Full disclosure: the article you're about to read is not the one I intended to write. I'd hoped to make some direct comparisons between the Legacy Collection versions of The Sims 1 and 2 and fan-patched versions of both games, in order to see how EA's upgrades compared with all the fanmade alterations that have come over the years. The reality is that both the official and fanmade patches offer effectively identical experiences. There are minor pros and cons to each - more on those in a minute - but I find myself unable to definitively call one better than the other.
After a half-dozen hours getting a Sims 2 Legacy Challenge - a popular community ruleset that has you building a multigenerational legacy from humble beginnings - off the ground, I've been impressed with how well the Legacy Collection is working. I've had a couple of odd crashes and interface quirks, but they're few and far between. I only started playing after EA had deployed a few patches to the game, and I was hopeful that these updates had indeed knocked out all the major issues that were being reported in the first days after the game's release. Then I spoke with my colleague Anja, who's still having all the consistent crashing issues she reported in her initial impressions. We're both on high-end PCs. I don't know why our experiences are so different.
But while I'm not here to try and spin these kinds of technical issues as a good thing, there is something appropriate about The Sims feeling like it's being held together by duct tape and good wishes, because that's exactly how I remember the experience of playing these games back in the mid '00s. While the past decade or so has gotten us all used to stable PC games that work consistently across a wide range of hardware configurations, that wasn't the reality for the vast majority of PC games in this era, and The Sims in particular is vast mess of complicated gameplay systems and endless expansion packs building on top of each other to create a uniquely broken experience. I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to truly "fix" these games.
The real Legacy Challenge
You might have rose-colored memories of your time with the old Sims games, but I'm here to tell you that it was not all sunshine and roses playing these games on the contemporary PCs of the '00s. These were big, complicated games that could bring all but the highest-end machines to their knees, and the casual audience that The Sims attracted suddenly had to become PC gaming experts to keep their games in working order. Each new expansion was like adding another level to a house of cards. By the time I got to Hot Date - just the third expansion pack for The Sims 1 - my load times were ballooning into the minutes range, and I held my breath every time I took a Sim out of the house for fear that this trip would be the one that would cause the inevitable crash.
Both The Sims and its sequel have always been a little broken, and that converts into a lot broken once both games have gotten years worth of progressively more complicated expansion packs. That's just as true with the Legacy Collection and the fan patches today as it was with the original games running on Windows 98 and XP decades ago.
Honestly, it's a little less onerous in the Sims 1 Legacy Collection, which features reasonable load times and solid performance, but I do still have to keep a few of those old breaths held back, especially when I take Sims on vacation, which is probably the most reliable crash trigger I've seen in either Legacy version. That's an issue that, notably, does not occur in the fan-patched version of the game I've tried, but those fan patches have their own problems.
Chiefly there's the problem that, outside of the Legacy Collections, it's effectively impossible to play The Sims 1 or 2 on a modern PC without engaging in some form of piracy. Even if you own the original game discs - and have a disc drive hooked up to your modern PC - pretty much every mod guide you're going to come across will tell you to first of all replace your .exe files with a cracked version, as that's the only way to evade the crashes caused by the original DRM imposed on these games. There are exemptions to the DMCA that could potentially give the OK to this kind of crack, but I ain't a lawyer and neither are any of the modders creating these patches, so you'll have to navigate that legal and ethical minefield yourself if you want to go for the unofficial upgrades.
Beyond those Sims 1 vacation issues, I've found the fan patches and official Legacy Collections to offer roughly equivalent experiences across both games. I think the Legacy version of Sims 1 is slightly more visually appealing, but the fan-patched Sims 2 probably looks slightly better in the end. Fully stress testing both versions of each game is going to take a long, long time given the volume of content in each, and the results of that testing will quickly become irrelevant when another patch comes down the pipe.
Perhaps I'm being too forgiving of the Legacy Collections, but that's easy to do when I'm not experiencing the same issues that other players are. For me, these are now the easiest and most convenient ways to access two of the most significant video games ever created, which is all I'd hoped for from this release. I fear the instability and inconsistency that others have found, hopeful though I am that more and more of it is going to be fixed, might just be the price of Maxis' ambitious legacy.
If you're looking for more games like The Sims, you know where to click.
