An Important Update From The Sims Legacy Team
Sul Sul Simmers! We recognize some fans are currently experiencing various issues with The Sims: Legacy Collection and The Sims 2: Legacy Collection. We are currently investigating these issues and hope to have more information on fixes soon. To help with our investigations, please ensure you're including screenshots, videos, dxdiags, and (for TS1) vulkaninfo.exe files in your bug reports.The Sims 25th Birthday Bundle Release Notes for The Sims and The Sims 2
The Sims Release Notes Sul Sul Simmers! We hope you’re in the mood to travel back to the year 2000 with us to celebrate the launch of The Sims! To celebrate with you, we’ve brought The Sims and all packs up to date to make it work more easily with Windows 10 and 11! Revisit your favorite packs or finally play that one you haven’t tried yet. This release does a lot under the hood to make this 25 year-old game work on your new computer. We thought we’d also make it easier to see all those classic pixels on your monitor! To scale the game to make better use of the screen space available, try using the Alt + Enter key combination to cycle through the different scaling options. The bulk of the work was to make the first The Sims game compatible with Windows 10/11 from the moment you install it. There are things that you’ll immediately see: Game now supports the aspect ratio your monitor is set to (not restricted to 4:3) Different aspect ratios, such as 16:9, gives a wider view of the game Crisper rendering and visual fidelity from changing how the game scales textures Fixed several crashes Improvements and fixes When The Sims launches it will automatically use the aspect ratio of the main monitor. Unfortunately you can’t change the aspect ratio directly, but you can direct The Sims to launch on a second monitor with a different aspect ratio by using the -monitor:[num] command (“0” is the default monitor). We hope you’ll enjoy returning to The Sims’ neighborhoods, Vacation Island, Downtown, Studio Town & Magic Town to spend time with all the classic Sims and Sims families as much as we did. Enjoy encountering Bella, Bonehilda, Chip, Miss Crumplebottom and the rest. Dag dag! The Sims 2 Release Notes Sul Sul Simmers! Put down that grilled cheese sandwich and get ready for a trip down memory lane to 2004 with us! We’ve revived The Sims 2 and most of its packs to work easily with Windows 10 and 11! Please note that modern licensing restrictions have required the removal of 1 pack and some of the original songs, but we have included as many as possible. We thought we’d also make it easier to see all those classic pixels on your monitor! To scale the game to make better use of the screen space available, try using the Alt + Enter key combination to enter and leave full-screen mode. Enjoy that glorious widescreen The Sims 2 view! There are a few more updates as well to look out for: GraphicsRules.sgr now supports modern hardware configurations Fixed a shadow bug that surrounded Sims with a big black square Wide screen and higher game resolutions are now supported UI scales better to higher resolutions Texture memory corruption and “pink soup” are fixed Dragging The Sims 2 window from one monitor to another works more smoothly If your computer has a lot of RAM, The Sims 2 is able to use it Fixed several crashes Improvements and fixes We hope you’ll enjoy returning to the Belladonna Cove, Desiderata Valley, Riverblossom Hills, Pleasant View, Strangetown, & Veronaville! Spend time with all the classic Sims and Sim families. The Goths, Greenmans, Smiths, Monty/Capps and more are ready to come back to your screen from 21 years ago. Dag dag!The Sims™ Legacy and The Sims™ 2 Legacy Patch Notes
Sul Sul, Simmers! We hope you’ve been enjoying revisiting The Sims and The Sims 2! It’s been super exciting seeing all the joy and enthusiasm from our community for these classic games. We’ve also been focused on the reports of technical issues that some players have had, and have been diligently working to address them. We wanted to say thank you to the community for sharing your detailed reports via the forum to help us improve these games. The Sims Legacy Team: – For the most current bug updates, please visit The Sims Franchise forums here. February 4, 2025 Patch Notes: The Sims Fixed Issues: Alt+Tab or Alt+Enter can sometimes cause a crash Alt+Enter can sometimes cause the Windows title bar to be hidden Alt+Enter can sometimes not toggle between full screen and windowed modes On some systems, The Sims can appear to launch and then immediately exit (no splash screen displayed) The Sims should now launch in most situations In some cases where there is an underlying graphics issue, The Sims will display a message Some players are unable to click on various parts of the neighborhood map The travel screen, when traveling between neighborhoods/worlds, can sometimes appear garbled or glitched The Sims might crash if you are not on the default neighborhood, interact with