Sims 4 devs assemble team to focus on fixing bugs and upping performance, updates to now land every two months
Starting with fixes for summoning a cheese toastie, among others, later this month
The Sims 4 is fast approaching its 10th birthday this September, a fact that genuinely instilled me with the crushing sense of time marching relentlessly on when I checked its release date a moment ago. That near-decade has brought a whole heap of additions, expansions, packs and updates to the enduring life sim game, to the degree that the underlying tech serving as the foundation for dozens of later mechanical and visual elements can sometimes look a bit wobbly these days.
The game’s developers over at EA are as aware of this as anyone, and they’re now looking to step up their efforts in blowing out some of the dust, oiling the gears and getting the wonderful interlocking machinery at the heart of the PC modern-classic (is 10 years old enough to justify as a classic? It feels apt here) to purr along smoothly again.
To do so, the devs have put together a whole new team to focus on tackling bugs, fixing technical troubles, improving performance and just generally improving the overall experience of playing, acknowledging that there are a number of outstanding problems that have “caused much frustration” for fans. In essence, the presence of the new team should mean more fixes for both big and small issues reported by the community - as tracked on the team’s ‘Laundry List’ of requests - landing at a more regular clip than before.
Specifically, the team say that updates should now land every two months or so, starting with an update later this month that should include fixes for pairing nose rings and brow piercings, seasonal weed-growing, and an error relating to summoning a Grilled Cheese (cheese toastie, please), among many others. Ah, god bless The Sims. The game’s next patch will then look to optimise memory use to reduce crashes, up frame rates and generally boost responsiveness and performance, with patch notes that are probably a bit less entertaining to read.
The team’s announcement vows that “our team is more dedicated than ever to developing great The Sims 4 gameplay experiences into the foreseeable future” - the formation of this team certainly seems to speak to that, especially with not-officially-The Sims 5 aka Project Rene still appearing to be a good ways off.