EA has shared a community update stating it is investigating reports of "various issues" in the Legacy Collection re-releases of The Sims 1 and 2. Over on Steam, the games are both sitting at a "Mixed" score from user reviews, with complaints of crashes, bugs, and a general lack of quality or improvements.
"We recognize some fans are currently experiencing issues with The Sims: Legacy Collection and The Sims 2: Legacy Collection," an EA employee wrote in a post to The Sims Game Info Hub on the EA forums. "We are currently investigating these issues and hope to have more information on fixes soon."
It's a fairly boilerplate, cards close to the chest sort of response, and does not quite measure up to how much these Sims re-releases seem to be fundamentally borked. Combing through the Steam reviews of both Legacy Collections, the issues I've seen repeatedly mentioned include:
- No UI scaling at resolutions of 1080p and above (you know, modern ones), leading to small, difficult to read icons.
- This is even worse for the pre-rendered Neighborhood view, which seems to be presented as a small, low-res window in the center of the screen.
- Crashes at launch and after assorted durations of play time.
- Lack of modernizations, QoL fixes, or basic features like Steam Cloud saves or MacOS support.
- Retention of known bugs from the original release of The Sims 2.
I've seen some positive reviewers contest the UI complaint on The Sims 2, but overall, these re-releases appear to be fundamentally compromised. What's more, even once you get past the overt failures, EA is charging $20 and $30 for The Sims 1 and 2 respectively when they are, in the best-case scenario, bare bones ports of the original games to Steam—Nightdive's The Thing: Remastered charges $30 for a version of the game with numerous light touch quality of life, graphical, and gameplay upgrades. MSRP for Beamdog's Baldur's Gate Enhanced Editions, which similarly add a ton to their respective games, is $20 a pop.
The situation reminds me of the disastrous initial release of the Metal Gear Master Collection, where similarly basic ports of classic games were compromised by a multitude of technical issues. That collection has redeemed itself somewhat through updates, but I still had to turn to mods for the best experience on Steam Deck. It has not been a good week for EA: After its latest Sports FC and Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed sales expectations, it appears that the publisher has gutted BioWare, with a number of veteran developers either shuffled to other studios or laid off entirely.
