Re: In game time

@keke1253   Hi!  I think when you start playing the game you'll see why in game time moves so quickly.  If it were that close to real life it would take the rest of your life to play one sim.  So, I totally agree with @LadyAofPineapple.  That would probably get really boring really quickly. :-)

Even though you're not able to adjust the speed, as @PipMenace said, you are able to change the lifespan of sims, giving you more control over how long you get to play with them.  There's an option to turn aging off completely which means you decide when to manually have sims progress to their next life stage (from child to teen to adult and so on).  There are also options for short, normal and long lifespans.  Each lifespan comes with a set number of in-game days for each life stage.  For example, an infant on the short lifespan will have 2.5 days before aging up to toddler, then 3.5 days before aging up to child.  The normal lifespan gives 5 days for infants and 7 days for toddler.  The short lifespan can give you 66+ total in-game days with your sim if you play from newborn through Elder.  The long lifespan gives you 528+ in-game days.  If you're interested in learning more about life stages and lifespans, I like this article on Game Rant.  https://gamerant.com/the-sims-4-lifespans-guide/

Hope this helps!

@keke1253   I haven't played animal crossing but I can say for sure 100% I definitely would not want my sims to be doing whatever they want while I'm away.  lol

@keke1253  When you exit the game, everything is frozen until you open the game again.  Trust me, you want this!  lol   There is so much that can happen that you will want at least some control.  Careers / school, birthdays, relationships, having babies and on and on.  You really won't want to miss anything in your played sims' lives and you definitely won't want to allow them to make their own decisions about many things.  While playing the game, the unplayed sims will do things and gain experiences that you do not control.  This can be limited or encouraged depending on your settings.

@keke1253   You're welcome!  The game is so complex with so many different variables it would be nearly impossible to describe it all at once; not to mention the added features from the various packs if/when you choose to add them.  Fortunately, you have AHQ as a resource.  Whenever you have a question or run into a problem, there are lots of folks here who enjoy helping.  :-)

@keke1253 I play Animal Crossing New Horizons and I really dislike the way that it's in real time and linked to the date set on the console. I much prefer the Sims not being in real time.

When I haven't played Animal Crossing for a while, I have to remember the date of the last time I played and set my Nintendo Switch to that date or my villagers get really annoyed at Mini Me and want to move away or in the case of snooty villagers they give me quite a piece of their mind (Bree and Astrid were ejected from my island after such incidents). I started time travelling backwards if I wanted to skip across seasons to avoid villagers kicking off, so my Switch is set to Oct 2020 right now. The game itself starts out great, it's less buggy and I love it but it gets really repetitive since you can only have one character, with Sims you can have dozens with everyone being different for more variety. Plus you can miss festivals and events on AC if you miss certain days...I don't want to miss Flick's visits!

You can't time travel on the Sims like you can with AC but you don't really need to and, unlike AC if you have the Seasons Pack installed each season is only 28 days max and you can shorten it to 7 days. I wish we could do that on AC in fact that's why I time travel...I hate winter.