When there will be only one loading sequence in games?

[rusty_shackleford]

The only small downside was only like 70% of the game was actually finished.

...and that it still runs like garbage on modern computers.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Do you hate things that are objectively shit:

1: Yes
2: I am retarded
3: We all are retarded
4: A running Joke i do not get.

 

[cvv]

The only small downside was only like 70% of the game was actually finished.

...and that it still runs like garbage on modern computers.

Aakshually it finally runs well. Last played 2 weeks ago.

 

[Tacgnol]

Afaik Gothic 3 was the first open world RPG without a single loading screen. From the first second in the game you could go absolutely anywhere in the world, with zero loading. Not even fast travel used loading screens, the game only kindda froze for two seconds. Plus the graphics looked better than Skyrim that came out 5 years later.

The only small downside was only like 70% of the game was actually finished.

It also stuttered like crazy because it was constantly streaming the world.

Probably better these-days, but still.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Afaik Gothic 3 was the first open world RPG without a single loading screen.

False.

King's Field II (1 in the US) was the first one (among the 3D games) back in 1995. It masked the streaming of additional data by including short corridors between each area of the game (kinda like Soul Reaver did several years later, but it wasn't an RPG).

You could count the original JP version, but it's less elegant -- the streaming of additional data is masked via the teleport animations, but it still results in a short instance of watching a blank screen as the game loads the dungeon floor.

 

[RuySan]

So people are really asking to go back to the days of the ZX Spectrum?

 

[Ash]

Loading screens have rarely bothered me, except in games where you have to go through many in quick succession (recent example: Prey).

 

[Daemongar]

I never worried too much about loading screens until I played GTA:SA - once you were in, that was it. The flow as you drove around really added more dimension to the game. Otherwise loading screens after each death causes me rage. Ultima 8 - nobody remembers how horrible that game was at release. Not only platform jumping and small steps could kill you, but waiting forever between deaths. Damn.

 

[J1M]

If there is one thing that no one supports is to wait. Everytime, there is a loading screen , and it's a huge amount of time lost.I wonder how many time of my life i have lost in those god damn loading screens.
enter a new area -> loading screen
Fast travel -> loading screen
Everything -> loading screen
Witcher 3 is the only game that reduces loading times the maximum they could as far as i remember. Bethesda is the worst exemple in this section.
Imagine a game with only 1 short loading time and other loadings are instantenous. No time lost , full time used on the game.

This is one of those "you think you do, but you don't" situations. With loading screens you can improve the load times with better hardware or by copying the game files into a virtual drive that lives in RAM.

With no loading screens you will have unskippable in-game animations to mask resource loading and the animation duration will be based on the minimum requirements. Think the elevators in Mass Effect or the narrow passages you squeeze through in the new Jedi game. And they will remove fast travel entirely.

I would love to see the most popular engines offer an option to load all resources into RAM, but even then there's a limit to how many textures fit on a video card at once.

 

[taxalot]

The end of loading will come with streaming.

 

[Thac0]

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632

Some interesting stuff: The technology to have minigames playable while the game loads was patented and blocked unused by the fucks at Bandai Namco until 2015. It is mostly redundant now since games on an SSD load fast as fuck and you can just alt tab and browse the net on a modern system when you encounter one of the few games that loads long. But it sure would have been nice if this wasnt patent trolled.

Fuck the modern patent laws. Cant wait for the sphere grid patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020198046 from FFX to expire so people can start to innovate on this amazing system without fear of getting sued by Square.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Gothic I only had loading screens when you got in and out of mines and even then it was short.

I am OK with smartly hidden loading screen : Mass Effect party banters in the lift, Alpha Protocol “door closed behind you and this door will only open in 2 seconds” etc ...

 

[J1M]

Sphere grid doesn't look any different than Path of Exile or Wolcen.

 

[Butter]

Sphere grid doesn't look any different than Path of Exile or Wolcen.

Sphere grid requires you to spend different spheres of varying rarity, like Power Spheres and Ability Spheres. It also has different level locks and Teleportation Spheres, and the party-based nature of the game influences the player's strategy for trying to cover all bases.

 

[Thac0]

Sphere grid doesn't look any different than Path of Exile or Wolcen.

