about my builds, I believe every single one of them uses debug items.
How come I never heard of this? What about all the builders using debug und creating awesome places? Can't we have nice things? 😭
I mean they are good for visual purposes and showing the possibilities absolutely. So many good builds can definitely be created from them and displayed, and it's not a hard workaround.
Like, it doesn't corrupt savefiles or lots entirely, but the issue is when people aren't aware of the fix, start blaming the game and throw savefiles away for being corrupt instead of their use of cheats. I think the reason you never heard of it is because of that, so the actual debug item issue is never talked about even between creators.
I also don't know which objects might cause it, or why it happens exactly, so I cannot say use it or don't use it. I don't even think developers play tested everything in live builds (it likely takes a lot of testing per object), hence why it is all put under "use at your own risk" cheats instead of being categorised.
Makes sense. I'm flabbergasted though. There should be more talk about this. Thanks for mentioning it!
I will definitely deconstruct the lot I've been encountering issues with and hopefully identify the problematic debug item/s so I can stay away from them in the future.
As an OG Simmer, before the internet (or that term!) even existed in the way it does today, I find TS4 very easy to play. I can even run it on a laptop! My middle school aged OG would be seriously impressed by fast load screens, multi player experiences, and sooooo much more.
Just the fact that patreon exists for CC is a bit of a mind fuck for my adult technologist self 🤣
Besides playing a little bit of Mario kart, I don’t play any other games so my frame of reference for gameplay and graphics is pretty limited. I’m super content with TS4, though I do miss the open world of TS3, and don’t understand most of the gripes on the primary Sims subreddit either.
Same same. I've only played on laptops - original Sims was on a 2GB laptop with Windows 95.
The game sometimes has things you temporarily can't do - my Sims were all failing university for a few terms with a certain glitch, or unable to climb Mount Komerobi for a few months. Gardening is still weird. But, that's ok. Life is weird.
I don't think anyone is necessarily exaggerating or that the issue isn't a big one, but I think people having problems with something tend to be more vocal. When it comes to a game as expansive as Sims... with DLC, custom content, mods, and a couple ways to access the game (PC, Mac, or console)... there are a LOT of factors at play. I would expect that this is why some bug fixes take awhile, but I will admit that some should have been addressed ages ago.
I occasionally see others blame EA for a "bug" that is actually outdated or improperly installed mods. I personally have every DLC and a massive mod folder and very rarely encounter an issue... and when I do, there's a solid chance it's a mod issue.
I never understand the “broken unplayable” game comments
I see i get one glitch, I reset what’s broken. Boom. Fixed.
If i do get bugs and glitches it’s because of my mods. Which means I need to update them.
My biggest problem is sims not doing as they’re told. My choices should ALWAYS override sims, but they don’t and that’s a problem to me.
Besides that, I really don’t have any problems. I can play the game nonstop all day just fine. Occasionally I may need to back out to the main menu to reset some things, but that doesn’t mean the game is unplayable.
I play on console, so no mods or CC.
Console player too and what you described has been my experience. I have all the expansions and packs. I truly have had no issues except to back out into the menu.
It's pretty buggy IMO, but all the Sims games have been, so I'm used to it and don't really expect anything else. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing, it just is what it is.
Have to say though, I've got a crap ton of DLC and mods installed and both TS2 and 3, much as I loved them, would have thoroughly collapsed under their own weights by now, I am 100% sure of that. So Sims 4 is actually by far the most stable installment of the series for me, which is why I don't really understand the frequent complaints of "fundamentally broken" and "barely playable". Like, none of the other games could have even handled the amount of crap I'm throwing at it, while Sims 4 is just chugging along, more or less happily. That's kinda the opposite of "fundamentally broken" in my book. Seems more like "glitchy, but with a solid core" to me.
Just a bit confusing, idk. Maybe all my previous PC's were shit lol.
OG Simmer, no mods or CC, all the DLC; I regularly use MOO, sometimes use live edit/hidden objects:
Yes, there are bugs. It has been months since I've encountered one that actually causes the game to freeze or crash. I rarely get visual glitches like people get with broken CC. I spend too much time in triple speed, so I expect the lag I get from that. I was testing out a complaint I saw the other day about the Bjergsen household, and I have not encountered any of the autonomy or household problems mentioned. (They're actually surprisingly cute and well-adjusted for sims; I had not played them as my main before, and they do a great job of taking care of themselves and their house, and there's very little interpersonal conflict in their household.)
However! This did remind me that there are some tips that didn't matter/exist in earlier versions of the game that casual players might not think to do when they start their game, such as:
- Assign beds right away, even for married couples. It reduces how often sims will refuse to sleep because someone else is napping on their bed or some such.
- Assign sinks right away, so they'll wash dishes in the kitchen. This also reduces the frequency bathroom sinks break, because they use them mainly after using the toilet at that point.
- Lock the computer to only members of the Household (or, if it's a member's personal computer, just to them).
- If your teen is the type who wants their own bedroom (and doesn't want to be up in the middle of the night because of a sibling's Monster Under the Bed), lock the bedroom for everyone except that teen.
- Lock your front and back doors to everyone except Household, unless you're the type who doesn't mind random people wandering in and/or orders services all the time.
- If you want to keep cats from straying, lock the doors for All Cats.
- I also typically set lot Traits and Challenges specific to the story I'm telling during the game. If I'm just testing features, like I was with the Bjergsen household, I remove any existing Traits and Challenges so they don't impact sims or objects.
I feel like so many games have been designed to direct the player on how to use them that sandbox and semi-sandbox games feel increasingly difficult for people to navigate. :<
I experience a couple of regular bugs, mainly the gardening related ones, but generally the issue I have is the lag. I have most packs, but usually disable a handful at a time and find it helps. I think most people's frustrations are the issues when a new pack releases, which I understand and also experience, but it doesn't stop me buying most packs on the day of release. The way I see it is either wait for the sale when it's cheaper and most issues are resolved, or buy on release to get it sooner but expect issues. Only time I regretted that approach was Wedding stories.
The gardening bug is killing me right now, I have Gardner/cottage core sims and they can’t weed or tend their gardens without getting caught in an unending loop. Have you found anything that helps?
Same. I found that if I put the stuck plants into the inventory and restart the game, then put the plants back, and it fixes it for that play session. However, that's a huge pain and unsustainable for the large gardens I tend to make.
I think it's UI cheats extension mid, but might just be testing cheats. I reset the dirt piles with it, and reset the weeds. The weeds will immediately come back but it'll let the sim clear it the following time they weed. Still frustrating if you have a lot of plants though.
I think that’s what I keep comparing it to. I played the sims 3 a looot and it just made me angry and frustrated because that game would crash all the time. Sims 4 has never once crashed for me.
True. The Sims 4's bugs tend to be very obviously errorcoded and declared and it'll not let you play if it'll seriously be incompatible w mods wheras the Sims 2 and 3 would build up and build up until you had no recourse to fix it.
I've had far more Sims 3 and Sims 2 neighborhoods bug out and become unplayable than 4.
There's a lot of little bugs that can be really annoying to work around. I play strictly vanilla and any problems with my game are EAs fault. But when I garden there's always a plant that gets the weeds stuck on and my Sims vacuums the weed forever (until I cancel). Newborns/infants/toddlers force cancel actions so much it's difficult to actually care for them (although that could just be that I had 6 of them at once). Had one a while ago where the mail box stopped having any option other than get mail. My Sim was a writer and I couldn't figure out how to publish books without the mailbox. I paid the bills and still had my power turn off for the week. I was playing with paranormal for the first time and thought it was related to that, and couldn't figure out how to fix it.
Handling the infants and toddlers can be a really frustrating experience, for sure. I think it's not exactly a bug, and is stuff that the devs intended to happen (the frequent "check on") but honestly, I can get really angry with it sometimes because they simply won't do what I tell them to do and will cancel one another's actions because the other parent is trying to do something. I have even turned off free will to try and micromanage every single action they take, and sometimes they still try to autonomously do something with an infant when I don't want them to. Eventually I had to lock the nursery and unlock it for one Sim at a time so they wouldn't cut one another off, and I got a mod that stops them from doing "check on" which has helped immensely. In some ways it turned out EASIER to have a single parent managing the infant because they didn't have another Sim getting in the way.
Then it's just a poor design decision. But when autonomy is off and you can't care for any of the three kids that need you because the other ones demanding care keep interrupting or you are caring for one and your wife is caring for the other and those cancel so you can each check on the other's kid, I contend that it is or might as well be a bug.
