This issue has been happening since I purchased the game and seems to come and go. Lately, it's been every time I play and completely game-breaking, making me want to throw my console into traffic.
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Ideas
This seems to be the case in the last handful of days for me, but prior to that, it would not resolve on its own. I've had it happen for nearly half an hour straight before I lost my patience. That's a long time when you're trying to play a game.
Indeed. 😔
Just for the sake of documenting variables, I’ve always played The Sims 4 on buffed up consoles — PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation 5 (which emulates the former).
When you experiences this half hour issue, were you playing on a base PlayStation 4? (Or Xbox One?)
(Methinks there might be limited QA resources for less popular environments running The Sims 4 code — like using controllers instead of keyboard&mouse, or running the game for long sessions in low-spec machines. And all consoles, by design, are low-spec, specially the base models in each generation. This bug could be caused by limited RAM or a memory leak, given its random nature in both manifesting and going away. Maybe units with more RAM have it better — or “less worse”.)