Tag: Mac

Origin shutdown and what it means for Mac users

Published on by BluebellFloraLeave a comment

EA are shutting down Origin on April 17th 2025. This means that if you want to carry on playing your EA games, whether you purchased them, redeemed gifted codes, or claimed free titles, you have to use EA App which means you MUST be running macOS 10.15 Catalina or later. If you can’t/won’t update your macOS to Catalina you won’t be able to play.

Who does this affect?

  • All Mac users running the following currently compatible operating systems:
    • macOS 10.11 El Capitan
    • macOS 10.12 Sierra
    • macOS 10.13 High Sierra
    • macOS 10.14 Mojave

By extension this means that if you want to carry on playing The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 you have to upgrade to Catalina as EA App will be required to authenticate entitlement to the game in your EA account.

Upgrading to Catalina will mean that your Mac will no longer be able to run 32-bit applications as Mojave was the last macOS to support this. It is therefore important to check if any of the software you currently run, and rely on, in pre-Catalina versions of macOS are 32-bit. You can do this by launching your installed apps and opening Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) to check:

(note – this is an old screenshot from Activity Monitor and not indicative of the current versions of Sims 2, Sims 3 and SimCity/4 which are now 64-bit through EA or Aspyr)

Catalina will run on all Metal compatible Macs up to Macs released with subsequent versions of macOS, i.e. 2012 – 2019 models:

  • MacBook Pro introduced in 2012 or later
  • MacBook Air introduced in 2012 or later
  • MacBook introduced in 2015 or later
  • Mac mini introduced in 2012 or later
  • iMac introduced in 2012 or later
  • iMac Pro
  • Mac Studio introduced in 2022 or later
  • Mac Pro introduced in late 2013 or later

For a full list of compatible Macs see Apple’s support page.

What if I need to still run 32-bit apps or want to stay on a pre-Catalina OS but also want to play my EA games?

You have a few options available:

  1. Partition your internal hard drive:
    • use Disk Utility to partition the drive and install Catalina on the new partition. Make sure you allow enough space on the partition to include Catalina, around 12.5GB, EA App, around 1.5GB, and the games you want to play. As an example – the Sims 4 base game is currently around 24.5GB. All Packs and Kits to date amount to around 46.5GB. You would therefore need to allocate at least 85GB to the Catalina partition and this is not accounting for future DLC releases and any other games, plus spare space. 100GB would be the minimum partition allocation.
  2. Install Catalina on a bootable external drive. Apple are making this harder to do in current and future versions of macOS but you should still be ok with pre-Catalina versions of macOS.
  3. Install Windows in a Boot Camp partition and play in Windows instead of macOS. This is only an option if your Mac is an Intel machine and not Apple silicon (M-series ARM Macs) but if you are running pre-Catalina macOS your Mac will be an Intel machine as Apple silicon was released in 2020 and Catalina was released in 2019.

If you have any questions or need any further help upgrading to Catalina or creating a partition on your Mac the best place to ask is in my Discord server – https://discord.gg/EB9hZBDx34

Sims 3 and Sims 4 – testing in Big Sur and on an M1 Mac

Published on by BluebellFlora22 Comments

My entry level MacBook Air has finally arrived so I can start playing around with Sims 3 and Sims 4. This is my Mac:

2020 13″ MacBook Air
Apple M1 chip with 8‑core CPU, 7‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine
8GB unified memory
256GB SSD storage

I have all packs up to and including Snowy Escape installed. Settings are maxed out in each game.

Origin

No problems downloading Origin from https://www.origin.com/gbr/en-us/store/download. I am aware that there were reports of Origin not downloading in Big Sur. This appears to have affected those using Chrome. If you’re still having an issue use Safari or Firefox and you will be able to download it.

When you launch Origin you will get a pop-up asking you to install Rosetta, go ahead and install it. Rosetta is the software developed by Apple to translate Intel x86 apps into a language the M1 ARM chips can understand:

Origin should now run and you can start downloading your games (at the time of writing there is a bug in the Origin beta/technical preview which prevents packs from being downloaded. Opt out of the beta in the Application Settings then restart Origin and you should be good to go).

The Sims 3

After installing all the packs the game was still showing as Finalising in Origin. I launched the game by double clicking the app in my Applications folder instead and the Launcher immediately came up (repairing will also fix this). After clicking play in the Launcher a couple of times the game finally started to load. Managed to load a household fine and get into the game and play. One thing I did notice is awful pink lines around some of the screen and sim icon edges. It doesn’t affect gameplay but doesn’t look great.

Overall performance was ok and stable. Having the 64-bit version now is fantastic but it’s no doubt still pretty buggy overall.

The Sims 4

With all the packs downloaded I could press play and start a brand new game. CAS loaded fine and I managed to move a sim into their Lot. There are a lot of reports of users having crashing issues in CAS or when leaving CAS to move their household into a lot. If this is happening you need to enable Vertical Sync in the in-game options (I have no idea why). As well as testing a brand new folder I also copied over my existing Sims 4 folder from my MacBook Pro. This folder is around 5GB in total with a ton of high poly CC. Still loaded and ran beautifully. Really smooth gameplay.

If you’re having issues please leave me a comment or report over in the Mac forum at Answers HQ: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/bd-p/The-Sims-Mac

How to successfully buy the Sims 4 in Origin

Published on by BluebellFloraLeave a comment

If you’re looking to buy the Sims 4 you need to be aware that buying it through Origin isn’t currently as straightforward as it should be. EA are really pushing Origin Access subscriptions at every step of the purchasing process, trouble is that Origin Access (OA) is not available to Mac users so a lot of new Sims players are unwittingly buying the OA subscription which is completely useless to them. The trial version of the game is also not available to Mac users so don’t even bother trying to download it.

  1. Go to Origin.com or download and install the Origin client. Log in with your EA/Origin account if you already have one or create a new one.
  2. Find the Sims 4 base game and click Get The Game:
  3. Ignore the massive adverts trying to get you to buy Origin Access and click on the Buy Now button:
  4. You will then be taken to the next option asking you which version of the base game you would like to buy. Click the one you want and follow the rest of the instructions. Ignore the Origin Access advert at the bottom of the page.
  5. For further help installing the game see full instructions here.

If you have unwittingly purchased an Origin Access subscription  and want to cancel it:

  1. Log into your Origin account
  2. Hover over your name in the bottom left corner and select EA Account & Billing
  3. In the web browser window that opens to your EA account page select Origin Access from the menu on the left side and follow the instructions to cancel the subscription