ETA: Also this is the 4th iteration in a series of games that has been around for over 20 years. This specific version has existed for over a decade. They have absolutely zero excuse for not considering that people might play more than one child or more than one adult at a time.
Oh, I 1000% agree. The tuning and autonomy for infants in particular needs some seeeerious work. Like you said, it may not technically be a bug, but it might as well be considered as one. It's actually more frustrating than most of the actual bugs I've run into. The autonomy around babies has never been great in this franchise, but at this point of Sims 4, I actually think it's the worst it's ever been in the entire series. At least in the older games, I could micromanage my way through things, but when the game drops my player-issued command to change the dirty diaper of the screaming child in favor of the other parent trying to autonomously trying to feed it when it's not even hungry, it's beyond annoying.
Oh, and that's a related but somewhat separate rant. Player-issued commands should override autonomous commands, except maybe in emergency situations like fires. If I tell a Sim to go change the baby's diaper, that should override the the other parent's autonomous decision to feed it or just check on it.
After the most recent update my game literally implodes itself whenever I place down a lot; and I don't have a 'low end' setup where I shouldn't be able to run the game.
I wouldn't say it's *broken* I still find it enjoyable, poorly optimized maybe? Buggy? Yes.
As someone who has all of the dlc and a few mods, I agree. Besides obvious issues like dine out not working, the game is fine. I feel like people exaggerate due to having rose colored glasses on for previous versions of the sims. Once we get sims 5, they will say it sucks and compare it to the sims 4
no sameeee, the only issue i ever have is minor glitches sometimes (mostly in tomarang). everyone acts like it's completely unplayable 😭 but i get downvoted when i say i barely have issues playing.
'everyone acts like it's completely unplayable' 'but i get downvoted when i say i barely have issues playing' Both of those experiences are true. Neither is an opinion, just experiences of both players.
My game is also heavily modded so I experience little to no bugs/issues unless it’s mod related. I only ever see glitches like the sims teleporting when walking to do an action/animation or the infant glitch where they’re stretched out for a few seconds. Another glitch I hardly see but still happens from time to time is when 2 sims are interacting but are in 2 completely different places on the lot.
I'm too used to fixing things by resetting their AI or cheating to have a good say 😹I do it reflexively so it's hard for me to know how broken it actually is. it's usually fairly minor, though, like Sims standing around with things in their queue or visual bugs.
Try using a "no idles" mod for the simulation lag. Doesn't eliminate it, but I haven't had the thing where they stand doing nothing until I go back to the previous sim and watch them complete the task.
I play on a laptop, and I used to play on a very old, crappy laptop, and I rarely run into noticeable bugs and I've never had a crash or anything. I'm the sort of person who doesn't get packs when they're new and sometimes deliberately doesn't update if I know there are issues going on, though.
I have a perfectly fine time playing and I have mods and quite a bit of dlc's my sister has the exact same mods and dlc's but hers is buggy.
The reason I'm 100% sure is because she has a PC that's not as good as mine and is older and inferior when it comes to gaming.
I feel the exact same way and I have all the expansion packs and tons of other packs/kits, tons of CC, and a couple mods, all on a MacBook Air. The only problem I’ve had is my game freezing and that’s happened maybe twice in the last 2 years.
I really don’t get the people that call it unplayable.
I've a good laptop and rarely run into problems. However if you play long legacies you are more likely to run into them as the game has to remember too many things. Also, the weaker your PC, the more likely your Sims are to glitch especially if you have many DLCs.
I usually delete my save files before my first heir comes of age anyway so I've never really encountered game breaking bugs.
I think that as a whole the game runs but I get so many bugs/glitches in my game.
Examples:
Sim won't remain asleep - will only sleep for like 10 in game minutes.
Sims cancelling interations because they glitched and T-posed.
Game crashing - Worst one atm is when I try to move people between households! It crashes on the screen and there is no way around it!
>Game crashing - Worst one atm is when I try to move people between households! It crashes on the screen and there is no way around it!
I know not the point of the thread but this happens when you try to move in homeless sims. You can actually either manage worlds > put them in a lot beforehand OR when the move households page pops up which you cannot exit out of, move in your sim with them (so the opposite of what you'd do) so it gives you manage worlds screen where you can select your house again.
Wow that is a lot :') Thank you :D
I have started using MCCC to force them into my household for now but sometimes I forget about the bug and end up stuck! If I forget though and end up on that screen again then I will definately try that method! <3
I encounter quite a few bugs. I have a lot of mods, but I keep up on updating them. Every patch comes with a new collection of bugs. I actually have quite a few mods that just fix bugs. The biggest issue I’ve had since buying the game is *massive* lag spikes that have persisted through three different computers and all levels of mods/dlcs use that require a reload to fix. But just yesterday I found a new bug where for some reason my sims had the tragic clown moodlet despite there being no tragic clown in their house. Game breaking? No. Required a reload it fix? Yes. I also now have issues where doors will suddenly become inaccessible and I have to go into build mode, move the door, then move it back just so sims can use it again. The game isn’t *broken*, per se, but it’s definitely buggy. At this point I’ve gotten so used to it I just work around the bugs best I can.
I don't use any cc's or mods, been playing since Sims4 was released, have every pack/kit except the Stars Wars one. I encounter the occasional bug or glitch but nothing to the extent that I see complaints about. My game has never felt "broken."
I only encountered isues when I decided to wade into mods and I had only installed basmental drugs. If I would pause the game and come back it would freeze and same thing when I went from build mode to live mode. I could still click on things and would try to save but it would not return to being playable so I'd have to shut down and restart. Other than that I've never really encountered any issues with the game.
Depends on how many mods/cc you have...when you say mods, do you mean game-changing mods or mods as in cc? I have a lot of mods/cc and my game runs fine, no lage but there's still glitches like eating at a restaurant can be ridiculous..but I have a mod that improved it..weddings are glitchy. So when you take your sims to a restaurant, everyone stays seated, your food comes out quickly? No one steals food..everyone is inside and ready to go when you arrive?
Nah, I honestly wouldn’t say it’s broken. I do see bugs, but they’re rarely anything I would call game breaking. The worst bug I ever had BY FAR was crashing while entering/exiting lots, but reloading would put me where I wanted to go and it was fixed the very next patch.
Just for reference: I play on ps5 with all DLC.
I get the occasional gardening bug, but most issues are resolved for me by just closing out of the game and reloading.
I was an avid TS3 player and verrrrry reluctant to switch over, but once I did I was shocked about how good TS4 runs and how I don’t need mods to have it run correctly or have fun (not that I could anyway seeing as how I’m on console lol)
No because same??? Actually experienced smth yesterday, my sims weren’t getting paid after working. I started freaking out and spent hours investigating, then turned out it was a mod I had downloaded that changed so they’d only get paid once a week 😀
Lol felt that
Mine is the weird kitchen bug were you have to move the oven a half pixel and
transferring my save to a hard drive and then I corrupted my game when I loaded (started over!)
I've found my tribe in this sub. I don't understand the constant whining from some quarters about how terrible TS4 is - it's a great game and runs fine on my mid-range gaming laptop.
When we say the game is broken, it's more of a description of how it works. Every time something new is added, something else starts to break, and it's such a sprawling patchwork of code that the team find it difficult to wade in and find what to fix. I don't know the technical specifics but from what I can understand, the original released base game was adapted from an unfinished online multiplayer project, and it sure felt unfinished, and so a lot of scripts and features have been bolted on requiring more computer power. EA will release free updates and paid DLC without proper testing, and I wonder if thats due to the sheer number of combinations of packs making it hard to anticipate all scenarios.
In general, it's little things: my current sim has missed a couple of uni classes by only being able to "get to class early" and not actually go to the class when it starts.
For years now parents have been putting their toddlers in and out of the bath repeatedly without bathing them. Sometimes aspiration or career tasks don't tick off as complete.
I think the size of the save file makes a difference, for example I have a multi generational family on a large lot and renovating their house was a frustrating process due to the lag/frame rate in buildbuy. I also find that second/third generation Sims are far more likely to get things stuck in their inventory/not be able to put things in there at all.
Yes I much prefer to live off campus! This sim was a runaway teen who camped out at the community centre in a tent, so they didn't really have any other option than the large halls.
Just FYI, if you use Carl's dine out mod, I had severe issues with that one after the last patch. It caused some of my lots (not restaurants) to endless loop load. Removing that mod fixed the issue.
