Simcity Societies Destinations only loads base game

Hi All,

For anyone who actually plays SimCity Societies Destinations and is looking for solutions, I did manage to solve this myself.

The EA App installs SimCity Societies in its own folder within EA Games in Program Files. For this issue, the Destinations expansion was installed in a subfolder, SCS Destinations.

THE SOLUTION: What I did was extract the Destinations folder. To play it safe, I cut and pasted the SimCity Societies folder to desktop, and pasted Destinations as its own folder within EA Games. This solves the issue. Make sure to open the SCS Destinations launcher (SimCity Societies, with the old base game icon, located in SCS Destinations\Launcher.

There's a separate issue too, with sound. In some save games only some of the sound channels play, with no music. This leads to a pretty quiet town absent of the normal ambient building, vehicle and sim noise. You just have to quit to main menu and open a new city, exit out of this city, and reload the save. Repeat this process 1-3 or so times until the sound is fully restored. You'll know when the music starts playing as normal on loading the game.

Some people have an issue where the game won't load properly at all, there's just a black screen and it crashes to desktop. I fixed this by deleting the video settings files located in My Documents\SimCity Societies (if in doubt delete the whole folder, but this will delete your saves and profile(s)). If that doesn't work then God help you.

All in all, can't complain, this game is well over 10 years old, and wasn't designed to be compatible with Windows 8, 10 or 11.