Sims 3 Pets Broken Graphics Issue | Why Sims 3 Pets Won't Work For Many Players
If you bought the Sims 3 Pets expansion pack thinking that you'd be able to play it because you've been able to play all the other expansions, think again. It turns out that a great many graphics cards are no longer supported in the Sims 3 Pets expansion pack, these include, but may not be limited to:
- Intel G33/G31
- Nvidia GeForce 6200
- Nvidia GeForce 6150SE
- ATI Radeon Xpress 1250
- Nvidia 6200
- Nvidia GeForce 6150SE
- ATI Radeon Xpress 1250
Glitches related to many of these cards are so extreme that the expansion pack is pretty much unplayable. Many of the pets appear to have been melted by an out of control ray of corporate greed.
Why the creators of The Sims 3 would think that it's okay to change basic systems requirements for an expansion pack without making it very clear that they were doing so is beyond me. The Sims 3 is not a game generally played by high end gamers, it's a game popular with the 'casual' gaming set who don't have hundreds of dollars of disposable income to upgrade their pc's and graphics cards just for an expansion pack. (In many cases, upgrading a graphics card means having to upgrade the entire pc, especially if there are power supply issues.) There are many people who bought The Sims 3 pets without being made aware of the potential for incompatibility. Would it really have been so very difficult to tell gamers that they needed to make sure that their systems could handle the new expansion pack because the requirements had changed? Apparently so.
This is not the first time that EA has knowingly released what I would call 'broken' content. I'm still not over the 'Lady Ravendancer Goth's Spell Book' debacle, in which the spell book doesn't work if you bought Hidden Springs. That's right, EA released two pieces of custom content that weren't compatible with one another without so much as a warning on either piece.
EA has been taking a lot of flak lately, both for its deeply flawed Origin store, for broken custom content and for shoving advertisements into paid games. It would seem that the company isn't really all that concerned about the experience the end user has as long as they paid for the content first. The Sims 3 forums themselves are being run basically by volunteers because EA's idea of support is putting in three different services and forcing you to create different accounts for every single one.
This isn't good enough, and it certainly mars the release of what should have been a fun addition to The Sims 3 franchise.
EDIT: If you're coming to leave a comment about how it is the player's fault that their graphics card isn't supported, you should be aware that some graphics cards that do meet the requirements stated on the packaging aren't actually supported either. So not only has EA hiked system requirements mid-game so to speak, it has also blatantly misrepresented what the actual requirements are. I must therefore ask EA apologists to kindly go and boil their heads.
