User blog comment:Knc1w2h3n4c5t/The Sims 4 is NOT Open World - Thoughts?/@comment-1692461-20140623222633/@comment-2201555-20140623224620

Most modern AAA games take 10-30 seconds to load for me, saving is instantaneous. It mostly depends on how much has to load, texture sizes and how much data is being stored in memory. Given that TS3 uses like 2.3GB of RAM and 512MB of VRAM on max settings, it's a hefty load. Hard disk speed/health and memory bandwidth also comes into play.

They might be able to make TS4 more efficient but don't bet on it.