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.
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.
You may have had your fill of shimmying on a ledge, but have you had your fill of shimmying on a ledge, and then a rock slips and you need to frantically press X?
My theory is that today’s load times are the Xbox 360 era of graphics. Wait let me explain.
When the 360/PS3 came out, graphics were suddenly really good. But the industry didn’t just want really good graphics, they wanted cinematic photorealism right now and the 360/PS3 weren’t good enough for that.
So, we got many games in that generation full of brown filters, blurring, lens flares, and bloom effects in order to hide the fact that games still had visible polygons. They looked worse for it.
Today, load times are pretty small. But the industry wants load times to be non-existent right now, so they’re using all of these scripted sequences to hide it. I suspect that, in hindsight, people will say that a lot of games from this generation had poor level design because of it. I definitely think that a lot of 360 games look bad because of their “cinematic” visual effects.
How did Sekiro get roped into this? I mean, sure it has ledge shimmying; but it’s pretty much optional, except in the tutorial where it’s needed to reach the kid the first time and then at the big snake for like a second before getting into the sedan.
I was always under the impression that these were here specifically because loading screens broke immersion and were just as disruptive. And honestly I prefer it over a loading screen myself. God of War 2018 was one continuous camera shot with fade-to-white only when fast-travelling, it was immersive as fuck. And that was only possible because it wasn’t chucking a loading screen in my face every time an area loaded.
If they’re only there to bloat playtime they can get fucked, for sure, but I am a sucker for immersion.
Yeah I mean does anyone really want every game to become fallout? It is unbelievably irritating having to redo a level that has like six loading zones within 2 minutes.
This is something i like about No Mans Sky. The loading screens are masked as light-speed jumps and it works really well. I wish they had like 2 or 3 other animations sequences though.
It’s also what elite dangerous does when travelling between star systems. If you actually fly over to a system (it takes forever but there are a few star systems that are close enough to each other that you can actually legitimately do that within a couple of hours) it doesn’t work because you skipped the loading zone. You just end up in empty space where they should be a star. But if you then jump to it, suddenly there’s a star even though your coordinates are exactly the same.
I was always under the impression that these were here specifically because loading screens broke immersion and were just as disruptive.
This is especially infuriating when you’re playing on a PS5 where there shouldn’t be a need for a loading screen but the game is cross platform and they need to design them into the levels because PC and PS4 need them.
See my other post. A PC is a general purpose machine designed to be modular, this comes at a pretty significant cost in performance. Everything in technology is a trade-off, nothing comes for free.
A PS5 may use the same x86 architecture but the system architecture is not the same as a generic PC. It’s not that a PS5 punches above its weight, it’s actually the other way around: PC’s perform relatively poorly considering their specs. For example: the ability to replace the GPU comes at a massive cost in performance. PCs make up for this somewhat with sheer brute force. A purpose-built machine will always be more efficient.
You do realise the PS5 is just a computer chip right you can get the same graphics card that’s in the PS5 (don’t because you can get better ones now). I know all the marketing was about how amazing it was but honestly much of that came from the fact that it was finally using an SSD rather than their stupid old HDDs which were obsolete even for the PS4
The user is correct in that the modularity of a home PC is not the most efficient way for the electronics to communicate, and therefore some performance is lost.
I would also point out that while a PS5 has known, defined specs that a developer can plan for, a PC could be pretty much any specs. And while yes the dev can state a minimum spec requirement, but if they are launching on PC they are going to want to target a wide audience.
LOL, What do I know right. I only have a degree in computer engineering and 20 years of experience as a software engineer. It’s not like I write GPU code for a living…. oh wait, I do.
The God of War reboot released on the PS4, where it also “didn’t need” loading screens.
The PS5 does still need some time to load anything, it’s not magic. You can expand a PS5 with M.2 NVMe storage, which is also used in many PCs.
The benefits of the PS5/NVMe storage are greatly reduced loading times and faster data streaming (which enables, for example, the ability to move faster through a higher fidelity NYC in Spiderman without buildings visibly popping in).
The PS5 does still need some time to load anything, it’s not magic.
It’s not magic, it’s engineering. Games specifically designed for the PS5 can pretty much load instantly. It’s not just the SSDs raw bandwidth. The SSD controller plays a huge role. It can decompress data as it’s loading from the SSD, effectively acting as a bandwidth multiplier. It also communicates directly with the GPU cache.
