Re: Sims 4 start screen greyed out

holy crap it worked??? thank you!

I figured out a workaround for now. If instead of clicking the X you click “save now” and then click the Home tab after, all is copacetic. Hope they fix it soon

When the game loads and immediately brings you to a pop-up ad that takes up the entire screen, instead of pressing the X to exit, press Esc. It just worked for me!

OMG thank you, you're a life saver this worked for me... I'm really starting to get so frustrated with all these bugs in a game I've spent hundreds of dollars on :/

THANK YOU OMG

Same thing here, can't click on anything.

This happens to me fairly regularly. It's like the game wanted to send me a pop-up to buy something i didn't own, but didn't actually do it, so there's nothing to x out of.

ESC is pointless.

It's super frustrating because my game takes about an hour to load, so having to force it shut and reload it makes me want to scream.

Same here. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not.

So your comment led me to try something that worked! My thought process was: It's trying to load an ad, and it's probably gotta cross reference with my account in a database somewhere to see what I don't own and what event we're on. So I disabled my wifi, booted the game, no grey screen! Turned the wifi back on after booting it. It's not a GREAT fix cause I'm very fortunate to have a stable connection and I know disconnecting and reconnecting is sometimes super difficult, but I'm glad it fixed it and I didn't have to like reinstall every pack or something

actually, i now always load the game in offline mode, and go back online if i need the gallery later. it does the trick, no need to disconnect your entire wifi! 

Thank you! After trying basically every other suggestion and having it fail with the same results, launching the game while the EA launcher is set to offline worked for me. Even already owning all the EA Sims 4 content, I still get the ADs, which is pointless and glitch up my game frequently. In this case it was the event AD which ESC'ing, X'ing, waiting out, or any other option didn't work and left me with a greyed out screen, and unable to access my game any further. My game generally runs fast (to launch/load my game takes a few seconds) and smoothly for me and I've got a direct connection to my internet (not using wifi), so I figured it was a bug on EA's end of things. I tried repairing my game but yielded the same issue, so again, thanks for this simple/temporary fix to be able to at least play the game. Hope EA is able to resolve this soon.

Same exact thing is currently happening to me since the last update and ESC is not working anymore… I’ve turned off my WiFi in order to even play my game right now. It’s definitely the ads causing this issue.

This thread refers to this issue 
Frozen game/menu after ad | EA Forums - 12008756