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.
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!
