Since the latest Sims 4 update released, players have noticed some odd bugs–even by the Sims’ standards. As of the latest patch, which introduced burglar Robin Banks to the game, child and baby Sims may appear pregnant, have beer-bellies, or be oddly muscular.
Some players on The Sims subreddit, as picked up by Eurogamer, noticed that some of their child sims were suddenly appearing pregnant–in one case, the user claimed the bug was affecting every male child in their game.
The bug appears to be visual only–the child Sims have thankfully not been given the actual pregnancy state and are not about to give birth to other Sims–but in a game like this, visuals are important to most players.
Other posts on the Sims subreddit suggest there are more visual glitches affecting young Sims, with one post showing a collection of strangely buff babies, and another showing a child Sim who looks like he’s been hitting the gym.
One Reddit user theorized that the game is somehow mixing up child and adult body types, mistakenly applying adult musculature, beer bellies, or pregnant bellies to child and infant Sims. While it’s easy to fix an adult Sim who’s been assigned the wrong body type, child Sims’ bodies can’t be customized, making this bug difficult to get around. Even aging up and then regressing the Sim doesn’t appear to reset the body-distorting bug, according to players’ experiments.
The Sims has a history of unintentionally hilarious bugs, like the one that gave infants freakishly long limbs back when the new life state was first introduced, but EA’s poor track record of fixing bugs means players are often anxious about how long disruptive bugs will stick around. While this bug hasn’t been officially acknowledged yet, EA encourages players to report bugs through its forums, where a thread has been started to catalogue body distortion in child Sims.
EA recently re-released The Sims and The Sims 2 as legacy editions, including all their DLC packs. However, these re-releases also launched with a number of bugs that have frustrated players. A Sims community manager has said that the legacy game bugs are currently being investigated.
