Pondering How Time Works in the Sims
In the comments on the poll about Paralives and Sims 5, the subject of characters taking off shoes came up and it made me think about time in Sims 4 (and I guess any other life simulation game).
In real life, when I get home from work, I immediately take my shoes off. I wear Chelsea boots to work, so this takes, maybe, 30 seconds. The shoes that take me the longest to take off would be my hiking boots, but even those are off in under two minutes.
So far as I know, a minute in Sims is a second or so in real life. I figure this is why there are animations like taking off shoes that get left out. In order to animate taking off shoes in a realistic time span, the animation would be too quick for players to watch. What would likely happen is that Sims would take 10-15 minutes to take off their shoes, taking valuable time away from activities like getting water that nobody told them to get or knitting on the toilet.
I'm curious how other players feel about the inherently distorted timing of things (seriously, how long does it take you to walk from your living room to your kitchen compared to how long it takes your Sim to do the same thing?) and would you like the ratio of real life time to game time to be changed. If one minute of Sims time took 5 seconds of real life time at the slowest speed, more animations could be added and things like getting endless glasses of water wouldn't waste so much of a Sims' day. That being said, playing a day of a Sims life would take five times as long.
I'm not 100% sure where I'm going with this train of thought or what I'd prefer. Mostly, I'm just curious to hear what others think about how time works in Sims.
In real life, when I get home from work, I immediately take my shoes off. I wear Chelsea boots to work, so this takes, maybe, 30 seconds. The shoes that take me the longest to take off would be my hiking boots, but even those are off in under two minutes.
So far as I know, a minute in Sims is a second or so in real life. I figure this is why there are animations like taking off shoes that get left out. In order to animate taking off shoes in a realistic time span, the animation would be too quick for players to watch. What would likely happen is that Sims would take 10-15 minutes to take off their shoes, taking valuable time away from activities like getting water that nobody told them to get or knitting on the toilet.
I'm curious how other players feel about the inherently distorted timing of things (seriously, how long does it take you to walk from your living room to your kitchen compared to how long it takes your Sim to do the same thing?) and would you like the ratio of real life time to game time to be changed. If one minute of Sims time took 5 seconds of real life time at the slowest speed, more animations could be added and things like getting endless glasses of water wouldn't waste so much of a Sims' day. That being said, playing a day of a Sims life would take five times as long.
I'm not 100% sure where I'm going with this train of thought or what I'd prefer. Mostly, I'm just curious to hear what others think about how time works in Sims.
