Simcity Societies Destinations only loads base game
Hi, I am playing SimCity Societies Destinations on a Lenovo Ideapad laptop on Windows 10.
I have tried a number of steps (opening game via EA App, opening SCSDestinations.exe directly, etc.) but the Expansion is not recognised by the EA App and does not open.
I can open the base game with no patches (the patches come as part of the Destinations expansion) and open a map without issue, just the aforementioned missing content.
I have tried reinstalling the game and the EA App but this did not work.
I have previously been able to play Destinations on this device (a few months ago) but had to reinstall as the game began crashing to desktop when I revisited it recently. This was preceded by the EA App also requiring reinstallation as it was failing to start.
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.
