Is anyone else completely over this tedious shite?
I understand the cases where it’s used to hide the fact that the game is loading in the next section of the level, but surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.
Regardless, it’s almost never the case that these shimmy squeezes have anything to do with slowing the player down for under-the-hood reasons (think of games like Sekiro, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed or Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order). They’re apparently there to provide the player with ‘gameplay’, I guess because they’re free gamey gameplay shit that you can just pepper into a level randomly to embloaten the experience a little.
It’s like a dog bowl with lots of nooks and crannies in it, designed to make the dog eat slower, but is presented as “enrichment”. I’m not a colicky dog and the rest of the game is providing ample enrichment, thanks. It would be even more enriching if you’d stop interrupting me to make me walk sideways through a fucking bookcase.
One problem I have with this trend is that squeezing through a gap or running down a artificially long corridor will always take the same amount of time.
A loading screen only takes as long as it needs, meaning that the gameplay interruption shortens with better / newer hardware.
One amazing thing about playing 20-30 year old games is that they have practically no load times anymore. Squeezefests like the FF7 Remake will always stay a slog, even when your fridge can run it in 20 years time.
Good point about hardware upgrades, though it doesn’t work for consoles where the hardware will never change.
It’s a difficult problem because it spans multiple domains: part of it is gameplay mechanics (players often get power ups that make them move faster, which could make the same corridor take 10s or 2s), part of it is level design (the layout of the building in the story is compact, but two adjacent rooms both need a lot of content or have complex set pieces), and part of it is artists intention (they want you to feel claustrophobic or like your character is taking an unintended route, which an arbitrarily long hallway wouldn’t convey).
Something related that games used to do (more than they do now) that no one ever complained about were points of no return. Your character would drop down a ledge that they couldn’t climb back up, or they’d walk into a room and the door behind them would lock or debris would fall and block the path. This served a similar purpose: to bar the player from backtracking so they could unload unused assets. I guess it was just a more subtle method of misdirection, people never complained. The sideways slow shimmy is just so in-your-face without anything else to misdirect that it’s become a meme.
Consoles tend to be backwards compatible to an extend and often even come with an inbuilt emulator for older games. You can play the first Zelda on the Switch.
Bloodborne had load times up to a minute on vanilla PS4, around 25 sec on PS4 Pro and around 15 sec on PS5.
Imagine they had you squeeze through a gap for 60 seconds to hide that load. Even a 30 second squeeze would have handicapped both Pro and PS5.
There’s a video on YouTube showing a breakdown of the level streaming in The new resident evil game and it’s clever because it’s just hidden by doors and corners.
I think games use a lot more level streaming the people realise and yeah it absolutely doesn’t need to be a narrow passageway.
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You would rather see a loading screen every 40ft than have them hide asset streaming?
Yes it’s overused, but that just means they need to get a bit more clever with their slow-downs. I would take them over a loading screen any day.
One problem I have with this trend is that squeezing through a gap or running down a artificially long corridor will always take the same amount of time.
A loading screen only takes as long as it needs, meaning that the gameplay interruption shortens with better / newer hardware.
One amazing thing about playing 20-30 year old games is that they have practically no load times anymore. Squeezefests like the FF7 Remake will always stay a slog, even when your fridge can run it in 20 years time.
Good point about hardware upgrades, though it doesn’t work for consoles where the hardware will never change.
It’s a difficult problem because it spans multiple domains: part of it is gameplay mechanics (players often get power ups that make them move faster, which could make the same corridor take 10s or 2s), part of it is level design (the layout of the building in the story is compact, but two adjacent rooms both need a lot of content or have complex set pieces), and part of it is artists intention (they want you to feel claustrophobic or like your character is taking an unintended route, which an arbitrarily long hallway wouldn’t convey).
Something related that games used to do (more than they do now) that no one ever complained about were points of no return. Your character would drop down a ledge that they couldn’t climb back up, or they’d walk into a room and the door behind them would lock or debris would fall and block the path. This served a similar purpose: to bar the player from backtracking so they could unload unused assets. I guess it was just a more subtle method of misdirection, people never complained. The sideways slow shimmy is just so in-your-face without anything else to misdirect that it’s become a meme.
Consoles tend to be backwards compatible to an extend and often even come with an inbuilt emulator for older games. You can play the first Zelda on the Switch.
Bloodborne had load times up to a minute on vanilla PS4, around 25 sec on PS4 Pro and around 15 sec on PS5.
Imagine they had you squeeze through a gap for 60 seconds to hide that load. Even a 30 second squeeze would have handicapped both Pro and PS5.
There’s a video on YouTube showing a breakdown of the level streaming in The new resident evil game and it’s clever because it’s just hidden by doors and corners.
I think games use a lot more level streaming the people realise and yeah it absolutely doesn’t need to be a narrow passageway.