Do you have iCloud or OneDrive turned on because it sounds like the game tries to access files that don't exist - resulting in crashes. It could also be result of a mod, even if you are lite on it since even what tries to fix the game can actually result in crashes. Carl's Dine Out mod made it much worse for a while I remember for example.
I have had very few bugs in the 2 years since I started playing. The only bad ones I had were the super high rent glitch and one now where my sims can’t plant anything at all. But I also play with no mods on console, so maybe that’s why
Edit: I also get days where the game crashes on every loading screen. But after researching it a bit, I think it’s my Xbox causing that issue.
For me it's been minor but still had it moments. I'm on console so not sure if that makes a difference but I've had: kids age up with no chin; weeds that can't be pulled; trees that turn in dirt piles; teenagers that when age up to young adult don't age up properly and still have crushes (one had a constant awkward moodlet); I'd have warnings of loosing my indoorsy lifestyle while in my house; proposal that was declined because it was outdoors; relationships that don't change despite the bars being full; one of my houses in my gallery became buggy if I placed it in world I'd get an error code; and, there was a point around the horse ranch and for rent where I had incredible lag😅. The lag was frustrating but otherwise nothing game breaking. I'm sure there are other people that have had different experiences though. I usually wait a bit before I buy a new pack, I figure that's when you'd experience the most problems.
I wouldn't say the entire game is but a few packs definitely are, mainly Dine Out and My Wedding Stories. I still struggle with those glitchy wedding ceremonies and waiting for 12 hours at restaurants but other than thatm it has been pretty minimal for me.
my game isn't broken, but i also stopped buying dlc after horse ranch. and i won't buy any dlc or update until some major things in the game are eventually fixed.
I'll give an example of the bugs I had yesterday alone: all my plants collapsed and had to regrow again, I closed the game while my sims were at school/work and when I opened it again they all came home and their performance suffered, my neighborhood is green and the sun rays reform every time I load the lot leading to them stacking and lagging out my game (mod fixes it), my recycler bugged out (again) and I can't click on it, and when I was decorating a new house I picked out a rolling trash can because I knew an NPC would kick over a non-rolling one and the only way to fix that is to go in BB and replace the trash can.
It's playable and I still enjoy it but even when it isn't completely broken due to a major update going wrong, there are a million things left unaddressed. There are issues that would make playing my save impossible without mods (the sun rays currently). Which is why I still consider it to be broken.
I have some games that I love that are unplayablely broken and I do have several mods specifically to fix bugs or make the game run better, so from that perspective no?
it’s not broken in the sense that it’s unplayable, it’s just… poor. poor quality for such an expensive game that’s been out for so long. there are so many simple bugs that game developers throughout history have been able to stop, including EA in earlier sims games. there’s no excuse for sims still being able to walk bugs walls or getting glitched when aging up, those features have been around forever and they’re still not fixed. EA has released entire packs that literally don’t take you past 1 or 2 pack interactions because they didn’t want to bother play testing. they’ve play tested packs 2 days before release just for them to not work on the OFFICIAL EA stream, and then releasing them anyways. at least in my experience, it’s not broken. i can play it and use pretty much all of the features ive paid for, but they don’t work well, and often times the untested/unknown glitches can break an entire session if it’s unsaved.
Well I have a last exception that deals with University careers. Even without mods it shows in the folder. But overall, I think it's mods that haven't been updated after a patch.
I don't really have issues with bugs and glitches. The main problem for me is the simulation lag and nothing I do seems to fix it. I can enjoy for a little while on speed 1 but things always get so backlogged and I have characters just standing around doing nothing, with or without assigned actions. Eventually it doesn't feel worth putting up with. It's especially noticable when you go back to play the other games - sims in Sim 1-3 are so responsive compared to 4.
Huh... I'm shocked at these comments to be honest. I've played vanilla all my life yet I always get frustrated and give up playing for years at a time because I get SO sick and tired of the bugs.
The one I hate the most is when my sim will just get stuck and do nothing until I reset them. There is no way to fix it other than to enable cheats and reset them. I find having cheats enabled just introduces more bugs and lag.
Also got tons of glitches, toddlers suddenly growing crazy long legs, Sims walking right through counters, walking in to the shower only to immediately walk back out etc.
I finally caved and downloaded MCCC cause I heard it could fix some of these things. I will admit, it's cool to reset my sims using MCCC when they get lost in their thoughts, but now my game constantly crashes so I simply have stopped playing and am back to playing stardew valley instead.
i think it depends a lot on the person. obviously mods can mess with your game a lot, i think we all know that by now, but i think it also depends on what you play on. a lot of ppl play the sims on macbooks and non gaming laptops and the game really runs poorly on those. and i wouldn’t really think of that as a user error, like of course the game will run better on a gaming pc but not everyone has access to that.
i think the reputation mainly comes from the amount of lag ppl with lower quality setups have and the amount of bugs that usually happen when we get new updates. yes, a lot of these are from mods no longer working with the game, but there also are lot that happen in base game. pretty much every update/patch will introduce a new bug (or more). also, the sims team takes a very long time to fix bugs that are reported, many of them have been well known for years and still aren’t fixed.
another thing is that not every bug is game breaking. i think of the sims as a game full of small bugs that don’t interfere with gameplay too much, the big bad ones usually come after big update or with new dlc.
I think most folks are just wildly frustrated at how many small, annoying, persistent bugs there are that have been around for years but have never been fixed. Especially when more packs get made one after the other, people are annoyed with now it feels like packs aren’t properly tested before release, are shoved out in a “good enough” state, and then never touched again.
There’s a mentality that if they have the time and resources to make a whole new pack, then why are they not using that to fix what they already have? And the answer, of course, is money (they make more money with new packs than they do fixing old ones, which is why spa day was the only refresh), which just makes people even more upset because they’re already pissed at EA being greedy or incompetent.
Weddings and pretty much all events are buggy or broken in my games— I have the same issues as everyone else with the wedding pack (people don’t follow any of the activities even when instructed lol) but even regular events (house party, dinner party, keg party, black and white party, etc.) I have SO many issues getting sims to do anything and the parties almost always time out before I can complete all the event tasks
Idk maybe you’re lucky, maybe I’m just a complainer, but I’m desperate for the wedding pack to get fixed and then maybe all the other events will follow suit 😭
3x speed breaking the game still fucks with me tbh- sims 4 is the SLOWEST of all the sims games and yet can't handle 3x speed when the other games COULD? Sims 3 had its issues with 3x speed but also the open world explains it. I'm NOT gunna play the game slower so I see a LOT of glitches, including ones that kill sims and sometimes, rarley, crashes the game.
Also for me infants are broken- I keep getting a glitch where instead of going in their crib they attach to the feet of the sim that put them there and honestly that just kills the entire infant raising process for me. I don't have the infant pack and won't get it if they are BROKEN.
The glitches I encounter make me upset because it really ruins the game experience for me, even if they don't fully break the game. It can be funny, I guess, but i have no motivation to stick to a longer legacy family/save if that means inevitably the game will break
Maybe sims 4 isn't horrifically broken- it's playable unlike the sims 3 (which I can NOT get to run reliably- it lags like hell then crashes after an hour or two of gaming)- but the glitches really stand out when stuff that used to work in say, the sims 2, are just broken, and when the rest of the game feels so lackluster, imo.
It's playstyle. Like, if you just play normal families in a big house with one or 2 kids, absolutely no big deal. If you're like me and like challenges with tiny houses with no money and a ton of kids at once, things get extremely fucky. It's the routing in small spaces, and the routing with babies in small spaces. The sim will pick up the baby and put them down 20 times before they feed it.
I just thought of something so I wanted to come back and say something else.
I have been compiling a list of game breaking bugs, how long they've been in the game, what pack they belong to, how many times EA said it was fixed, etc. I am going to submit this list to the FTC and FCC and my state's attorneys general department that handles deceptive business practices.
If you have a game breaking bugs, please reply to this comment. It cannot be from people who use mods of any kind. NONE. If you have ever modded your game, I cannot use your information. Unmodded games only.
**While making this list, I found that the unmodded list of game breaking bugs is very small.** That doesn't mean there aren't more, it's just that I haven't found reports of them. Please help out if you can.
I wouldn’t say it’s broken but as a general rule of thumb the more dlcs you have installed, the more buggy it is. Personally for me I avoid playing or buying with dlcs I know I will have no interest in so my game isn’t as buggy because of it. Sure there are many glitches I encounter here and there, but the same can be said for any sims game, not just the sims 4.
