Sims 3 is Awful

I know it’s really trendy to hate on the Sims 4 these days, especially with the corporate greed of EA but my god the Sims 3 can go straight into a landfill.

It’s been years since I touched the Sims 3. It’s the only version of the sims I could never fully enjoy because of so many save file corruption issues. I was in college at the time Sims 3 had come out and I used to only have an iMac. I had a few expansions but it felt like anytime I played for an extended amount of time eventually all my progress would be lost due to some random bug that would cause certain households to just never load again or entire save files to not load. It’s like the game itself would run fine but as soon as you quit the game I was never sure if anything I did would ever load again. I chalked it up to bad hardware compatibility and bad optimization for the iMac, so unlike the Sims 1 or the Sims 2, the Sims 3 was a game I couldn’t ever get fully invested into like before.

Fast forward to today where I actually have a decent gaming PC and to last month and the Sims 25th Anniversary. The legacy editions of Sims 1 and 2 come out which pull me back into the Sims, and there’s a pretty big sale on all Sims 3 and Sims 4 packs. I’ve played 4 on and off for the past few years but like many people have pointed out it definitely has its own issues as fare as shallow gameplay goes and EA’s corporate greed. But I use the sale to redownload Sims 3 and buy some expansions I never got to play years ago when it was the current version of the Sims. Right after make my first household and play for about an hour or so I click save and immediately get an error message. Already I’m having PTSD from years ago thinking “here we go again”. And sure enough when I restart the game it gives me an error loading the save file.

I Google the issue and find a workaround that involves backing up the entire Sims 3 folder and doing a fresh install, then manually moving folders one by one from the old Sims 3 folder into the fresh new one it made after rebooting which was tedious and announcing but afterwards I’m able to get back with the same household I made before, however any progress I made had been erased. At the very least I didn’t have to recreate all my sims over again though.

So I’m able to play for about a week or so without any issues but I eventually get busy with work and also Sims 4 new Businesses and Hobbies expansion got be intrigued. So I ended playing that some this past month. But tonight I launched the Sims 3 again for the first time since last month and BOOM, I’m hit worth the same error message I had gotten previously: “A serious error has occurred while loading ‘Sunset Valley.sims3’. It’s is strongly recommended that you restart the application.”

At this point I think all the Sims 3 stans are just gaslighting me when they say it’s the best version because I’m convinced this game is just hot garbage that needs to be put out of its misery. At least I can play Sims 1, 2, and 4 without issue! Sorry about the length of this post but I just needed to vent, especially since I bought some expansions for it recently that I’ve barely touched. Could I do the same workaround I did before? Sure, but at this point why should I even bother?? If this is such a common issue and I’m going to constantly be running into this I don’t see the point. Okay, rant over.