The Sims 4 update adding High School Years to the game is here! Although maybe it shouldn’t be, not yet at least. The newest expansion for EA and Maxis’ life game is causing a few problems, some rather more serious than others. Some of the major issues arrived with the wants and fears addition in the life game’s free update and require more work from the development team to fix. The raft of additional issues that comes with the High School Years expansion is a bit different.
The Sims 4 subreddit is full of posts with people showing blank user interfaces, missing dialogue, and furniture and housing catalogues with *DEBUG* instead of item names or placeholder text. One user even made a collage of issues, most of which consisted of missing text.
These issues are reportedly easy to resolve. Reddit user Feizeit said the problem seems to stem from the game missing its string package, which, in normal terms, means the code telling it to display text in certain areas isn’t there. Other users said the folders aren’t there and couldn’t follow their advice, but PLAY Magazine staff writer Dashiell Wood seems to have landed on a solution.
It seems the missing text phenomenon is mainly affecting Steam versions of the game. Wood says you can open EA’s Origin app, and it should verify the files, adding the missing string package in the process.
That still leaves quite a few, non-text-related bugs to sort out, though. The social bunny app lets people drastically raise friendship levels with other Sims just by repeatedly sending friendly messages, while a more serious issue seems to be affecting the end of the school term. One player posted a screenshot where the game said their Sim graduated and dropped out at the same time. It’s a potential issue considering drop outs have far fewer career opportunities open to them.
Other, much more significant, problems include the aging bug where Sims get older every time you transition screens, and the incest bug, which Kotaku reports is where the wants system randomly suggests your Sim wants to get intimate with family members.
Big yikes doesn’t even cover that one.
Neither does the usual development cycle, unfortunately. One member of The Sims team posted at 11:15 p.m. in regards to the incest bug, saying they were working to fix it – along with the other problems. Even taking time zones into account, that’s well beyond the scope of the usual work day, so bear that in mind while dealing with your frustrations.
For the time being, it may be worth using some Sims 4 mods to make the transition to high school a bit smoother.