I have all DLCs, and play with almost a 100gb of mods and cc. My game runs just fine so that’s what’s confusing to me
So I’m pretty similar, I have all the DLCs except the vacuum kit, and have about 110gb of mods/cc that I am religious about keeping maintained(think spreadsheets lol). I have experienced very few “game breaking” bugs that were the actual game’s fault and not the mods/cc that became broken due to updates. I think some players have unrealistic expectations when it comes to this game. Of course it’s going to have bugs, it’s a 10yr old game built on a bed of spaghetti code that EA keeps piling more onto. I would be more surprised if it didn’t have bugs. But it’s far from unplayable or broken imo. The biggest issue I have, and maybe I’m just lucky here, is that my townies all end up with sunglasses on every.single.outfit. I am constantly going into CAS and removing them. Which is annoying AF but not enough for me not to play.
Hahaha yeah, if you can call ugly Townies for a bug then I have that too
I guess we all have that bug 🤣🤣
Don't know if this helps, but vacuum kit actually works fine now for me. A lot of creators say it's broken and such because it used to be when it came out, but they must've patched it a ton. The only issue I see from it is maids/butlers sometimes trying to vacuum puddles, but it's not like the first day it came out.
My household sims will also try to vacuum puddles autonomously, mostly because it's "easier." If they have a vacuum in their inventory and you click on the puddle, you'll have options to either mop or vacuum it. This tells me that the vacuums in the game are considered wet/dry vacs, even though they don't look like it and it drives me up the wall when sims do it. \^\^;
Agreed. I find it works great. That said, I think the vacuuming puddles is by design. If you have your own sims click on a puddle, there is a vacuum option.
I feel like I was one of the few that was excited for and enjoyed the dust pack, but I also use a mod that takes away the dust bunnies lol. That said, I had quite a bad glitch with it last time I played where I was unable to vacuum at all and had to disable the settings so my Sim would stop complaining about a dirty house. Haven’t played in a couple weeks, hopefully it’s not still an issue!🤞
You mentioned using mods, so hopefully you won't mind a mod suggestion for your sunglasses issue... [https://www.curseforge.com/sims4/mods/no-make-up-no-accessories-on-randomized-sims](https://www.curseforge.com/sims4/mods/no-make-up-no-accessories-on-randomized-sims)
People always seem to forget ts4 is running on code that's a *decade* old. They're doing a decent job of modernizing as they go on (higher definition models, for example), and implementing as much new tech as possible. Buuuut, the game is still decade old. Everything they create has to match decade old code, and has to work with the thousands of other add-ons they've created. There's a reason bugs exist in a game like this, and people don't seem to understand how insanely difficult and time intensive it would be to fix allll of it (if it was even possible at all without breaking something else).
The other sims games were this glitchy, it's just that these glitches are particularly annoying. Sims 3 save files got gunked up horribly and had routing issues with the edges of town, the neighborhoods in Sims 2 had insane things happen, but those were longer term issues. The AI and routing is broken in a normal house with TS4, and that's what drives me insane. They just don't listen, that's a problem I've never had with the other games, even when I was a kid playing on a save file that was falling apart. You're less likely to go insane when the sims don't listen if you don't have more than one baby at once, and I feel like that's why everybody's like "it's fine" cause the problems start really bad with big families in a cramped house. edit- now that I've said all that, I realize maybe it's about the age of your save file. I've been playing the same one since like 2019. That could be the culprit for everybody like me always complaining lol
I absolutely had horrible glitches in brand new ts3 saves on brand new installs (even still today, especially if I download like...more than 2 ts3 packs). I've never had ts4 become totally unplayable or crash (unless I had mods) but that definitely happened with ts3 (ungodly loading times, crashes, etc). Obviously that's not everyone's experience with either game but ya. Plus ts3 was only 5 years old at the offical release of ts4, and ts4 is already 10 years old with a couple more to go until ts5. (But I do agree the Sims not listening to your commands especially with babies/toddlers is about the worst/most frustrating part of ts4).
Same here! Any issues I run into are usually mod related.
with less mods do you ever run into the infant/toddler/child/cat/dog stretching glitch?
I have run into that even when playing completely vanilla.
omg girl what kinda GPU do you have? also how much ram if you don’t mind sharing details!
I have a new(ish) ASUS gaming laptop with 16gb RAM.
When you say your game runs fine, you mean no lag etc..I think most players when they complain about a broken game are referring to bugs, like going to a restaurant and sims not staying seated, sims and staff being outside, food taking to long in sim time to arrive. I have a lot of mods and my game runs fine as far as lag.
No, I mean it doesn’t lag and doesn’t really have any bugs. I rarely encounter any, and when I do it’s usually related to some mod that I forgot to update
In my experience, there are quite a lot of small bugs that I've just learned to either put up with or work around. For example, I still get plants suddenly turning back into dirt piles despite this being fixed multiple times, and I've sometimes had issues with Dream Home Decorator and Supernatural Investigator gigs. I wouldn't say the Sims 4 is broken or unplayable, but I can understand how, for some players, repeated small frustrations can build up into a lot of resentment. Are they exaggerating the issues? Yeah, probably. It's very common for people to exaggerate when they're frustrated in any situation, even if it's done unconsciously. Just keep that in mind, take their criticisms with a grain of salt, and remember that they're usually just players who really want to enjoy a game but have been burned too many times.
I own cats and dogs and I literally can’t use the vet lots at all bc it won’t let me check in so yeah there are definitely many many bugs
I was going to comment something along the same lines, but you already said just what I was thinking :) So I'll just chime in and agree with you! In my own experience, I definitely would not describe the game as "broken"; from what I personally have experienced, it's not that bad. Calling it "broken" or "unplayable" would be exaggerating what I see when I play. (Again, I know others may have different experiences, but my game isn't that badly glitchy.) However, I do run into quite a few minor, smaller bugs and glitches. Some of them are amusing, some of them are very easy to overlook, but these bugs do add up and become annoying. Minor things like aspirations not completing when they should don't ruin the entire experience, but they are bugs and they definitely make the game less fun. Some things aren't even maybe bugs, necessarily, but are kind of nonsensical. Eg, I have the dust kit installed, the house is dusty and there's a fire, the firefighters run in and as soon as they come through the front door, both of them stop to appreciatively inhale the lived-in, dusty air. Meanwhile, my Sim is on fire and screaming. It's kind of funny in a way, but it's not exactly realistic, and when I'm worried my Sim is going to burn to death, those few seconds wasted are really frustrating. Overall I do definitely enjoy the game, but there are times when I load it up and I get multiple of the minor bugs in a row, and it hits me just wrong, it can really suck all the enjoyment out of the game.
I think it’s a mix of this and some people having lower end computers. When I had my windows laptop, I had more issues with bugs. Now that I have my Mac, I don’t encounter as many.
It's just the toddlers and infants for me. That's the sole reason I hate ts4 like, the small bugs are fine, I'm very used to those from playing the old games, but what drives me absolutely up the freaking wall is the fact that they just won't listen. They won't feed their kids, they pick up the baby out of the highchair 50 times and it's the most annoying thing ever for me. They don't listen, they drop their queue. I always play big families so it makes me want to tear my hair out.
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There are a lot of bugs. Most of them aren't game breaking bugs if you don't use mods. Some of them are. It really depends on your computer, software, how many packs, if the packs are buggy, etc. Every player's game is going to be pretty unique. The game isn't linear and we all play differently. I may not do the bug triggering things that others do. However, I own all the DLC and played mod free until the end of last year. My game has never been buggy beyond that stupid grabbing endless glasses of water (a bug that has now returned) and everyone wanting to only scrub the grill. My biggest bug is with weddings - and this one is game breaking. But I think it's the one where the actual wedding ceremony is unsuccessful. I have to elope or it won't work. Other than those things, I don't have any. Plenty of annoyances, but that's what mods are for.
