The Sims 4 censorhip 'bug' may be piracy punishment

Electronic Arts' virtual people simulator The Sims 4 arrived in local video game store shelves yesterday, but if you already happen to have installed an 'extra-legal' copy then there's an undocumented feature you have to watch out for.

 

Experienced 'Sims' players know that when their polygon people go nude, they get pixelated in order to hide their naughty bits. Not that they have anything to show as extracting the games assets reveal that the intimate regions of the Sims are as smooth as that of a Ken doll's.

 

However, reports are going around that some copies of the game see the entire screen become permanently pixelated. Every time a Sim takes a shower or uses the toilet, the area of pixelation increases until it covers the whole screen. This issue, according to places like sims4forum.com and reddit is exclusive to pirated and/or torrented copies of the game.

Pirates' outing
 

That's right, pirates are being treated to a 'mosaic' mod that turns 'The Sims 4' into a 'Minecraft'-like experience. Some are trying to look for fixes to this, trying to play it off as a random glitch that happened to their legit copies. Already guides are being written to determine how to get 'fix' it, and a few torrents have also appeared purporting to address it.

 

And while there might be room for doubt, a few are outing themselves as having pirated the game in an effort to understand the problem better. One user even acknowledged having both pirated the game and acquiring it legitimately, and reported that the glitch only appears in his pirated copy.

 

There is no official word yet from EA, but this wouldn't the first time a software publisher or developer has resorted to creative forms of copy protection. Last year, the creators of Game Dev Tycoon revealed that they uploaded a broken copy of their own game onto torrent sites and cracked copies of 2011's Serious Sam 3 features a hostile pink scorpion that is also unkillable.

Undocumented punishment

 

Such undocumented features are an amusing way to not only punish pirates, but out them on message boards and forums. However, a lack of clarity regarding their presence might be doing more harm than good, as some may choose to assume that these bugs are real issues and serve as a deterrent to legit purchases. In the case of 'Titan Quest,' the copy protection routines were designed to dump pirates back to their desktop but this was widely mistaken as a crash bug, a result of poor workmanship on the developers' part.

 

Piracy will always be an issue, and while not everyone is satisfied with digital rights management systems, online checks it may not be in the best interest of developers to attempt to put one over gamers, whether or not they may deserve it. An if EA doesn't make a wide and clear statement about 'The Sims 4,' then they might be selling fewer copies than they could.  — TJD, GMA News