The Sims 4 is a notoriously problematic game. Between its incessant monetization of content packs that have gradually grown sparser (and ultimately led to the essential cancellation of The Sims 5) and now Saudi Arabia’s impending acquisition of Electronic Arts, it’s not exactly the same life sim it was when the series kicked off in 2000. The game is also notably buggy, a problem that seems to grow with every new expansion pack. Most of these bugs have been fairly harmless and occasionally charming: things like Sims randomly hitting T-poses and peeing fire. But now, a much more devastating bug is wiping out generations of gameplay, and it seems like developer Maxis might not know how to fix it.
Over the past several months, quite a few Sims 4 players have noticed an eerie bug that turns all of their family photos black. While the bug has apparently been around for a whopping five years, it seems like it’s become rampant over the past several months. Photos serve as arguably the game’s most sentimental feature, and they’ve become a handy way to keep track of memories from past generations, so players are understandably really, really upset.
The bug has proven especially devastating for players who play in the same family for generations. Reddit user iiappie noted that they had lost 7.5 generations of photos, sharing a screenshot of a gallery with hundreds of photos all gone. And Reddit user LilNyoomf shared that every memorial photo in their entire cemetery was completely wiped.
“Shaking my head,” LilNyoomf wrote. “I have no words.”
As if the family photo bug isn’t already horrible enough, the game is also apparently now deleting entire Sims from the family tree UI, meaning players who don’t archive their progress through some external method are just losing all records of their dead Sims (other than their literal graves).
“I haven’t played in over 6 month because of shit like this and with the way things are going, I likely won’t return,” Reddit user VibrantViolet commented on iiappie’s post. “EA killed this franchise.”
The game’s patch notes from February 3 and January 13 declare that the team fixed these bugs, but photos are definitely still vanishing. Some players have even reported that these patches intended to fix photos were actually what broke their photos, which seems especially awful. It’s also worth noting that one patch states that the alleged fix it introduced doesn’t allow photos to be fixed retroactively, meaning there might not ever be an official way to recover these hundreds of lost photos.
While Maxis hopefully works on an actual patch, Reddit user efsamo has shared a DIY fix that allows players to recover their missing photos. However, it’s not a guaranteed remedy. Other players are turning to new ways of archiving their gameplay, like modded portraits, but plenty more are still waiting on Maxis to provide a surefire fix before even opening the game at all.
I’ve never been a hugely sentimental Sims player, and I’ve abandoned so many single-generation save files to start new ones, but I still use the hell out of the photo feature. I can only imagine what it would be like to spend hundreds of hours building a massive family tree only to lose all of those digital memories. Hopefully Maxis will figure out how to patch this out for real (and maybe even rescue those lost photos), but it seems like this is still the last straw for quite a few players.
