Following the release of The Sims Legacy Collection, The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 have both seen an increase in players, taking things back to where it all started. However, those who have eagerly awaited such an experience have had a series of hiccups and issues pop up along the way that has resulted in multiple patches being released.
From game-breaking errors to strange visual glitches or uncanny audio bugs, both The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 have had their problems along the way. Thankfully, the Sims team has been working hard to fix these problems frequently, ensuring gamers are able to enjoy the experience to the fullest capacity.
As of February 20, The Sims 1 & The Sims 2 have received a fourth set of patch notes, helping to smooth out pesky issues for players.
Details regarding these patches have been outlined for each game separately below:
The Sims Patch Notes – February 20, 2025
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
General Notes:
We have received reports of “random flies” appearing. This is working as designed
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::” (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
The Sims 2 Patch Notes – February 20, 2025
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
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.
Stay tuned for more updates on everything related to The Sims, and be sure to browse the site to keep up with the latest topics and announcements.