another Sim, and then save When using Alt+Enter to cycle window and zoom sizes, the HUD could be clipped. At this zoom level, The Sims will now instead clip from the top of the screen. In some situations in windowed mode the title bar might not be visible The Family friends counter could sometimes not be visible The Sims General Notes: Several players have had problems (e.g. walls, floors, objects not showing up; game not launching; other oddities) that are addressed by updating graphics drivers to the latest versions. Please make sure your drivers are up to date. The Sims game window is of a fixed size that can’t have its basic properties changed after it has launched. Moving the window from a monitor to another with a different, lesser resolution can lead to unexpected results, possibly even crashes. If you want to run The Sims on that second monitor please use the option “-monitor:<num>” to force it to launch on the other monitor. “0” is your primary monitor, a second monitor is “1” and so on. We are investigating adding this as a menu option in the future. In some situations, players have noted that music only plays in Live mode. Please check your computer sound options and make sure that everything is properly configured (e.g. on a 5.1 surround system make sure that your center speaker is functioning). You might be prompted to “Enable the help system” every time you return to a house. This is the game trying to have you complete the tutorial. This will continue to happen until you complete the tutorial. The Sims 2 Fixed Issues: Alt-Tab or Alt+Enter can sometimes cause a crash Some players on EA App received an error message indicating that certain needed files were corrupt The game would sometimes crash after creating a family The game sometimes launched at a small resolution (800x600) and then scaled that small format to fill the entire monitor In certain situations the game will launch and then immediately show a “DirectX” error, requiring use of the “-w” option to work around the problem Sometimes a Sim (or multiple Sims) would disappear after the player moves to another lot or neighborhood, or after leaving and rejoining the game despite saving Sometimes non-adult Sims (children, pets) would disappear Some interactions that result in a transferable reward (e.g. a dog returns from work) can cause the game to crash Addressed some infinite loading screen issues The Sims 2 General notes: Several players have had problems that are addressed by updating graphics drivers to the latest versions. Please make sure your drivers are up to date. Remember that the “boolProp testingCheatsEnabled” cheat will cause the game to periodically show various dialogue boxes with debugging information in them. The cheat is working as expected. We are investigating an issue where during certain cinematic events (such as Alien Abduction), the Sim can be reset and the event fails. While we are investigating this, you can work around the issue by making certain there are no other Sims on the lot to observe the event. While some issues may not be listed here, they may still be in the process of being addressed. Some topics can require an extended investigation on our end, so even though these fixes may be in active review, it’s not a guarantee that we’ll have an immediate fix for it in the upcoming patch. Thank you for playing these games that are such a storied part of our history – starting 25 years ago! Please continue to share and report any issues on our forums, and join our official Discord community for tips, tricks, and news! Dag dag, The Sims TeamThe Sims™ Legacy and The Sims™ 2 Legacy Patch Notes (Patch 3)
Sul Sul, Simmers! We’re back with another update. Our team is working hard to resolve issues related to crashes and usability that have been reported in the community. Thank you for your continued reporting efforts via the official EA Forums! -The Sims Team For the most current patch updates, please visit The Sims Game Info Hub here. February 6, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 4, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 12, 2025 Patch Notes: The Sims Fixed Issues: A memory issue could lead to various unexpected behaviors after playing for a period of time (random crashes, sluggish performance, missing objects, etc) A memory management issue could lead to random crashes when traveling between worlds The game could fail to launch on Snapdragon based computers in some situations The movie player is temporarily disabled while we address a stability issue. We will provide an update when we are able to restore it. While it is disabled, you will no longer see the intro logo splash The Relationship panel would show only five relationships A memory management issue could cause random crashes when zooming in/out of Calamity Forrest and other dense lots Blue panels that appear when selecting various game elements (e.g. grabbing an object) would not scale to fill the horizontal space Tiles around pool edges would sometimes