This is the story that has consumed the Sims community for the better part of a week. EA is pressing ahead with an increasingly aggressive monetization strategy, having embedded a fully integrated marketplace directly into The Sims 4, a storefront where mods now carry real price tags. The backlash from a community already stretched to its breaking point was immediate and fierce. And as has become something of an unwelcome tradition with Sims updates, the patch accompanying this new feature didn’t just fail to help, it made everything considerably worse.
Mods that had been working perfectly stopped functioning or vanished from the game’s recognition entirely. Maxis’s emergency attempts to patch the patch only compounded the mess, introducing fresh problems with every fix. The result: since the end of last week, a portion of the player base has been completely locked out of The Sims 4, unable to launch it at all. What followed was an update to fix the patch that was meant to fix the previous patch, a recursive cycle of failure that this game has somehow made its signature move.
Yet another emergency update for The Sims 4
Maxis has followed through on its promise with a new emergency update at the start of the week, though it apparently found time to launch a LoFi Girl collaboration before getting around to actually fixing the game. With players still unable to boot up The Sims 4, the studio pressed ahead with that announcement regardless. Simmers can now apparently decompress to ambient beats while downloading the new patch, version 1.122.218.1030, which targets the errors preventing the game from launching and specifically addresses players running mods and custom content. “Your custom content should now load and work as expected,” Maxis told the community in a characteristically brief message. Here’s what the update actually changes:
- Fixed an issue where the game could crash on launch for 2% of players using specific types of custom content, under certain circumstances.
- Resolved an issue that caused a main menu message to appear more frequently than intended.
The patch is live now on PC and Mac but players without a single mod installed are still reporting crashes on launch. Others who had somehow escaped the chaos unscathed are now discovering brand new display issues materializing out of thin air. The community’s most devoted, longest-standing members have largely given up on outrage and moved on to dark humor. « Great, I can finally play the game I bought along with my nearly $1,000 in DLC, » deadpanned one exasperated Simmer. The cleanup operation is clearly far from finished, and the collective patience of The Sims 4 community, already stretched to its limit, is running out fast.
Source: Maxis
