Game loading time immediately doubled after Feb update

heeeydevon​  Does this happen if your computer is offline when you launch the game?  Please test it out: you can put the EA App in offline mode, then disable wifi and/or disconnect the ethernet cable before pressing Play.

If that doesn't make a difference, please open GameConfig.ini, in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4, and see whether you have a line that says this:

useappdataforscratch = 1

If it's missing, or if the value is 0, that's fine and the same as it's always been; if it says 1, try setting it to 0 instead and see whether it helps.

I appreciate the help! It looks like it's about the same loading time. 5min 12sec. I usually back up my game files and mod folder after every update, just in case I want to revert back. I've tried launching the game with the old update and mod folder and I can 2min 23sec. 

From what I'm seeing online a lot of other people have been having the same issue as well and it seems like the time always amounts to 2x the original load time. Saving times seem fairly okay as well, I've also tested my NVMe health and had no other issues with other games. 

I did notice that maybe they've improved the in game performance by a little bit. My theory is that it might have something to do with them creating this new family tree thing where the game needs to load in a massive amount of data (more so than before) before actually launching to assign cousins, nephews, etc, but it's a theory with no backing evidence. But 5 min to load is brinking on a bit overboard, I can't imagine what people's loading times are that that already took 5 min to load 🤯

heeeydevon​  Just to be sure, you're saying neither playing while offline nor setting useappdataforscratch to zero changes the loading times?  I want to make sure you tried or at least checked both.  And did you test a new user folder as well?  I'd test the same new folder twice just to be thorough.

Does the longer loading time persist after you've saved your progress and reloaded?  I could see a single longer loading time happening while the game recalculates family trees, as you've mentioned, but it shouldn't keep happening.  And a new save shouldn't have much of a difference either.

I've only seen one other report of an excessively long loading time since the patches that wasn't due to a broken save.  As in, you and one other person report the time has been doubled, and more have reported that they get infinite loading or something in the range of 5-10 times normal.  The latter group is mostly fine after one of the e-patches though.

Point is, I'm curious as to what's going on and would appreciate any more data you have, but I don't think all the reports you're seeing are relevant to your particular setup.

Hi! Just came across this thread and I wanted to hop on as I have also been having the same extremely long loading issue ever since the february update and it hasn't been fixed in the patches that released afterwards. My loading times used to be 1 minute max, now they can be 5 - 7 minutes at worst.

I've tried the solutions you suggested as well and they have made no difference to the loading time of my save. 

I also suspected that it had something to do with the updated family trees as in my current save it is extremely large and it was the only thing that had changed. I also had the glitched, overlapping family tree bug when the update came out, but that has since been fixed.

Happy to hear any thoughts and feedback! Thanks!

LilFlowFlow​  Does this happen in a new save too?  If only your older saves are affected, then the problem could be the family trees or something else that changed, but that shouldn't affect new saves.

I will have to check with a new save. I did recently start one and I think it was still slightly longer, but I only played in it the one time, so it could have been because of the initial world loading. I'll check it again and feed back!

Hi! Sorry to take a little bit to get back on this.

It looks as though new saves load in as normal, it only takes around 30 seconds.

It's just the older ones, so I'm guessing it's my other save's family tree that is causing the loading lag, as it's only slow to load when loading into the main family, not anywhere else. Including loading into the family from CAS.

If there's anything else I am able to try then let me know! I do use mods in my game, but only MCCC and UI cheats for gameplay, however the slow loading occurs both with and without them.

LilFlowFlow​  I don't know of a fix for slow loading that's confined to one save, or one household in one save, if it doesn't fix itself over time.  I guess you could try to sever some familial relationships using the mods, in the hopes that the family tree gets simplified enough to stop causing issues, but that's probably not the result you want.  And that presumes that the family tree is the underlying problem.

If you want to confirm that the issue is the large number of relatives, you could save this household to your library and place it in a new save.  The sims would retain jobs, skills, etc., but anyone not in the household would no longer be related.  So it's a good test and source of information even if it's not any kind of fix.

If it becomes too much of an issue over time then I'll do this. Thank you so much for the input regardless! It was good to be able to test things either way :)