appear grey Importing Sims or Households was looking in the wrong path. Sims and households to be imported can now be placed in “C:\Users\<username>\Saved Games\Electronic Arts\The Sims 25\UserData\Import” Improved error reporting On several hardware configurations, the game would display a “Unable to find a suitable Vulkan device” error (AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, and others) Spraying roaches (and other bugs?) was more difficult than it should have been “Work” and “School” icons were missing from Sims portraits The Sims General Notes: The game by default adopts the aspect ratio of the monitor it is run on. The aspect ratio can now be specified with the launch option “-maxaspect:<width>:<height>”. Examples: -maxaspect:16:9, -maxaspect:4:3 or bespoke ones like -maxaspect:16:10 Note that the option will only set the aspect of height to width. It will only restrict the maximum width - it can not increase it In windowed mode the window will run at the aspect ratio; at fullscreen black bars will fill the unused space of the monitor This will mostly be useful in situations where your monitor (virtual or real) is very wide, but you want the game to be a more traditional aspect ratio Note that there are limitations on how extreme a ratio this will accept There are some hardware configurations that we are seeing a disproportionate number of errors on and are actively investigating. Systems based on Intel ARC GPUs, and NVIDIA T600 GPU laptops are being investigated Some players who have experienced problems with getting an error indicating a lack of Vulkan compatible devices have reported that in some cases removing "OpenCL™, OpenGL®, and Vulkan® Compatibility Pack" can resolve the issue We have received reports of “random flies” appearing. This is working as designed The Sims 2 Fixed Issues: The game could unexpectedly show a “D3D” error, then crash or quit. This should happen less with this update Improved error reporting The Sims 2 General notes: In some cases, issues that have now been addressed might have corrupted game saves before they were addressed (e.g. when Sims could disappear, Sims can’t eat cooked food, etc). In these cases, please try starting a fresh save as the game won’t be able to correct the corruption, and working with corrupted saves may lead to unexpected behavior. While the Alien Abduction scene now works, the scene is still missing the alien baby. We’ll continue working on that. In the meantime, you will have the alien baby in the game once the scene is done. Some players have tried using Windows shortcut keys to move the full-screen game to another monitor. When in full-screen mode the game should not be moved to another monitor or this may cause issues. There may be issues not listed here that are in the process of being addressed as certain issues require an extended investigation on our end. Even though these fixes may be in active review, it’s not a guarantee that we’ll have an immediate fix for it in an upcoming patch. Please continue to share and report any issues on our forums, and join our official Discord community for tips, tricks, and news! Dag dag, The Sims TeamThe Sims™ Legacy and The Sims™ 2 Legacy Patch Notes (Patch 2)
Sul Sul, Simmers! We hope you’ve been having a great time celebrating all of the Birthday festivities! We’re plugging away at reports of technical issues that some players have encountered in The Sims and The Sims 2. Thank you for your support and continued reporting efforts via the official EA Forums, it really helps us identify and resolve issues. -The Sims Team For the most current bug updates, please visit The Sims Franchise forums here. February 4, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 6, 2025 Patch Notes: The Sims Fixed Issues: A memory issue could lead to various unexpected behaviors after playing for a period of time (random crashes, sluggish performance, missing objects, etc) The mood level arrows and mood bars had visual artifacts in some cases The mouse scroll wheel could take a lot of clicks to zoom Some players were encountering a “Vulkan device” error at launch The Sims General Notes: There are some hardware configurations that we are seeing a disproportionate number of errors on and are actively investigating. Systems based on Intel ARC GPUs, Snapdragon laptops with Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU, NVIDIA T600 GPU laptops are being investigated Users that have experienced problems with getting an error indicating a lack of Vulkan compatible devices have reported that in some cases removing "OpenCL™, OpenGL®, and Vulkan® Compatibility Pack" can resolve the issue. When you want to import Sims or Houses, the game could look in the wrong directory to find them. You can now work around this by placing them in “Program Files/Maxis/The Sims/UserData/Import” We are investigating an issue where traveling between worlds can result in crashes in some situations The Sims 2 Fixed Issues: Addressed some situations related