Remember that PCs are held back by their modular architecture. To allow for an interchangeable GPU it needs to be on a PCIe card with its own separate VRAM. This all comes at a huge performance penalty. Data needs to be copied over the slow PCIe bus to the VRAM before it can be accessed by the GPU. On a PS5 with its unified memory architecture everything is immediately usable once it hits the system RAM. This is a massive advantage when streaming assets.
The big difference is latency. Not how much data it can load per second, but the time between starting a load and the data actually being available. Sony spent a lot of effort in getting this as short as possible throwing a lot of purpose-designed hardware at it. Something you can’t do in a PC because it’s a general purpose machine.
Another huge factor is that every PS5 has the same minimum performance level. The fact that you have a super fast SSD is meaningless because the game has to be designed to work with the crappiest spinning rust HDD that meets the minimum system requirements. So while a PS5 may not be as fast as the best PC that can run the game, it is much faster than the crappiest PC that can run the game, so the developers can optimize for a much faster machine than they can when they have to take into account that crappy low-end PC that has to be able to run it.
what pissed me off about Jedi fallen order was when they would put in an elevator to hide a loading screen, and then when you got to the end it would still stutter for a couple seconds to finish loading. don’t make the elevator a real fixed distance dumbass, just make it a looping animation that continues arbitrarily until the loading is completely done
It depends on how it’s done, and what’s important to the game, if you can do this. If you can see outside the elevator, it obviously has to be really moving a fixed distance. Also, if you’re supposed to know the height you moved it needs to be fixed, so the experience conveys that. The key is to just make it as long as, or longer, than your longest expected load time, or make the door stay closed until it’s done.
For an example, Dark Souls 1 has to have fixed length elevators. The length is totally tied to the physical world. If it changed length to suit loading times, it’d throw off your sense of where you are. Dark Souls 2, many of the elevators are just trying to convey a sense of traveling, not a specific amount of it. The world is abstract, and the transitions are more about a feeling than the actual physical scale. (These two use the exact same system though obviously, but it’s a good example of different goals.)
One thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there’s no guarantee that — especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers — the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.
Static loading screens don’t have this problem.
I kind of like Fallout 4’s approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It’ll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there’s something the player can fiddle with for a few seconds.
Ridge Racer back in the day had you play Galaga while it loaded. Namco patented it tho, so nobody else ever did it. (the patent has since lapsed, but it’s still not being done by anyone :()
Besides masking loading, I think these are put in to break the pace in games. If all you’re doing is going from one fight to the next, your mind is a bit too locked in. Climbing is less effort on your mind, without making you pay attention to story.
I also found in games like Expedition 33, they help make the world feel more alive if you’re clambering through low caverns and climbing up cliffs. The way the verticality lends to better vistas is itself pretty valuable.
I like them. Even if it doesn’t hide a loading screen in a specific instance, as others have pointed out, it breaks up the pace. It’s never very long and usually it makes me focus on some art, animation or music that I hadn’t noticed or was taking for granted. It usually lasts a very small amount of time. I think our attention spans have just shrunk so much.
Walking sideways through a bookcase, crack in the wall, crevasse, is often to mask a load screen, as you suspect. I forget who coined it, but someone online observed that these are literally “load-bearing walls”, and I’ve been calling them that ever since. In the case of Assassin’s Creed, there used to be sort of a puzzle of “how do I get from here to there with only those observable handholds?” Perhaps that eroded over time as the series went on. The last one I finished was Unity, and I sampled Odyssey, but that wasn’t a very vertical climbing game. Assassin’s Creed came from Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell roots, one of which retains that traversal puzzle, and the other is a stealth game, where you have to get from one place to other either without touching the ground or without being in the light. I would argue Hitman’s ledge-climbing fits the same bill that stealth games always have, so it’s not out of place there. I can’t speak to Sekiro or Jedi.
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Time to barrel, sewer counter, squeeze score, etc
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.
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.
Oh, you’d love the Hololive game I played recently. You shimmy along the wall, sure, but you shimmy as a temporary 2D image projected onto the wall.
No not me. I love stealth mechanics.
You may have had your fill of shimmying on a ledge, but have you had your fill of shimmying on a ledge, and then a rock slips and you need to frantically press X?
My theory is that today’s load times are the Xbox 360 era of graphics. Wait let me explain.
