Opinion: EA might be done with single-player games—but we’re not.

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.

  • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.org
    24·
    2 days ago

    Explain in one sentence what cloud saves are and how they conflict with it being a singleplayer offline game.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Never said they conflict. Said they’re not a “basic feature”. Sigleplayer has lived without cloud saves since around 1960.

      Heck, most modern consoles have a USB port, I’d consider “offline save” more “basic” than “cloud save”. After all we all know by now the corporate internet can’t be trusted.

      • Something Burger 🍔
        6·
        1 day ago

        Electricity isn’t a “basic necessity”. Humanity survived for thousands of years without it.

        Cloud saves are a basic feature of any modern game. It’s extremely easy to add on Steam without even having to implement it in the game. It’s just configuration, so not having access to the original source code isn’t an issue.