Sims 4 update season becomes a chaotic time for players of The Sims 4. People who use mods and custom content have to either deal with a broken game or wait until their mods are updated to play the new update, various Sims 4 communities online are filled with ambivalent posts about the fun aspects of the new update or complaining about it (including the broken mods), and then the posts raving about a new pack. For the past year or more, the Sims team has released a large base game update a couple of days before releasing a new pack, meant to introduce parts of the new pack to all players. For Seasons, hot and cold weather outfits were introduced. For High School Years, body hair was added. And for Growing Together, the newest expansion pack, a new life stage (infants) was added, alongside a revamp of the newborn babies.

I haven’t been able to play with the new update due to the fact that many of the mods I use have not been updated for this new base game update, but I’ve witnessed some of the responses from other Sims players about the new life stage. Infants were an especially anticipated addition to the game, as for years, Simmers had been asking for an update to the newborn babies so they felt more realistic. And with this new update, the Sims team updated both newborn babies and put a life stage between them and toddlers to make things seem more realistic in terms of development. However, since this is the Sims, there are some glitches that make things wacky and kind of terrifying. The main glitch I have seen from other Simmers happens when an older Sim picks up an infant, which makes their limbs become long and spindly, kind of like a daddy-long-legs spider. While some have complained that infants without the new Growing Together expansion pack can become boring to play with, many Simmers would rather take this than the previous pre-teen gameplay we had before. It took three years for the toddler life stage to be added into the game, meaning that newborns used to age up directly into children.

Thankfully, the base game update coming before the release of Growing Together wasn’t plagued with various bugs and glitches. Other packs, however, have not had the same fate. When the game pack My Wedding Stories was released in February of 2022, it was unplayable and broken. The pack is meant to make the wedding ceremony for Sims better by adding new events and roles related to western wedding ceremonies. However, the various bugs and glitches that were present made the gold-medal completion of a wedding event almost entirely impossible. Various updates have been released to fix these bugs and glitches, but there are still issues with the pack to this day.

Dine Out is another pack that has had similar issues as My Wedding Stories. The Dine Out pack adds the ability for Sims to own and manage their own restaurant. Having been released in 2016, its content is similar to the retail store owner career from the expansion pack Get to Work. However, almost seven years after its release, many Simmers still talk about how unplayable the pack is. Bugs and glitches have made the restaurant owning/managing gameplay almost entirely impossible, and many Simmers have turned to mods to fix these issues. There is hope for these bugs and glitches to be fixed, as the Sims team made a large update to the Spa Day pack.

While updates to the Sims 4 can become an ambivalent time for the community, Simmers tend to come together around the time of updates and discuss the bugs and glitches they encounter with others. Making everyone happy in this community is a hard task, especially since the Sims franchise is marketed as a game where players can choose how they want to play – whether that be someone who only uses the Create-A-Sim feature, someone who only uses Build Mode, people focused on family gameplay and wanting the best for their virtual families, or people who play in a humorous way. Yet, the bugs and glitches that plague certain corners of this game bring the Sims community together and remain the topic of many conversations to this day.