to the error “Some needed files were corrupted during the installation” Addressed some situations where the game could terminate with a pop-up message when creating a family or when entering a pre-made lot The game could get stuck on the color swap tool The Sims’ voices could be of low quality The Sims’ voices could be very quiet The custom skin window couldn’t be closed in some cases The “Graphics Rules.sgr” file was missing a rule that could cause “D3D” error messages During the Alien Abduction cutscene, sometimes audio could drop out and a Sim could reset Sims could be unable to eat cooked food The game could sometimes present a loading screen that could not progress Sims could sometimes disappear The Sims 2 General notes: In some cases, issues that have been addressed might have corrupted game saves before they were addressed (e.g. when Sims could disappear). In these cases you should try starting with a fresh save as the game won’t be able to correct the corruption, and working with corrupted saves can lead to unexpected behavior. While the Alien Abduction scene now works, the scene is still missing the alien baby. We’re working on that. In the meanwhile you will have the alien baby in the game once the scene is done. Some players have tried using Windows shortcut keys to move the full-screen game to another monitor. When in full screen mode the game should not be moved to another monitor or this may cause issues. While some issues may not be listed here, they may still be in the process of being addressed. Some topics can require an extended investigation on our end, so even though these fixes may be in active review, it’s not a guarantee that we’ll have an immediate fix for it in the upcoming patch. Please continue to share and report any issues on our forums, and join our official Discord community for tips, tricks, and news! Dag dag! The Sims TeamThe Sims™ Legacy and The Sims™ 2 Legacy Patch Notes (Patch 7)
Sul Sul, Simmers! We’re enjoying playing these games all over again and very much hope you are too! In this patch you’ll see stability improvements as well as some in-game fixes for both games. Please continue to report any issues on the official EA Forums. -The Sims Team For the most current patch updates, please visit The Sims Game Info Hub here. March 14, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 27, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 20, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 12, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 6, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 4, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. April 3, 2025 Patch Notes: The Sims Fixed Issues: General stability and performance improvements Various game tabs don’t use the full available window width Name selection for townies is not as random as it should be Animal Control can’t be called if the picture-in-picture window is open Travel loading screens are inconsistently scaled Using Shift + Windows + Arrow keys to move the game window between monitors doesn’t always resize as expected The Sim portrait camera was not always correctly positioned (already created portraits will not be regenerated) Functionality Improvements: The Sims will warn users whose user names contain characters that could cause crashes Edge-scrolling hit zone now includes the full letterboxing area The Sims General Notes: The Sims requires a Vulkan compatible GPU. Please check GPU compatibility with the manufacturer, and keep your drivers up to date. On some NVIDIA GPUs pixels could appear misplaced or misaligned when there is a contrast between them. NVIDIA has a driver in late February that addresses this. Please make sure your drivers are up to date. The Sims 2 Fixed Issues: General stability and performance improvements CAS Sims are clipped on ultra-wide screens Alien Baby Sim is missing from Alien Abduction A member of the Curious family would sometimes not appear in the Alien Abduction It is possible to queue an infinite number of actions during camera snapshot which results in a crash It is possible for the keyboard to lose input focus and prevent the player from entering text In-game UI is too small on higher resolutions (see below) Edge-scrolling does not work The UCP panel disappears after the college send-off animation Improved Functionality: The Sims 2 now uses a borderless window to provide the fullscreen experience Improved redraw time when moving the game window from one monitor to another using Shift + Windows + Arrow keys The Sims 2 will now, by default, use a larger scale factor to produce in-game UI on screens larger than 1080. If a larger or smaller UI is preferred then the cheat code “uintProp uiScaleFactor” can be used to specify a preferred value. Valid options are 1, 2 or 3. The game uses “2” by default. This value can be set to be persistent in the “Graphics Rules.sgr” file located in “The Sims 2 Legacy Collection\EP9\TSData\Res\Config" (where this folder is located will vary depending