Have played neither of those two, but on the sphere grid you have to place in spheres to unlock the nodes. You get the spheres as loot from enemies or from chests and side quests. There are a lot of sphere types which do more interesting stuff than just unlock a node, like unlocking a completely new section on the board or eliminating a stat node, or replace an empty node with a stat node of your choice. All of your party members are on the same grid and there are spheres that make one jump to the position of the other or unlock a node that someone else has already connected and this character has no connection to yet. There is a lot in there that could be expanded upon.

 

[Fedora Master]

The last couple of years have shown that technology doesn't make people more creative, it makes them lazy. Devs, especially multi-platform devs, will always find stupid uses for larger storage space and faster HDDs.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

This is one of the reasons I still play games from the 8 & 16-bit eras. No load, no faff.

On cartridge systems yes, there is no faff. But the minute you switch to a magnetic media (disk or tape) then the loading times pile up.

Loading a game from tape could take as long as 11 minutes, where the user would be forced to stare at a static screen with the only animations reserved for presenting the loading. (Even then it was possible that each level needed to be loaded seperately after the game itself had loaded.) The C-64 found a brilliant solution to this by not only coming up with the FastLoader system, which loaded up tape games at double or triple the normal speed, but also by introducing Loader Songs (Ocean Software were good with those) and even mini-games to play while loading!

Floppy disks cut down the loading times severely. A 30-second loading time to boot up the game was the norm, and any loading needed afterwards would only need about 5 seconds or so. Hard drives cut this down even further. Switching floors on Eye of the Beholder could take as much as 8 seconds on a standard IBM-PC compatible in 1990. (Doing the same on an EGA-based system with Eye of the Beholder 2 took 30 seconds!) One of the biggest flaws I've found with the Amiga are the abnormally long loading times.

Check out this demo from 1990. Spot all the 'interludes'.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i find your lack of half-life disturbing.

but anyway, 16bit and old consoles did this all the time. we're in this shitty situation today because we developed only graphics.

 

[Falksi]

This is one of the reasons I still play games from the 8 & 16-bit eras. No load, no faff.

On cartridge systems yes, there is no faff. But the minute you switch to a magnetic media (disk or tape) then the loading times pile up.

Loading a game from tape could take as long as 11 minutes, where the user would be forced to stare at a static screen with the only animations reserved for presenting the loading. (Even then it was possible that each level needed to be loaded seperately after the game itself had loaded.) The C-64 found a brilliant solution to this by not only coming up with the FastLoader system, which loaded up tape games at double or triple the normal speed, but also by introducing Loader Songs (Ocean Software were good with those) and even mini-games to play while loading!

Floppy disks cut down the loading times severely. A 30-second loading time to boot up the game was the norm, and any loading needed afterwards would only need about 5 seconds or so. Hard drives cut this down even further. Switching floors on Eye of the Beholder could take as much as 8 seconds on a standard IBM-PC compatible in 1990. (Doing the same on an EGA-based system with Eye of the Beholder 2 took 30 seconds!) One of the biggest flaws I've found with the Amiga are the abnormally long loading times.

Check out this demo from 1990. Spot all the 'interludes'.

Yeah, I should have specified 8-16 bit consoles.

 

[vortex]

No loading screens for Unreal 5 confirmed. We still have to wait for it until next year. Despair.

 

[Arbiter]

No loading screens for Unreal 5 confirmed. We still have to wait for it until next year. Despair.

I believe that this is a feature of PlayStation 5, not the Unreal Engine: a custom SSD with 5 GB/s transfer rate or 9 GB/s of compressed data.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Kingmaker's throne room.

 

[Burning Bridges]

If you are like loading screens try to connect to GTA Online. Takes 5 minutes or so on a PC that need 8 seconds to boot Windows.

 

[Excommunicator]

Afaik Gothic 3 was the first open world RPG without a single loading screen. From the first second in the game you could go absolutely anywhere in the world, with zero loading. Not even fast travel used loading screens, the game only kindda froze for two seconds. Plus the graphics looked better than Skyrim that came out 5 years later.

The only small downside was only like 70% of the game was actually finished.

Gothic 3 had PAINFUL loading screens when you actually loaded a game though. Literally up to 5 minutes of loading at a time.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Gothic 3 was a technical disaster because its engine wasn't written while the devs were high on ELEX.