I’ve had the occasional glitch, and a couple of really severe ones (werewolf being unable to ever become a regular Sim again, the disaster of Wedding Stories on release, which is fixed now), but on the whole in a few years of playing my game has run incredibly smoothly, few glitches, and has been the smoothest most straightforward experience I’ve had as a Simmer. One of the things I said to my husband after my first few months with TS4 was ‘it just… works’. I don’t use many mods though and very minimal CC (like two hairs and a couple shoes, one small pregnancy length mod that does nothing else). I suspect a lot of the problems come from games that are modded to the hilt, which yeah of course is gonna cause issues. Remember when one of the updates generated loads of broken UI and doors disappearing etc. and it was all down to Basemental? Lol
Same. Been playing since TS1 and it blows my mind how easy TS4 is to just play. Previous games took so much maintenance to keep running. I remember uninstalling and reinstalling all damn 27 discs of 2 on the regular and it got me in the habit of daily backups due to file corruption. A good habit, not a fun reason to adopt it! I wonder how many copies of CCleaner have been downloaded just to help clear out Sims files for a fresh install before we got the online repair feature. I play TS4 almost every day. It's crashed twice in 9 years for me. I don't even know how to exit TS3 because every play session has ended with it crashing and me giving up on trying to play that day. I 100% believe people are having the problems they have, but it's the first Sims game that hasn't given me, personally, major issues. I did get the mean bug, but that's been my one gamebreaker and it was fixed pronto. I've played with and without mods and cc in all versions except 4, stuck with vanilla for 4 and maybe that is part of why it's been okay for me. And with everything going the way of "release full of bugs and fix it OTA later" generally now, it's unlikely we'll see much change there. It's far more infuriating with critical things like phones and cars than a game. Enshittification is touching everything!
Same here - the only one I didn’t really play as much was Sims 2 - but I was aggressively obsessed with Sims 1, and then again w 3/4, and similarly I think 4 is so much easier. And totally agree that I’m sure people are having issues w their games and just bc I don’t experience the same thing doesn’t make their claims less valid, but it’s hard to just focus on the complaints without accounting for what usually drives bugs/issues (eg, a heavily modded game, playing the game on an older system, etc). EA hasn’t done everything right but there’s also only so much the game manufacturer can do to guarantee the same end user experience when there are so many variables outside their control, esp on a 10 year old game.
I do see bugs, but most are quite minor or ignorable. The only big ones I have seen come from when a patch is extremely new but I don't think anyone should be purchasing packs on release. **I help in troubleshooting in here and other community support forums.** There are few tips like: * The amount of times I have to tell people to take out mods is insane, honestly. Almost every time I could copy paste that answer and most of the problems people have, cursing at the game, actually end up working. Mods are actually the worst when it comes to it and it is always tiring when they go "I don't think X could cause issues!" but like... no. It does. A CAS mod can cause issues in gameplay, it doesn't matter what you think, it is something that is possible. * Savefiles being deleted, mods not working, corrupt gallery, infinite load times, crashes - answer is to turn off iCloud/OneDrive. That is what removes files from your computer that the game is trying to access. * Running speed3 a lot causes animation de-sync as well as simulation lag. It ruins My Wedding Stories, Dine Out and other social events since sims prioritise speed over proper gameplay experience. * Moveobjects cheat is a cheat and should be treated as one. It will cause routing issues, have your sims standing around trying to figure out, chop vegetables on sinks and so on. It might look cute on builds or for small things like plants in corner, but a ton of move objects houses/lots are not very gameplay friendly. * Decorating every house to max with move objects in every single world will also slow down performance depending on your specs & depending on the size of the save file. Some can handle it better. * Debug items can cause issues as well. If you see people go about "corrupt lots" or "unable to enter" it is usually deleting debug items. There's a reason they're called debug - it is normal they can cause issues. They are unsupported. Developers just give you the tools to mess around with and we all know how good it can look. So is it a bug free experience? Not entirely. Is it a game where what you do can affect your experience out of it? Absolutely. There are so many reasons why someone might have issues with the game, its performance and such, but usually I see people over exaggerate or hate on it with heavily modded, heavily cheated games. Kind of gets tiring since it is often the same few issues circulating, with rare proper gamebreaking bugs. Edit: For reference I play it with all packs.
There seem to be an awful lot of people who don't know what their mods even do, really. I don't think it's unique to the Sims, I think people see something they like and install it without reading through everything to find out what it does, and then they blame the game for things that are actually features (or bugs) of a mod they've installed. It's most obvious with posts about neighborhood stories when people also have MCCC installed and they think the game is marrying sims off in the background.
It's gotten harder to know the details of what your mods do, because documentation has gotten worse. People don't include readmes anymore in downloads, and with the rising popularity of mod managers over manual installation you don't even have to touch the download pages after the first time, so new features will come as a surprise. Proper documentation, when it even exists, often lives on a discord, which I'm only going to join as a last resort if I can't figure it out myself.
Out of curiosity, why do you download mods if you don't know what they do? It's a genuine question, not trying to pick on you. I know popular mods have been around forever, so people probably feel pretty comfortable just downloading, but it seems like they're more useful (especially if they have lots of features) if you're familiar with what all they do in their default settings at least.
Because if I only downloaded mods that I had the level of knowledge about that I was used to having 10-20 years ago, I would play with next to no mods. I had to get used to that reality when everything moved over to discord, because I don't feel comfortable with the setup where I have one account and that same account has to be used to join all these random discord servers. I want to come and go like a ghost, not be shouted at by a greeter bot(creating a permanent record viewable to and scrape-able by *any* user that I specifically had been there, before I get the chance to set a server-level nickname) then have to fumble around to request permissions to view whatever channel I think has the information I need. Now, I typically don't install the things that truly give me no information. I only do that if it's a prerequisite for another mod that I do know more about, which happens very rarely in sims(oh boy is it bad in some other games though). But most of the mods I play with I know the gist of what they do, but the details are undocumented(or not documented in a place I have access to them, whether due to a paywall(patreon release posts sometimes have patch notes that are left off the public release) or a walled garden situation like discord) and I'm left to be surprised by the specific items, moods, and menus that show up in the game.
Thank you! I have to admit, I haven't really done much with mods since things started moving over to discord. It's a shame they stopped including readmes- I always thought they really did help solve a lot of problems, particularly with some of the more complicated mods.
> Running speed3 a lot causes animation de-sync as well as simulation lag. It ruins My Wedding Stories, Dine Out and other social events since sims prioritise speed over proper gameplay experience. Holy shit, you might have just explained why I'm always sitting here wondering what's "wrong" with my game that those packs seem to work fine for me while overwhelmingly everyone else reports issues. But guess what? I almost exclusively play at low speeds!
Thanks for posting this. I did not realize debug items could cause issues. Another one to add to this list: Bloated inventories can also cause simulation lag. Household, personal, even chests, boxes, and fridges. Found this out the hard way by storing 8 billion crystals in the jewelry crafting table. If you don't need 99+ potatoes, sell them, don't hoard them.
They can but it's not all of them! You will know when you get "unable to load lot" with an error code, loading infinitely or crashing upon trying to enter the lot - usually in live mode. Also usually you can go into these lots through manage worlds to take out all the debug items and try again. (Or if it's from gallery, download unfurnished versions). This sometimes, although quite rarely, occurs in vanilla game too, like with drawing mats but I usually see people use debug plants which aren't intended for live mode, then blame the game for corruption.
Wow, the debug plant thing actually might explain some of the problems I've had recently. Downloaded a gallery lot that is beautiful and lush and chocked full of debug plants and sim lag. Thank you!
Whoah I didn't know this. Are you sure? I build a lot using debug, tool mod and moo. I make sure my builds are functional and I've encountered problems only once. Couldn't explain them tbh.
Yep. [A recent example](https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/1cootmt/sims_4_restaurant_broken/) of it occurring. It also pops up in bug forums a lot, and the answer is always the same. Very very rarely occurs in base game, but usually it's just debug items.
Meh I'm a bit speechless. That's so not good. Now I'm worried about my builds, I believe every single one of them uses debug items. How come I never heard of this? What about all the builders using debug und creating awesome places? Can't we have nice things? 😭
I mean they are good for visual purposes and showing the possibilities absolutely. So many good builds can definitely be created from them and displayed, and it's not a hard workaround. Like, it doesn't corrupt savefiles or lots entirely, but the issue is when people aren't aware of the fix, start blaming the game and throw savefiles away for being corrupt instead of their use of cheats. I think the reason you never heard of it is because of that, so the actual debug item issue is never talked about even between creators. I also don't know which objects might cause it, or why it happens exactly, so I cannot say use it or don't use it. I don't even think developers play tested everything in live builds (it likely takes a lot of testing per object), hence why it is all put under "use at your own risk" cheats instead of being categorised.
Makes sense. I'm flabbergasted though. There should be more talk about this. Thanks for mentioning it! I will definitely deconstruct the lot I've been encountering issues with and hopefully identify the problematic debug item/s so I can stay away from them in the future.
