My Nightmare Dine Out Gameplay Session: Error code, Bugs and Feedback
I wanted to share my experience with Dine Out because I was really excited to finally play with this pack, but unfortunately the gameplay ended up being more frustrating than fun for me. I genuinely hope some aspects can be improved because the concept itself has a lot of potential.
One of my first disappointments was discovering that we still can’t hire Sims from our own household. I also expected the owner gameplay to feel a bit more active. Right now, outside of greeting customers and checking on tables, it feels like most of the restaurant management depends entirely on the game AI rather than the player actually running the business.
During service, I encountered a lot of strange autonomous behavior:
• My owner Sim kept repeatedly using the “Discuss Training Techniques” interaction with employees, interrupting both staff and tasks
• Employees and customers regularly stopped what they were doing to go look at themselves in mirrors
• Customers frequently stood up to chat in the middle of pathways or just stood around doing nothing
• Some customers randomly started doing cross-stitch during their restaurant visit
• Sims on the lot kept resetting themselves
• The restaurant review/thought icons were overlapping, clipping, and flickering constantly
One waiter in particular completely stopped working during service. At one point, he went to check himself out in the mirror, then walked outside the restaurant for a while while several dishes were already ready to be served, completely ignoring the customers waiting for their food. The issue only resolved after closing and reopening the restaurant.
Another issue I noticed is that the restaurant can quickly become unprofitable if you open it without actively being there. In just a few in-game hours, the business was already losing a lot of money. After a full day of managing the restaurant myself, my profit was only 92 simoleons, which feels very low considering the effort required.
I also ran into a serious error issue after adding a woohoo closet and a costume trunk to the closed restaurant lot, then removing the trunk and leaving the lot. When trying to re-enter the restaurant, I got error code: 123:20ece5dd:8de7a7da. After restarting the game, the same error persisted, even after removing the closet and trunk, clearing the lot, and rebuilding it. In live mode, I could not travel to the lot at all, and in build mode I saw a green warning icon saying the lot was incomplete, which disappeared when leaving build mode.
This eventually forced me to reload an older save in order to play again.
Platform: PC
Launcher: EA App
Mods/CC: Yes
I’m sharing this feedback because I really enjoy the idea behind Dine Out and I would love to see these issues addressed. If some of these problems are caused by my setup or mods, I’m also open to guidance on how to fix or prevent them, but otherwise I hope these bugs can be looked into globally as they heavily impact gameplay.
