Sims 3 Broken...or am I overreacting?

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I have been playing Sims 3 since day one and it's always been buggier than an entomologists lab. I know that one of the major bugs, a intermittent freeze of your sims, can be solved by moving the neighbourhood they are in.

They really need to sort themselves out before throwing more new content out there. This has been said by the building community for ages. At one point the online exchange wasn't working. EA's reaction was to add buyable forum badges to the site :|

They are really not as diligent as Maxis on their in game bug testing.

Oh and EA are really NOT friendly with player made mods like furniture and clothes so if you are using those I would stop. Patterns seem to be stable. If your are insistent on using mods then at least move your mod folder before you patch the game.

I build a lot for the sims and those guys who use custom furniture make me frown as they are probably just messing up someones game somewhere for the sake of making their build look cool.

 

[triggrhappy94]

2) You cant be married and keep your maiden name- So I started playing again after I got a GF (this was after Nightlife came out). I made Young Adult Sims for both of us, and put us both in a one bedroom apartment in the city. I decided to make us married, thinking it'll happen eventually (in game) anyways, and because they age like 1000x faster then us. My Sim became a talented musican and celebrity. Well, it eventually came the time to settle down, but when I tried making babies the game gave all three of us the "Child Born out of Wed-lock" negetive moodlet, because despite the game having the relationship status set to "Married" it still didnt recognize it because I gave my GF character her last name instead of mine. Now my celebrity is ruined, the whole city thinks my wife is a whore, and that my child is a bastard.

in Sims 3? Yes you can change your name back to your maiden name if you get married, just go to city hall and there's a Change Name option. Unless this isn't valid with the Nightlife expansion, I don't have it, but I can't see why they'd take that out of the game

Well I guess thats true, I havent tried. But I did it from Create a Sim. So the two Sims would have different last names, but the status was still set to married.

 

[triggrhappy94]

I'm really just waiting now untill they've released all the DLC and got their shit together, and untill I have a computer that can run it properly to actually buy it all.

 

[GonzoGamer]

People mention Bethesda and yes they have buggy games alot but they actually get around to fixing them and rarely are the bugs so bad that the game is unplayable.

True. New Vegas was the only one that crashed so much I stopped playing.

Sims 3 is really buggy. EA seems to have an erratic approach to fixing these bugs. Fortunately, there are others who make game-mending mods.

My personal go-tos:

http://www.modthesims.info/
http://www.the-isz.com/nraas/

I'll check that out, thanks. I understand that mods were the only things that made New Vegas playable on the PC for the first 6 months after launch. That's actually one of the big benefits of the PC: oftentimes the users are able to patch the game quicker & better than the devs.

 

[AnnaIME]

Oh and EA are really NOT friendly with player made mods like furniture and clothes so if you are using those I would stop. Patterns seem to be stable. If your are insistent on using mods then at least move your mod folder before you patch the game.

I build a lot for the sims and those guys who use custom furniture make me frown as they are probably just messing up someones game somewhere for the sake of making their build look cool.

There are a lot of CC creators who do sloppy work that may mess up your game. There are lots CC creators who make stuff that works as well as EA stuff, or better. If you know what you are doing and choose carefully what to download, CC will not mess up your game.

The "remove all mods before patching" goes without saying. The "make sure all mods are up to date" is also very important.

I would have left Sims 3 a long time ago if not for mods that change both the bugs and those features that are just as annoying (like limiting celebrity, or fixing the those ridiculous slanders).

 

[Allspice]

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I thought I'd mention something that fixed the photography bug for me. Yeah, I did just buy World Adventures. No, I don't know what's wrong with me. XD I saw it on sale for $19 at Target and couldn't resist since I have every other expansion for the Sims 3.

Anyways, like most other people, when I first tried to play it photography didn't work. It would queue up and wouldn't go away so my sim was essentially frozen. So I looked around the Sims 3 forums for anything that might help and saw that someone suggested making sure the game was up to date. Kinda obvious, but worth checking to make sure. And it turned out that was the problem for me. For some reason the automatic updater didn't update a couple of the expansions (WA and Ambitions specifically) to the latest versions. I don't know why. After I installed the last patch they released for WA manually, photography worked. I hope that helps.

 

[William Evener]

Well this is an old post but here ya go anyhow. EA has yet to fix any of the save errors. As to some that state that every game has it's bugs..you are quite correct. I do a lot of modding, but most of my work of late has been re-coding and re-scripting EA's massive screw ups. I am sorry but EA is just plain lazy. My self and freshprince from modthesims do a hell of a lot better work with modeling and textures solo than EA does with an entire design staff. EA has NOT had any game released that was any good (That was their own) in quite a long time. No you can't count Battlefield 3 or any of the Bad Company series. They may have been under EA but they were completely developed by DICE . The Sims and The Sims 2 were still a Maxxis developed game under EA. EA in all their infinite wisdom decided to do a full and final buyout, releasing The Sims 3 strictly EA. Well they butchered the code so bad that after every patch they break quite a few game elements, making the patch a destructive waste of time. Mainly for one reason. They refuse to go back and fix the memory handler. Yes you can alter it to reserve 1 gig of ram for your system, stabilizing it for a short time. But that doesn't fix the problem. Unless they fix that problem it does not matter if you have a 6 core cpu and 32 gigs of ram (My spec rite now)you will still run in to error code 12 (out of memory save error). Error 12 will use up all your memory and your operating system will dump the save out of the sectors that is is using in the ram, corrupting the save file. As I said...EA is just plain and simple lazy. Releasing a broken game is not good for business. That's why in their last quarter they have lost almost 20% of their normal sales to other developers. But EA seems to muted to the client-base to even care.

 

[aguspal]

I too liked the Sims 2 more than 3, but problem is I cant QUITE put my finger on why. But it just is that way, Sims 2 to me was better than 3. I am not sure why exactly but it was...


Also, in my (relativily) short playtime I had almost no bugs... NO major ones anyway. That I could notice... the game was just boring.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Ok this is sort of my way of venting but also asking for help so if you dont want to read about my sorrow (T_T) just skip to the end and I wont hold it against you.

You have my sympathy. Sims 3 was a buggy mess from the get-go, and has never really been fixed. Every expansion packed seemed to have at least one primary feature that was straight up broken, thus falling way short of any potential they had.

Sims 2 seems the better game in retrospect despite some of the good steps forward Sims 3 took, although I suspect I am beginning to find the formula a bit stale. I want it to "play itself" a bit more. Get a kind of Dwarf Fortress experience where I provide the broad strokes and see how my Sim interacts with the world. Not "queue up 20 hugs to be BFF".

 

[Tayh]

I think the mods found at this place could help alot with various bug, glitches and odd behaviours:
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/
I quite like the Relativity mod.
Now it no longer takes an hour to get into my 4th-floor apartment from the street, and brushing teeth doesn't take a half hour either.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I think the mods found at this place could help alot with various bug, glitches and odd behaviours:
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/
I quite like the Relativity mod.
Now it no longer takes an hour to get into my 4th-floor apartment from the street, and brushing teeth doesn't take a half hour either.

That sounds pretty awe...no. No. No, damn it. I am not playing Sims 3 again. I have many other excellent games with which to occupy my time.

I said NO, sir! Good day!

Why are you being so pushy?

Fine, I'll try it out.