When the 360/PS3 came out, graphics were suddenly really good. But the industry didn’t just want really good graphics, they wanted cinematic photorealism right now and the 360/PS3 weren’t good enough for that.
So, we got many games in that generation full of brown filters, blurring, lens flares, and bloom effects in order to hide the fact that games still had visible polygons. They looked worse for it.
Today, load times are pretty small. But the industry wants load times to be non-existent right now, so they’re using all of these scripted sequences to hide it. I suspect that, in hindsight, people will say that a lot of games from this generation had poor level design because of it. I definitely think that a lot of 360 games look bad because of their “cinematic” visual effects.
How did Sekiro get roped into this? I mean, sure it has ledge shimmying; but it’s pretty much optional, except in the tutorial where it’s needed to reach the kid the first time and then at the big snake for like a second before getting into the sedan.
I’m a couple of hours into the last of us 2, and I have already edged through a bunch of cracks. And done the ledge thing too. I don’t hate it.
I was always under the impression that these were here specifically because loading screens broke immersion and were just as disruptive. And honestly I prefer it over a loading screen myself. God of War 2018 was one continuous camera shot with fade-to-white only when fast-travelling, it was immersive as fuck. And that was only possible because it wasn’t chucking a loading screen in my face every time an area loaded.
If they’re only there to bloat playtime they can get fucked, for sure, but I am a sucker for immersion.
Yeah I mean does anyone really want every game to become fallout? It is unbelievably irritating having to redo a level that has like six loading zones within 2 minutes.
Tbf, a lot of games with loading screens aren’t as bad as Fallout and co.
Bethesda is just inept.
This is something i like about No Mans Sky. The loading screens are masked as light-speed jumps and it works really well. I wish they had like 2 or 3 other animations sequences though.
It’s also what elite dangerous does when travelling between star systems. If you actually fly over to a system (it takes forever but there are a few star systems that are close enough to each other that you can actually legitimately do that within a couple of hours) it doesn’t work because you skipped the loading zone. You just end up in empty space where they should be a star. But if you then jump to it, suddenly there’s a star even though your coordinates are exactly the same.
This is especially infuriating when you’re playing on a PS5 where there shouldn’t be a need for a loading screen but the game is cross platform and they need to design them into the levels because PC and PS4 need them.
Why would you think that a PC would need a loading screen when a PS5 doesn’t…? You are aware a PS5 is just an underpowered PC these days right?
See my other post. A PC is a general purpose machine designed to be modular, this comes at a pretty significant cost in performance. Everything in technology is a trade-off, nothing comes for free.
A PS5 may use the same x86 architecture but the system architecture is not the same as a generic PC. It’s not that a PS5 punches above its weight, it’s actually the other way around: PC’s perform relatively poorly considering their specs. For example: the ability to replace the GPU comes at a massive cost in performance. PCs make up for this somewhat with sheer brute force. A purpose-built machine will always be more efficient.
You do realise the PS5 is just a computer chip right you can get the same graphics card that’s in the PS5 (don’t because you can get better ones now). I know all the marketing was about how amazing it was but honestly much of that came from the fact that it was finally using an SSD rather than their stupid old HDDs which were obsolete even for the PS4
lol I don’t know if this is supposed to be a bit or just a deep misunderstanding of how computers work.
The user is correct in that the modularity of a home PC is not the most efficient way for the electronics to communicate, and therefore some performance is lost.
I would also point out that while a PS5 has known, defined specs that a developer can plan for, a PC could be pretty much any specs. And while yes the dev can state a minimum spec requirement, but if they are launching on PC they are going to want to target a wide audience.
LOL, What do I know right. I only have a degree in computer engineering and 20 years of experience as a software engineer. It’s not like I write GPU code for a living…. oh wait, I do.
The God of War reboot released on the PS4, where it also “didn’t need” loading screens.
The PS5 does still need some time to load anything, it’s not magic. You can expand a PS5 with M.2 NVMe storage, which is also used in many PCs.
The benefits of the PS5/NVMe storage are greatly reduced loading times and faster data streaming (which enables, for example, the ability to move faster through a higher fidelity NYC in Spiderman without buildings visibly popping in).
It’s not magic, it’s engineering. Games specifically designed for the PS5 can pretty much load instantly. It’s not just the SSDs raw bandwidth. The SSD controller plays a huge role. It can decompress data as it’s loading from the SSD, effectively acting as a bandwidth multiplier. It also communicates directly with the GPU cache.
