A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.
The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word “some.” Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn’t launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there’s work to be done yet.)
Look, it’s fine to re-release a game without remastering it. I’m actually glad to see the game’s original assets as they always were—it’s deeply nostalgic, and there’s always a tinge of sadness when a remaster overwrites the work of the original artists. That’s not a concern here.
But if you’re going to re-release a game on Steam in 2025, there are minimum expectations—especially from a company with the resources of EA, and even more so for a game that is this important and beloved.
The game needs to reliably run on modern machines, and it needs to support basic platform features like cloud saves or achievements. It’s not much to ask, and it’s not what we got.
Cloud saves are for playing on more than one box as well as backup. Achievements, from the developer’s POV, give some insight into player behaviour, you can also drop hints there (I would never have tried to pet the manta in Satisfactory otherwise), make suggestions for tasks people can set themselves, etc. Whether you, as a player, cares honestly nobody but you gives a fuck.
I can tell you, for example, just from the achievement statistics, that a metric fuckton, an absolute majority, of Cities:Skylines players play modded. They do track city building milestones and very very few people are reaching anything even close to mid-game with achievements still enabled.
Thank you for the insight. I respect it but nonetheless those are features completely indiferen to me.