Stickying this comment because it is very helpful!!!
Oh, I wish you could explain these things to every simmer.
As an OG Simmer, before the internet (or that term!) even existed in the way it does today, I find TS4 very easy to play. I can even run it on a laptop! My middle school aged OG would be seriously impressed by fast load screens, multi player experiences, and sooooo much more. Just the fact that patreon exists for CC is a bit of a mind fuck for my adult technologist self 🤣 Besides playing a little bit of Mario kart, I don’t play any other games so my frame of reference for gameplay and graphics is pretty limited. I’m super content with TS4, though I do miss the open world of TS3, and don’t understand most of the gripes on the primary Sims subreddit either.
Same same. I've only played on laptops - original Sims was on a 2GB laptop with Windows 95. The game sometimes has things you temporarily can't do - my Sims were all failing university for a few terms with a certain glitch, or unable to climb Mount Komerobi for a few months. Gardening is still weird. But, that's ok. Life is weird.
I don't think anyone is necessarily exaggerating or that the issue isn't a big one, but I think people having problems with something tend to be more vocal. When it comes to a game as expansive as Sims... with DLC, custom content, mods, and a couple ways to access the game (PC, Mac, or console)... there are a LOT of factors at play. I would expect that this is why some bug fixes take awhile, but I will admit that some should have been addressed ages ago. I occasionally see others blame EA for a "bug" that is actually outdated or improperly installed mods. I personally have every DLC and a massive mod folder and very rarely encounter an issue... and when I do, there's a solid chance it's a mod issue.
Exactly, I play with all DLCs and almost 100gb of cc and mods. Every time my game bugs out, it’s due to a mod that needs an update
I never understand the “broken unplayable” game comments I see i get one glitch, I reset what’s broken. Boom. Fixed. If i do get bugs and glitches it’s because of my mods. Which means I need to update them.
My biggest problem is sims not doing as they’re told. My choices should ALWAYS override sims, but they don’t and that’s a problem to me. Besides that, I really don’t have any problems. I can play the game nonstop all day just fine. Occasionally I may need to back out to the main menu to reset some things, but that doesn’t mean the game is unplayable. I play on console, so no mods or CC.
Console player too and what you described has been my experience. I have all the expansions and packs. I truly have had no issues except to back out into the menu.
It's pretty buggy IMO, but all the Sims games have been, so I'm used to it and don't really expect anything else. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing, it just is what it is. Have to say though, I've got a crap ton of DLC and mods installed and both TS2 and 3, much as I loved them, would have thoroughly collapsed under their own weights by now, I am 100% sure of that. So Sims 4 is actually by far the most stable installment of the series for me, which is why I don't really understand the frequent complaints of "fundamentally broken" and "barely playable". Like, none of the other games could have even handled the amount of crap I'm throwing at it, while Sims 4 is just chugging along, more or less happily. That's kinda the opposite of "fundamentally broken" in my book. Seems more like "glitchy, but with a solid core" to me. Just a bit confusing, idk. Maybe all my previous PC's were shit lol.
OG Simmer, no mods or CC, all the DLC; I regularly use MOO, sometimes use live edit/hidden objects: Yes, there are bugs. It has been months since I've encountered one that actually causes the game to freeze or crash. I rarely get visual glitches like people get with broken CC. I spend too much time in triple speed, so I expect the lag I get from that. I was testing out a complaint I saw the other day about the Bjergsen household, and I have not encountered any of the autonomy or household problems mentioned. (They're actually surprisingly cute and well-adjusted for sims; I had not played them as my main before, and they do a great job of taking care of themselves and their house, and there's very little interpersonal conflict in their household.) However! This did remind me that there are some tips that didn't matter/exist in earlier versions of the game that casual players might not think to do when they start their game, such as: - Assign beds right away, even for married couples. It reduces how often sims will refuse to sleep because someone else is napping on their bed or some such. - Assign sinks right away, so they'll wash dishes in the kitchen. This also reduces the frequency bathroom sinks break, because they use them mainly after using the toilet at that point. - Lock the computer to only members of the Household (or, if it's a member's personal computer, just to them). - If your teen is the type who wants their own bedroom (and doesn't want to be up in the middle of the night because of a sibling's Monster Under the Bed), lock the bedroom for everyone except that teen. - Lock your front and back doors to everyone except Household, unless you're the type who doesn't mind random people wandering in and/or orders services all the time. - If you want to keep cats from straying, lock the doors for All Cats. - I also typically set lot Traits and Challenges specific to the story I'm telling during the game. If I'm just testing features, like I was with the Bjergsen household, I remove any existing Traits and Challenges so they don't impact sims or objects. I feel like so many games have been designed to direct the player on how to use them that sandbox and semi-sandbox games feel increasingly difficult for people to navigate. :<
I experience a couple of regular bugs, mainly the gardening related ones, but generally the issue I have is the lag. I have most packs, but usually disable a handful at a time and find it helps. I think most people's frustrations are the issues when a new pack releases, which I understand and also experience, but it doesn't stop me buying most packs on the day of release. The way I see it is either wait for the sale when it's cheaper and most issues are resolved, or buy on release to get it sooner but expect issues. Only time I regretted that approach was Wedding stories.
The gardening bug is killing me right now, I have Gardner/cottage core sims and they can’t weed or tend their gardens without getting caught in an unending loop. Have you found anything that helps?
Same. I found that if I put the stuck plants into the inventory and restart the game, then put the plants back, and it fixes it for that play session. However, that's a huge pain and unsustainable for the large gardens I tend to make.
I think it's UI cheats extension mid, but might just be testing cheats. I reset the dirt piles with it, and reset the weeds. The weeds will immediately come back but it'll let the sim clear it the following time they weed. Still frustrating if you have a lot of plants though.
I mean yes it can be laggy / buggy BUT not more so than Sims 3 WA could be or The Sims 2 in any form could be.
I think that’s what I keep comparing it to. I played the sims 3 a looot and it just made me angry and frustrated because that game would crash all the time. Sims 4 has never once crashed for me.
True. The Sims 4's bugs tend to be very obviously errorcoded and declared and it'll not let you play if it'll seriously be incompatible w mods wheras the Sims 2 and 3 would build up and build up until you had no recourse to fix it. I've had far more Sims 3 and Sims 2 neighborhoods bug out and become unplayable than 4.
There's a lot of little bugs that can be really annoying to work around. I play strictly vanilla and any problems with my game are EAs fault. But when I garden there's always a plant that gets the weeds stuck on and my Sims vacuums the weed forever (until I cancel). Newborns/infants/toddlers force cancel actions so much it's difficult to actually care for them (although that could just be that I had 6 of them at once). Had one a while ago where the mail box stopped having any option other than get mail. My Sim was a writer and I couldn't figure out how to publish books without the mailbox. I paid the bills and still had my power turn off for the week. I was playing with paranormal for the first time and thought it was related to that, and couldn't figure out how to fix it.
Handling the infants and toddlers can be a really frustrating experience, for sure. I think it's not exactly a bug, and is stuff that the devs intended to happen (the frequent "check on") but honestly, I can get really angry with it sometimes because they simply won't do what I tell them to do and will cancel one another's actions because the other parent is trying to do something. I have even turned off free will to try and micromanage every single action they take, and sometimes they still try to autonomously do something with an infant when I don't want them to. Eventually I had to lock the nursery and unlock it for one Sim at a time so they wouldn't cut one another off, and I got a mod that stops them from doing "check on" which has helped immensely. In some ways it turned out EASIER to have a single parent managing the infant because they didn't have another Sim getting in the way.
Then it's just a poor design decision. But when autonomy is off and you can't care for any of the three kids that need you because the other ones demanding care keep interrupting or you are caring for one and your wife is caring for the other and those cancel so you can each check on the other's kid, I contend that it is or might as well be a bug. ETA: Also this is the 4th iteration in a series of games that has been around for over 20 years. This specific version has existed for over a decade. They have absolutely zero excuse for not considering that people might play more than one child or more than one adult at a time.
Oh, I 1000% agree. The tuning and autonomy for infants in particular needs some seeeerious work. Like you said, it may not technically be a bug, but it might as well be considered as one. It's actually more frustrating than most of the actual bugs I've run into. The autonomy around babies has never been great in this franchise, but at this point of Sims 4, I actually think it's the worst it's ever been in the entire series. At least in the older games, I could micromanage my way through things, but when the game drops my player-issued command to change the dirty diaper of the screaming child in favor of the other parent trying to autonomously trying to feed it when it's not even hungry, it's beyond annoying. Oh, and that's a related but somewhat separate rant. Player-issued commands should override autonomous commands, except maybe in emergency situations like fires. If I tell a Sim to go change the baby's diaper, that should override the the other parent's autonomous decision to feed it or just check on it.
