Yeah… as a PS5 player, through months of experience I’m learning that my odds of having a successful save “coincidentally” increases if I do these specific steps: clear my cache AND rebuild my database (i tried doing just one multiple times and it was ineffective), and then immediately hop on the sims and save after no more than around 6 sim hours of gameplay (definitely no more than 10!). When I save I close the sims through the home screen because it’s faster, and then I hop back on the game and repeat the steps ignoring cache and rebuild. If it starts crashing again then I upload my sims data to console storage for security, cache and rebuild, and then follow the steps as usual.
I’m able to do this several times. I’m not sure if something becomes too much but at some point it does start crashing despite these steps and I have to admit defeat and wait until the next day or something to try again. But, through this method I’ve had a noticeably easier time playing the sims - I went from being unable to surpass rank 7 in the Noble career across a few real time days to rising to monarchy (10) in one night. It even works if I use a little bit of 2x speed (whichever one has two sideways triangles). The smoothness of gameplay doesn’t really change for me, it only appears to positively affect my save ability.
The save icon usually behaves the same way for me when the save is gonna go through, to the point where my confidence in it saving genuinely rises greatly when I see this behaviour (to which it saves successfully as predicted 9/10 times); when I click save it will lag and stutter for the first few seconds and the menu options will briefly grey out and then become available again, and then it’ll almost “freeze” or “jam” and play the last few frames on repeat for maybe 10 seconds (also applies to whatever spinning vfx is on the UI at the top right of your screen, so it’s everything that moves), then once that’s done it does the super fast catching-up spinning, and the rest of the process is totally smooth.
This game definitely needs a big optimisation update, especially for console players. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here but the idea of a sims 4 ps5 version doesn't sound bad at all (assuming the data still carries over), but then xbox users will still struggle… :(