on which storefront you purchased the game from). The Sims 2 General Notes: Gaming performance on Intel Arc systems can be sub-optimal for games that rely on DirectX 9. Intel is continually working to improve performance on these systems, but at the time of this writing we have observed performance penalties that make us recommend caution in playing The Sims 2 on them. Please see the Patch 5 notes for more information When switching between Full Screen and Windowed mode with Alt+Enter, there can sometimes be a substantial delay (many seconds) while the scene is recalculated and rendered Please continue to share and report any issues on our forums, and join our official Discord community for tips, tricks, and news! Dag Dag, The Sims TeamThe Sims™ Legacy and The Sims™ 2 Legacy Patch Notes (Patch 4)
Sul Sul, Simmers! We’ve loved seeing all the creative builds and memorable moments you're enjoying in these legacy titles! We’re continuing to address the major issues you've been reporting via the official EA Forums. The Sims Team For the most current patch updates, please visit The Sims Game Info Hub here. February 12, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 6, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 4, 2025 patch notes are viewable here. February 20, 2025 Patch Notes: The Sims Fixed Issues: General stability improvements Addressed video player issues Performance improvement with AMD GPUs On some systems, walls, floors and other items might not appear on screen The game could crash when zooming in/out of Calamity Forest Child Sims would sometimes show a “Missing Animation” error when interacting with mail On some computers set to 2k resolution, visual artifacts or tearing could be present on various game screens The blue panel on the bottom of the screen did not properly fill the horizontal space Tiles near pool edges sometimes displayed as empty and grey The Burglar appearing could crash the game The Sims General Notes: The game by default adopts the aspect ratio of the monitor it is run on. The aspect ratio can now be specified with the launch option “-maxaspect:<width>:<height>” (note that underbars ‘_’ can be used instead of colons). Examples: -maxaspect:16:9, -maxaspect_4_3 or bespoke ones like -maxaspect:16:10 Note that the option will only set the aspect of height to width. It will only restrict the maximum width - it can not increase it In windowed mode, the window will run at the aspect ratio; at fullscreen black bars will fill the unused space of the monitor This will mostly be useful in situations where your monitor (virtual or real) is very wide, but you want the game to be a more traditional aspect ratio Note that there are limitations on how extreme a ratio this will accept There are some hardware configurations that we are seeing a disproportionate number of errors on and are actively investigating. Some players who have experienced problems with getting an error indicating a lack of Vulkan compatible devices have reported that in some cases removing "OpenCL™, OpenGL®, and Vulkan® Compatibility Pack" can resolve the issue We have received reports of “random flies” appearing. This is working as designed The Sims 2 Fixed Issues: General Stability improvements In some situations, the game would show an error indicating “too many iterations” Modular staircases could not be deleted and could be a source of infinite money The dog Sim is missing from the household after moving to a lot The Design Tool palette chooser pop-up could go off screen and not be able to be dismissed or interacted with Music tracks by Depeche Mode and Natasha Bedingfield have been restored The mouse pointer, Sim names, and Info Panel tooltips in build/buy were sometimes not properly aligned Beach lots could sometimes have incorrect terrain paint The Sims 2 General notes: In some cases, issues that have now been addressed might have corrupted game saves from before they were addressed (e.g. when Sims could disappear, Sims can’t eat cooked food, etc). In these cases, please try starting a fresh save as the game won’t be able to correct the corruption, and working with corrupted saves may lead to unexpected behavior. While the Alien Abduction scene now works, the scene is still missing the alien baby. We’ll continue working on that. In the meantime, you will have the alien baby in the game once the scene is done. Some players have tried using Windows shortcut keys to move the full-screen game to another monitor. When in full-screen mode, the game should not be moved to another monitor or this may cause issues. There may be issues not listed here that are in the process of being addressed as certain issues require an extended investigation on our end. Even though these fixes may be in active review, it’s not a guarantee that we’ll have an immediate fix for it in an upcoming patch. Please continue to share and report any issues on our forums, and join our official Discord community for tips, tricks, and news! Dag Dag, The Sims Team