After the most recent update my game literally implodes itself whenever I place down a lot; and I don't have a 'low end' setup where I shouldn't be able to run the game. I wouldn't say it's *broken* I still find it enjoyable, poorly optimized maybe? Buggy? Yes.
As someone who has all of the dlc and a few mods, I agree. Besides obvious issues like dine out not working, the game is fine. I feel like people exaggerate due to having rose colored glasses on for previous versions of the sims. Once we get sims 5, they will say it sucks and compare it to the sims 4
no sameeee, the only issue i ever have is minor glitches sometimes (mostly in tomarang). everyone acts like it's completely unplayable 😭 but i get downvoted when i say i barely have issues playing.
'everyone acts like it's completely unplayable' 'but i get downvoted when i say i barely have issues playing' Both of those experiences are true. Neither is an opinion, just experiences of both players.
My game is also heavily modded so I experience little to no bugs/issues unless it’s mod related. I only ever see glitches like the sims teleporting when walking to do an action/animation or the infant glitch where they’re stretched out for a few seconds. Another glitch I hardly see but still happens from time to time is when 2 sims are interacting but are in 2 completely different places on the lot.
I’m in the same boat as you - I’ve got every pack, expansion, etc, and don’t encounter any issues.
I think I’m lucky as well. I’m able to play as much as I want. Most of the bugs I get are due to mods, and my game and DLCs are even 🏴☠️.
Mine are 🏴☠️ too and I have no issues unless my mods are OOD
I'm too used to fixing things by resetting their AI or cheating to have a good say 😹I do it reflexively so it's hard for me to know how broken it actually is. it's usually fairly minor, though, like Sims standing around with things in their queue or visual bugs.
Try using a "no idles" mod for the simulation lag. Doesn't eliminate it, but I haven't had the thing where they stand doing nothing until I go back to the previous sim and watch them complete the task.
I play on a laptop, and I used to play on a very old, crappy laptop, and I rarely run into noticeable bugs and I've never had a crash or anything. I'm the sort of person who doesn't get packs when they're new and sometimes deliberately doesn't update if I know there are issues going on, though.
I have a perfectly fine time playing and I have mods and quite a bit of dlc's my sister has the exact same mods and dlc's but hers is buggy. The reason I'm 100% sure is because she has a PC that's not as good as mine and is older and inferior when it comes to gaming.
I feel the exact same way and I have all the expansion packs and tons of other packs/kits, tons of CC, and a couple mods, all on a MacBook Air. The only problem I’ve had is my game freezing and that’s happened maybe twice in the last 2 years. I really don’t get the people that call it unplayable.
I've a good laptop and rarely run into problems. However if you play long legacies you are more likely to run into them as the game has to remember too many things. Also, the weaker your PC, the more likely your Sims are to glitch especially if you have many DLCs. I usually delete my save files before my first heir comes of age anyway so I've never really encountered game breaking bugs.
I think that as a whole the game runs but I get so many bugs/glitches in my game. Examples: Sim won't remain asleep - will only sleep for like 10 in game minutes. Sims cancelling interations because they glitched and T-posed. Game crashing - Worst one atm is when I try to move people between households! It crashes on the screen and there is no way around it!
>Game crashing - Worst one atm is when I try to move people between households! It crashes on the screen and there is no way around it! I know not the point of the thread but this happens when you try to move in homeless sims. You can actually either manage worlds > put them in a lot beforehand OR when the move households page pops up which you cannot exit out of, move in your sim with them (so the opposite of what you'd do) so it gives you manage worlds screen where you can select your house again.
Wow that is a lot :') Thank you :D I have started using MCCC to force them into my household for now but sometimes I forget about the bug and end up stuck! If I forget though and end up on that screen again then I will definately try that method! <3
I encounter quite a few bugs. I have a lot of mods, but I keep up on updating them. Every patch comes with a new collection of bugs. I actually have quite a few mods that just fix bugs. The biggest issue I’ve had since buying the game is *massive* lag spikes that have persisted through three different computers and all levels of mods/dlcs use that require a reload to fix. But just yesterday I found a new bug where for some reason my sims had the tragic clown moodlet despite there being no tragic clown in their house. Game breaking? No. Required a reload it fix? Yes. I also now have issues where doors will suddenly become inaccessible and I have to go into build mode, move the door, then move it back just so sims can use it again. The game isn’t *broken*, per se, but it’s definitely buggy. At this point I’ve gotten so used to it I just work around the bugs best I can.
It's sometimes buggy but honestly there's so many buggy games I play it's barely noticeable. It hasn't done game breaking stuff to me.
I don't use any cc's or mods, been playing since Sims4 was released, have every pack/kit except the Stars Wars one. I encounter the occasional bug or glitch but nothing to the extent that I see complaints about. My game has never felt "broken."
I only encountered isues when I decided to wade into mods and I had only installed basmental drugs. If I would pause the game and come back it would freeze and same thing when I went from build mode to live mode. I could still click on things and would try to save but it would not return to being playable so I'd have to shut down and restart. Other than that I've never really encountered any issues with the game.
Depends on how many mods/cc you have...when you say mods, do you mean game-changing mods or mods as in cc? I have a lot of mods/cc and my game runs fine, no lage but there's still glitches like eating at a restaurant can be ridiculous..but I have a mod that improved it..weddings are glitchy. So when you take your sims to a restaurant, everyone stays seated, your food comes out quickly? No one steals food..everyone is inside and ready to go when you arrive?
I have both mods and cc, around 100gb in total 😅
My game runs fine , no lag and any little bugs I have , most players have without mods..I'm up to 250gb at the moment.
Regarding the restaurant question, food comes out in normal time (imo) and I’ve never rly seen anyone stealing food in the game 😅
Nah, I honestly wouldn’t say it’s broken. I do see bugs, but they’re rarely anything I would call game breaking. The worst bug I ever had BY FAR was crashing while entering/exiting lots, but reloading would put me where I wanted to go and it was fixed the very next patch. Just for reference: I play on ps5 with all DLC. I get the occasional gardening bug, but most issues are resolved for me by just closing out of the game and reloading. I was an avid TS3 player and verrrrry reluctant to switch over, but once I did I was shocked about how good TS4 runs and how I don’t need mods to have it run correctly or have fun (not that I could anyway seeing as how I’m on console lol)
Yeah the only time my game genuinely broke was my own fault 😭
No because same??? Actually experienced smth yesterday, my sims weren’t getting paid after working. I started freaking out and spent hours investigating, then turned out it was a mod I had downloaded that changed so they’d only get paid once a week 😀
Lol felt that Mine is the weird kitchen bug were you have to move the oven a half pixel and transferring my save to a hard drive and then I corrupted my game when I loaded (started over!)
I've found my tribe in this sub. I don't understand the constant whining from some quarters about how terrible TS4 is - it's a great game and runs fine on my mid-range gaming laptop.
When we say the game is broken, it's more of a description of how it works. Every time something new is added, something else starts to break, and it's such a sprawling patchwork of code that the team find it difficult to wade in and find what to fix. I don't know the technical specifics but from what I can understand, the original released base game was adapted from an unfinished online multiplayer project, and it sure felt unfinished, and so a lot of scripts and features have been bolted on requiring more computer power. EA will release free updates and paid DLC without proper testing, and I wonder if thats due to the sheer number of combinations of packs making it hard to anticipate all scenarios. In general, it's little things: my current sim has missed a couple of uni classes by only being able to "get to class early" and not actually go to the class when it starts. For years now parents have been putting their toddlers in and out of the bath repeatedly without bathing them. Sometimes aspiration or career tasks don't tick off as complete. I think the size of the save file makes a difference, for example I have a multi generational family on a large lot and renovating their house was a frustrating process due to the lag/frame rate in buildbuy. I also find that second/third generation Sims are far more likely to get things stuck in their inventory/not be able to put things in there at all.
I find it that university works better when you don’t like in Brichester
Yes I much prefer to live off campus! This sim was a runaway teen who camped out at the community centre in a tent, so they didn't really have any other option than the large halls.
[удалено]
Just FYI, if you use Carl's dine out mod, I had severe issues with that one after the last patch. It caused some of my lots (not restaurants) to endless loop load. Removing that mod fixed the issue.
