For the second time in two years, The Sims 4 has just fixed a surprise incest bug. The new Lovestruck expansion pack and patch come with an in-game dating app, more control over relationships, and even polyamory, but Sims getting crushes on family members wasn’t supposed to be on the menu. Developer Maxis and publisher EA quickly promised a fix, and now you shouldn’t get any more bombshell texts from extended family, in the game at least.
Before diving into the fixes, let’s look at what happened. Alongside this new The Sims 4 DLC, Maxis released some dense patch notes for players with and without the Lovestruck expansion. Among the improvements, the ‘Neighborhood Stories’ menu changed how you look at friendships and romances in the free Steam game, with some unintended consequences.
If you enable the Neighborhood Stories changes, load up a save with multiple related Sims in different households, and wait for one of them to call you, you get quite the message. According to a new bug report from ‘Jayrae316,’ “Your sim will get a call from a friend or relation to tell you that the sim calling you is now in a relationship with their sibling or other inappropriate related sim.”
Obviously, this shouldn’t happen, with The Sims 4 community managers saying they’ll look into this issue “with priority.” EA has now fixed The Sims 4 incest problem, with a patch on Friday July 26 removing the Lovestruck DLC’s new romances. The patch also gets rid of Sims having the Mean Streak phase well into adulthood, and a bug where going through the phases of adoption would just suddenly end, with no way to complete the process.
The Sims 4 Lovestruck is one of the life game’s most anticipated expansions to date, as it brings massive overhauls to the romance systems, so it’s a massive shame to see it weighed down by bugs, glitches, and incest. Luckily that last problem should be solved now, even if it should never have happened in the first place.
This isn’t even The Sims 4’s first incest bug either. Back in 2022, The Sims 4 High School Years had a bug where your Sim would randomly want to get intimate with other family members. Developer Maxis fixed this bug within a week, for obvious reasons, but thanks to Lovestruck and the newest free patch, the problem once again reared its ugly head.
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