Remember that PCs are held back by their modular architecture. To allow for an interchangeable GPU it needs to be on a PCIe card with its own separate VRAM. This all comes at a huge performance penalty. Data needs to be copied over the slow PCIe bus to the VRAM before it can be accessed by the GPU. On a PS5 with its unified memory architecture everything is immediately usable once it hits the system RAM. This is a massive advantage when streaming assets.
The big difference is latency. Not how much data it can load per second, but the time between starting a load and the data actually being available. Sony spent a lot of effort in getting this as short as possible throwing a lot of purpose-designed hardware at it. Something you can’t do in a PC because it’s a general purpose machine.
Another huge factor is that every PS5 has the same minimum performance level. The fact that you have a super fast SSD is meaningless because the game has to be designed to work with the crappiest spinning rust HDD that meets the minimum system requirements. So while a PS5 may not be as fast as the best PC that can run the game, it is much faster than the crappiest PC that can run the game, so the developers can optimize for a much faster machine than they can when they have to take into account that crappy low-end PC that has to be able to run it.
what pissed me off about Jedi fallen order was when they would put in an elevator to hide a loading screen, and then when you got to the end it would still stutter for a couple seconds to finish loading. don’t make the elevator a real fixed distance dumbass, just make it a looping animation that continues arbitrarily until the loading is completely done
It depends on how it’s done, and what’s important to the game, if you can do this. If you can see outside the elevator, it obviously has to be really moving a fixed distance. Also, if you’re supposed to know the height you moved it needs to be fixed, so the experience conveys that. The key is to just make it as long as, or longer, than your longest expected load time, or make the door stay closed until it’s done.
For an example, Dark Souls 1 has to have fixed length elevators. The length is totally tied to the physical world. If it changed length to suit loading times, it’d throw off your sense of where you are. Dark Souls 2, many of the elevators are just trying to convey a sense of traveling, not a specific amount of it. The world is abstract, and the transitions are more about a feeling than the actual physical scale. (These two use the exact same system though obviously, but it’s a good example of different goals.)
Fuck, even fallout 4 got that right lol
I mean, it’s a AAA game. I’m sure that was the plan, and then it was lost in the eternal crunch to meet the launch date.
There’s a reason AAA games all have that same shitty stank, and it’s not because the companies making them don’t have access to talented people.
I like that Dunkey’s running joke is if it has some cave you need to squeeze into then that’s how you know it’s a AAA game
One thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there’s no guarantee that — especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers — the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.
Static loading screens don’t have this problem.
I kind of like Fallout 4’s approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It’ll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there’s something the player can fiddle with for a few seconds.
Ridge Racer back in the day had you play Galaga while it loaded. Namco patented it tho, so nobody else ever did it. (the patent has since lapsed, but it’s still not being done by anyone :()
Skyrim and fallout 4 def have my favorite loading screens
Besides masking loading, I think these are put in to break the pace in games. If all you’re doing is going from one fight to the next, your mind is a bit too locked in. Climbing is less effort on your mind, without making you pay attention to story.
I also found in games like Expedition 33, they help make the world feel more alive if you’re clambering through low caverns and climbing up cliffs. The way the verticality lends to better vistas is itself pretty valuable.
I like them. Even if it doesn’t hide a loading screen in a specific instance, as others have pointed out, it breaks up the pace. It’s never very long and usually it makes me focus on some art, animation or music that I hadn’t noticed or was taking for granted. It usually lasts a very small amount of time. I think our attention spans have just shrunk so much.
Walking sideways through a bookcase, crack in the wall, crevasse, is often to mask a load screen, as you suspect. I forget who coined it, but someone online observed that these are literally “load-bearing walls”, and I’ve been calling them that ever since. In the case of Assassin’s Creed, there used to be sort of a puzzle of “how do I get from here to there with only those observable handholds?” Perhaps that eroded over time as the series went on. The last one I finished was Unity, and I sampled Odyssey, but that wasn’t a very vertical climbing game. Assassin’s Creed came from Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell roots, one of which retains that traversal puzzle, and the other is a stealth game, where you have to get from one place to other either without touching the ground or without being in the light. I would argue Hitman’s ledge-climbing fits the same bill that stealth games always have, so it’s not out of place there. I can’t speak to Sekiro or Jedi.