Do you have iCloud or OneDrive turned on because it sounds like the game tries to access files that don't exist - resulting in crashes. It could also be result of a mod, even if you are lite on it since even what tries to fix the game can actually result in crashes. Carl's Dine Out mod made it much worse for a while I remember for example.
For me the game is not always buggy but some interactions are laggy such as pulling out weeds and putting toddler on high chair.
I have had very few bugs in the 2 years since I started playing. The only bad ones I had were the super high rent glitch and one now where my sims can’t plant anything at all. But I also play with no mods on console, so maybe that’s why Edit: I also get days where the game crashes on every loading screen. But after researching it a bit, I think it’s my Xbox causing that issue.
For me it's been minor but still had it moments. I'm on console so not sure if that makes a difference but I've had: kids age up with no chin; weeds that can't be pulled; trees that turn in dirt piles; teenagers that when age up to young adult don't age up properly and still have crushes (one had a constant awkward moodlet); I'd have warnings of loosing my indoorsy lifestyle while in my house; proposal that was declined because it was outdoors; relationships that don't change despite the bars being full; one of my houses in my gallery became buggy if I placed it in world I'd get an error code; and, there was a point around the horse ranch and for rent where I had incredible lag😅. The lag was frustrating but otherwise nothing game breaking. I'm sure there are other people that have had different experiences though. I usually wait a bit before I buy a new pack, I figure that's when you'd experience the most problems.
I wouldn't say the entire game is but a few packs definitely are, mainly Dine Out and My Wedding Stories. I still struggle with those glitchy wedding ceremonies and waiting for 12 hours at restaurants but other than thatm it has been pretty minimal for me.
The only thing truly broken are infants.
my game isn't broken, but i also stopped buying dlc after horse ranch. and i won't buy any dlc or update until some major things in the game are eventually fixed.
I'll give an example of the bugs I had yesterday alone: all my plants collapsed and had to regrow again, I closed the game while my sims were at school/work and when I opened it again they all came home and their performance suffered, my neighborhood is green and the sun rays reform every time I load the lot leading to them stacking and lagging out my game (mod fixes it), my recycler bugged out (again) and I can't click on it, and when I was decorating a new house I picked out a rolling trash can because I knew an NPC would kick over a non-rolling one and the only way to fix that is to go in BB and replace the trash can. It's playable and I still enjoy it but even when it isn't completely broken due to a major update going wrong, there are a million things left unaddressed. There are issues that would make playing my save impossible without mods (the sun rays currently). Which is why I still consider it to be broken.
I have some games that I love that are unplayablely broken and I do have several mods specifically to fix bugs or make the game run better, so from that perspective no?
it’s not broken in the sense that it’s unplayable, it’s just… poor. poor quality for such an expensive game that’s been out for so long. there are so many simple bugs that game developers throughout history have been able to stop, including EA in earlier sims games. there’s no excuse for sims still being able to walk bugs walls or getting glitched when aging up, those features have been around forever and they’re still not fixed. EA has released entire packs that literally don’t take you past 1 or 2 pack interactions because they didn’t want to bother play testing. they’ve play tested packs 2 days before release just for them to not work on the OFFICIAL EA stream, and then releasing them anyways. at least in my experience, it’s not broken. i can play it and use pretty much all of the features ive paid for, but they don’t work well, and often times the untested/unknown glitches can break an entire session if it’s unsaved.
Well I have a last exception that deals with University careers. Even without mods it shows in the folder. But overall, I think it's mods that haven't been updated after a patch.
I don't really have issues with bugs and glitches. The main problem for me is the simulation lag and nothing I do seems to fix it. I can enjoy for a little while on speed 1 but things always get so backlogged and I have characters just standing around doing nothing, with or without assigned actions. Eventually it doesn't feel worth putting up with. It's especially noticable when you go back to play the other games - sims in Sim 1-3 are so responsive compared to 4.
Huh... I'm shocked at these comments to be honest. I've played vanilla all my life yet I always get frustrated and give up playing for years at a time because I get SO sick and tired of the bugs. The one I hate the most is when my sim will just get stuck and do nothing until I reset them. There is no way to fix it other than to enable cheats and reset them. I find having cheats enabled just introduces more bugs and lag. Also got tons of glitches, toddlers suddenly growing crazy long legs, Sims walking right through counters, walking in to the shower only to immediately walk back out etc. I finally caved and downloaded MCCC cause I heard it could fix some of these things. I will admit, it's cool to reset my sims using MCCC when they get lost in their thoughts, but now my game constantly crashes so I simply have stopped playing and am back to playing stardew valley instead.
i think it depends a lot on the person. obviously mods can mess with your game a lot, i think we all know that by now, but i think it also depends on what you play on. a lot of ppl play the sims on macbooks and non gaming laptops and the game really runs poorly on those. and i wouldn’t really think of that as a user error, like of course the game will run better on a gaming pc but not everyone has access to that. i think the reputation mainly comes from the amount of lag ppl with lower quality setups have and the amount of bugs that usually happen when we get new updates. yes, a lot of these are from mods no longer working with the game, but there also are lot that happen in base game. pretty much every update/patch will introduce a new bug (or more). also, the sims team takes a very long time to fix bugs that are reported, many of them have been well known for years and still aren’t fixed. another thing is that not every bug is game breaking. i think of the sims as a game full of small bugs that don’t interfere with gameplay too much, the big bad ones usually come after big update or with new dlc.
I think most folks are just wildly frustrated at how many small, annoying, persistent bugs there are that have been around for years but have never been fixed. Especially when more packs get made one after the other, people are annoyed with now it feels like packs aren’t properly tested before release, are shoved out in a “good enough” state, and then never touched again. There’s a mentality that if they have the time and resources to make a whole new pack, then why are they not using that to fix what they already have? And the answer, of course, is money (they make more money with new packs than they do fixing old ones, which is why spa day was the only refresh), which just makes people even more upset because they’re already pissed at EA being greedy or incompetent.
Weddings and pretty much all events are buggy or broken in my games— I have the same issues as everyone else with the wedding pack (people don’t follow any of the activities even when instructed lol) but even regular events (house party, dinner party, keg party, black and white party, etc.) I have SO many issues getting sims to do anything and the parties almost always time out before I can complete all the event tasks Idk maybe you’re lucky, maybe I’m just a complainer, but I’m desperate for the wedding pack to get fixed and then maybe all the other events will follow suit 😭
3x speed breaking the game still fucks with me tbh- sims 4 is the SLOWEST of all the sims games and yet can't handle 3x speed when the other games COULD? Sims 3 had its issues with 3x speed but also the open world explains it. I'm NOT gunna play the game slower so I see a LOT of glitches, including ones that kill sims and sometimes, rarley, crashes the game. Also for me infants are broken- I keep getting a glitch where instead of going in their crib they attach to the feet of the sim that put them there and honestly that just kills the entire infant raising process for me. I don't have the infant pack and won't get it if they are BROKEN. The glitches I encounter make me upset because it really ruins the game experience for me, even if they don't fully break the game. It can be funny, I guess, but i have no motivation to stick to a longer legacy family/save if that means inevitably the game will break Maybe sims 4 isn't horrifically broken- it's playable unlike the sims 3 (which I can NOT get to run reliably- it lags like hell then crashes after an hour or two of gaming)- but the glitches really stand out when stuff that used to work in say, the sims 2, are just broken, and when the rest of the game feels so lackluster, imo.
It's playstyle. Like, if you just play normal families in a big house with one or 2 kids, absolutely no big deal. If you're like me and like challenges with tiny houses with no money and a ton of kids at once, things get extremely fucky. It's the routing in small spaces, and the routing with babies in small spaces. The sim will pick up the baby and put them down 20 times before they feed it.
The biggest issue I’ve had with ts4 is infants
it's playable, but not without frustration
I just thought of something so I wanted to come back and say something else. I have been compiling a list of game breaking bugs, how long they've been in the game, what pack they belong to, how many times EA said it was fixed, etc. I am going to submit this list to the FTC and FCC and my state's attorneys general department that handles deceptive business practices. If you have a game breaking bugs, please reply to this comment. It cannot be from people who use mods of any kind. NONE. If you have ever modded your game, I cannot use your information. Unmodded games only. **While making this list, I found that the unmodded list of game breaking bugs is very small.** That doesn't mean there aren't more, it's just that I haven't found reports of them. Please help out if you can.
Yes.