Community run re-implementation of The Sims Online™, based on the original FreeSO project by riperiperi. LegacySO or FreeSO are not in any way affiliated with Electronic Arts or The Sims.
About LegacySO
LegacySO (or “Legacy Simulator Online“) is a child project of FreeSO (or “Free Simulator Online“). The latter was a reimplementation of The Sims Online™’s game engine. The original project was written in C# and Monogame and enhanced the original in many ways including hardware rendering, lighting improvements and more.
Unfortunately, when the FreeSO project was sunset in December 2024, the reimplementation was not complete and, as such, some features are missing from the final game. LegacySO’s goal is to work on preserving the work of the original development team of FreeSO whilst looking to enhance the vanilla experience where possible. In the future, the goal may shift to also work towards completing the reimplementation’s game engine to provide a fully-fleshed experience.
We encourage you to read more about the original FreeSO project, of which LegacySO is based on, here.
You can read information about quality of life enhancements we’re making to LegacySO here.
How to Play
To download LegacySO, please head to our ‘Register and Download’ page. Make sure you read the rules before you get started!
Is LegacySO safe? What about other servers?
There are other projects, lead by other teams, who are working on similar goals. And whilst it is important to consider the de-duplication of effort in this shared mission of upholding FreeSO’s legacy, for distinct reasons we have chosen to remain independent until now. If we decide to collaborate with another project in the future, it will be announced in our Blog and on our Discord Server.
Whilst there are other servers out there online that are competing for your Sims Online fix, we feel obliged to warn players that there are some servers that blatantly flaunt FreeSO’s original mission of not distributing copyrighted materials or using Sims branding on their websites or servers.
Why does this matter? Well if servers break these fundamental cornerstones of FreeSO’s legacy, there’s a chance EA could step in and shut the whole thing down. Including ones following the rules, including us. That means it all ends. And all progress is lost.
Therefore, here are some questions for you to ask to keep safe when playing on servers inspired by FreeSO:
-Is the source code published for the game client? (here’s ours)
If not, this breaches the license of the original FreeSO project and lowers the reputation for spin-off servers as a whole. It’s actually illegal to not do this.
-Is the server branding using Sims or EA materials?
If it does, this directly contravenes the careful decisions made by FreeSO to keep away from The Sims brand and to not cause problems for EA. Our goal is to remain independent and an open-source game client that reads from the original game files, not distributes it, the brand, or the assets in any way.
If there’s a server out there that doesn’t follow these guidelines, and you care about the FreeSO project (and it’s child projects, like ours) the best way to support the game’s preservation is to vote with your time. Don’t play on these servers and you’ll be contributing to the cause of servers remaining true to what FreeSO started. We don’t say this to encourage more people to play here, or to be petty. This is about game preservation, and we want this game to last the test of time.
Fair Use Policy
The LegacySO game client does not, on its own, display any copyrighted materials. The game files it works from are not distributed by the LegacySO client or from the LegacySO team. These files are provided by the user, and the LegacySO client reads these files in order to operate. This renders the LegacySO client effectively a front-end for which to view the original game files that the user already is in possession of.
The LegacySO server transmits metadata (e.g., lot information, in-game money values, etc) but does not transmit any copyrighted materials.
It’s worth reading this document written by the FreeSO team explaining Fair Use in more detail.