The Sims has seen revived interest in The Sims / The Sims 2 through the 25th Birthday Bundle. In celebration of this milestone, the bundle was released on Steam, EA, and Epic Games on January 31, 2025. Following this, multiple patches for The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 have been rolled out to help enhance gameplay.
As often expected with video games, there have been a series of bugs and errors popping up to cause an inconvenience along the way. Many quick fixes have already been released via Sims 1 and Sims 2 patches. On February 12, 2025, a third patch has been released. This patch continues to fix pesky errors, crashes, and bugs for both The Sims and The Sims 2, making the games more stable.
Details regarding these patches have been outlined for each game separately below:
The Sims Patch Notes – February 12, 2025
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!
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
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::”.
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
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.
The Sims 2 Patch Notes – February 12, 2025
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!
Fixed Issues:
- The game could unexpectedly show a “D3D” error, then crash or quit. This should happen less with this update
- Improved error reporting
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.
Keep an eye out for more updates on all things The Sims, and be sure to explore the site to stay up to date with all new topics and announcements.
