Various (mainly pets) issues in TS2L
Hi!
So I bought TS2 Legacy as soon as it released, and I've been playing it basically every day since. I want to establish that I LOVE these games. They're a huge part of my childhood, and by far my favourite in The Sims series. I'm not complaining for the sake of complaining - I'm complaining because this official rerelease is more buggy and unplayable than the community hosted ones established when TS2 was still abandonware. I want to see the official rereleases succeed, but I'm struggling to recommend them to others when they have so many more issues and instabilities now that they've been ported.
Before I get into the bugs, please be aware that this is a fresh install of the game, with no mods, no cc, nothing. It is completely vanilla.
When Pets are created as part of a family in CAS, they often disappear when being moved into a lot. It is as if they never existed.
Traveling to another lot to purchase a pet appears successful, until you return home, at which point the pet disappears. This means the only way to consistently acquire pets is to adopt over the phone. Other things bought when on the lot - for example collars, magazines, etc - are all still present. It is only the pet that is missing.
The Wants Controller is constantly breaking. Enabling cheats shows "An error occurred in object "Wants - Controller #118". This appears every single time a want/fear is achieved, or the wants/fears are rerolled. The issue appeared to be progressive, and eventually led to the Sim having no wants or fears at all. Any wants or fears they did have were completely generic, unrelated to their current life, aspiration, or relationships. This has affected multiple households across multiple neighbourhoods, including at University. It can start spontaneously after being on the lot for a long time, or is present as soon as the household is moved into the lot.
Sims are not able to reinforce certain behaviours in pets. The main one I noticed this with was "destroying furniture", but there was likely others as I only really tested this with dogs. The icon appears on the pet's portrait, but the options to Scold or Praise were missing. Some behaviours that do have reinforcement options are not always learned, for example "peeing outside". Praising the pet for peeing outside results in the progress bar appearing above their head (it gradually fills the more you praise), but the behaviour never appears in the pet's Learned Behaviours section. It does not influence the pet's AI - it is as if the behaviour has never been reinforced. This makes adopting a pet with undesirable behaviours is frustrating since you can't train them.
When teaching a pet commands, they sometimes seem to "bulk learn" things. For example - and this is just from memory so may not be exactly accurate - my sim taught the pet their first command which was Come Here. After learning Come Here, numerous other commands disappeared from the Teaching option, and appeared in the "Command" option. I believe these were Shake, Sit Down, Roll Over, and a few others. The only ones still available to train were "Sit Up" and "Play Dead". This occurred multiple times with different pets in different neighbourhoods. This implies the pet has learned them, but when checking their "learned commands" under their job menu, they only had the original "Come Here". Pets progress through careers as if they have learned these commands, even if you didnt actually teach them.
Travelling to a random lot is - most of the time - completely normal. However when travelling back, the game often crashes, or errors endlessly. This often requires a hard restart. I'll have to double check which object was erroring.
This one is really hard to describe, but there seems to be odd pathfinding quirks related to certain build objects "breaking". These include doors and stairs. When I first noticed this, it was pretty standard - Sims would take the long way around to get to somewhere rather than using a door and a cut-through. It was a bit frustrating, but nothing too distracting.
The second time I noticed this was in a lot I built myself. It was a raised building, and had stairs on to a porch. The sims would absolutely not touch the stairs. They could walk on the porch, and walk on the ground at the bottom of the stairs, but would absolutely not walk on the stairs. If I asked the sim to walk from the ground up on to the porch, they'd instead walk around to the back of the property, and then teleport on to the porch. This affected all sims and pets which visited the property. I tried removing the stairs to replace them, but the sledgehammer tool did nothing. On some parts of the stairs, I would be refunded, but the stairs would stay. On other parts, I'd click and nothing would happen at all. I've attached a video of both the pathfinding and the attempts to remove the stairs.
If any advice could be provided at all for these issues - any workarounds or fixes - then that would be amazing. If not then i'd just be happy to hear that I'm not the only one experiencing these things. Thank you!
