An ode to load screens—just in time for the Xbox Series X and PS5 to render them obsolete
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In 1998, video game company Namco was granted a patent on technology allowing a small “auxiliary game program code” to run alongside the “main-game program code” to avoid an “unnecessary wastage of time.” In more human terms, this meant Namco—and only Namco—could put minigames on its loading screens, which usually took the form of retro arcade titles that you could screw around with for a minute while Ridge Racer on the PlayStation loaded up. Loading screens were pretty new to video games at that point, and Twitter hadn’t been invented yet, so easing players into this dark new future by giving them something to do was brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that it became irritating when games got more and more complex and companies were barred from doing anything fun with their expanding loading screens because of Namco’s patent.
Finally, in 2015, the patent expired. The door was now open for companies to come up with fun auxiliary game program codes to help you avoid an unnecessary wastage of time while your main-game program code loaded in. Nobody really ended up doing it, but now, five years later, the whole thing has been rendered pointless because the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have effectively killed video game loading screens. (The A.V. Club was able to review the systems on pre-release firmware, with some games not-yet optimized for the new platforms.) We’d say “rest in peace,” but loading screens aren’t really gone. They’ve just been rendered so irrelevant by the power of these new consoles that it’s weird to see how much time is still being spent on making them seem like they’re not an unnecessary wastage of time.
For example, a relatively new trick that games have been pulling to mask loading screens is having your character crawl through a tight spot or push open a heavy door before proceeding. These generally take direct control away from the player for a more cinematic camera angle, and when you get the door open or pass through the tight spot, you’re in a new place. Gears 5, one of the games that Microsoft optimized for the Series X, pulls that trick a lot, and now that they’re not wholly necessary, it’s jarring to see how common they are—especially when the game doesn’t completely keep up with how fast the console itself is moving. While reviewing the Xbox Series X hardware, we noticed several instances where the lighting of an area in Gears 5 would completely change after, say, crawling under a tree branch, simply because the transition was happening so fast that the game didn’t have a chance to hide it, thereby rendering the whole “crawling under a tree branch” sequence meaningless. Here’s an example of a character climbing down a high ledge and then appearing in a totally different place:
The other way that developers have been avoiding time wastage on loading screens is by stuffing them with cool art or helpful tips. Yakuza: Like A Dragon, the new role-playing game spin-off of Sega’s long-running beat-’em-up series does this to give backstory on characters or a brief synopsis of the plot, and on some loading screens it shows cool 8-bit sprites of your party as a nod to the game’s RPG inspirations. The only issue is that running even the Xbox One version of Like A Dragon on a Series X speeds the loading up so much that you rarely, if ever, get to see that stuff. Here’s a loading screen that went by so quickly that it didn’t fully appear:
Destiny 2, which has lately been one of the absolute worst games for an unnecessary wastage of time (but enough about the game’s oppressive grind—hey-oh!), is also benefitting from the increased power of the next-gen systems. The game often requires players to hop from one planet to another, which would require loading new planets, which used to mean sitting and watching a picture of a spaceship for minutes at a time. You could unlock different spaceships to look at, but they served no purpose beyond that. At some point, the developers at Bungie did add helpful tips like other games have, but you’re still just… looking at a spaceship. Now, though, before Destiny 2’s next big update hits (which is supposed to streamline everything), the transition between planets is so fast that it’s possible you won’t get sick of looking at your spaceship. As anyone who has spent time with Destiny 2 can attest: That’s wild.
We have yet to reach a point where developers are actively making new games that exclusively run on the new systems and take advantage of every advancement they have to offer, but it’s safe to assume that loading screens are going to start to look different from now on. Will developers stop putting in the effort and just put up a black screen for a few seconds? Will they come up with more gimmicks like the old “high ledge/tight squeeze” move? Either way, load screens as we knew them are effectively dead, and it’s very… not “sad,” that’s too far. What do you call the feeling when something goes away that was always kind of a nuisance but was never actively bad, and also it was around for so long that you just accepted it anyway? It’s that. Not “rest in peace,” just “okay, see ya.”
41 Comments
Ya know, quick loading games? Effing awesome.But, I gotta ask, miles morales spider-man loads in 15 seconds. So “quick resume”, game loads in 15 seconds. What, exactly, is quick resume? Can switch games instantly, but spider-man take 15 seconds to load? So, I mean. . .
You’re measuring two different things: time to load from the game’s main menu, and time to load from the Xbox dashboard.
I am not.I’m kind of a judge, i wanna hear load times. Everything.
You are. 15 seconds for Spider-man to load means from the time you select the option to start the game from the game’s main menu. It assumes you’ve already loaded up the game’s menu. 15 seconds to load a quick resume game is from the dashboard, or from within another game. You get to skip the whole “loading up the game and clicking through the opening menus” step. In either case, 15 seconds is a huge improvement.
LOL, you think loading screens are going away? I doubt it. Instead like all new fast tech, coders are going to just get more lazy and optimize stuff less.
This isn’t an issue with coding and “optimization.” We’re no longer reliant on on disc/had drive media, SSDs have faster load times period, this isn’t even new you got faster load times if you swapped out your standard HD for an SSD on your PS4 and well PC users have known this for a decade now. The media we’re playing games off is just NATURALLY faster, there isn’t some secret thing programmers need to tap into.
I have been a console and PC gamer for a long ass time and every time something new comes by that will “drastically increase load times”, it does it for older software but then new software comes in and the coders just realize that they don’t need to work as hard to get games to load at the rates people were use to.
Except we’ve already seen games load faster on SSDs with “new software” for the last 10 years, on average usually at half the time or better, and SSDs are only getting faster.Like you’ve already been proven wrong, games with longer load times like Witcher 3 loaded faster on SSD right off the gate, no patches, no optimizationIt’s like you don’t understand the underlying mechanics here. What you’re saying is basically the equivalent of “maybe a Ferrari will be faster than a Pinto one day, IF the engineers can optimize it.”
That still doesn’t solve the problem of long downloads, installs, and running out of hard drive space.
Yah let’s bring up things we weren’t even talking about….
The only thing lazy is the childish assumption that game developers are lazy.
We don’t think game developers are lazy, we think coders are lazy.
It’s not even laziness, honestly. It’s that devs and coders will frequently find themselves testing the limits of hardware even as those limits are expanded. You see this in every generation, the first few games for a new console aren’t *that* radically different from what came before but at the end of the generation they’ve figured out all sorts of bizarre tricks. (Compare Super Mario World to Yoshi’s Island, they’re both excellent games but the latter is full of amazing technical stuff.) Design expands to fill the space.I can def. see a number of games sticking with near-instant loading, but I can also see some studios saying “well if we sacrifice this we can do X which is what’s really gonna be the selling point.”
THIS! I’ve never worked in development, and I’ve only learned enough HTML and Java to really screw things up. But for a couple of years I worked for a company that was developing some online platforms for various customers, and I happened to sit next to the developers, so I could hear the sort of things they had to deal with. When people say “the devs are lazy” they really should be saying “the product manager told the devs to prioritize something else” or “upper management wouldn’t hire enough devs / offshored too much of the workload”. The Devs themselves are generally busting their ass trying to deal with ever changing product requirements.
I have developer friends who tell me that, since there’s always something to do, when something just “works” at the minimum required spec, they leave it at that and move on to the next requirement. So yes, they’re lazy, in that it’s not standard to go optimizing more than they’re asked for (even if there’s ample room to do so), but also, no, as they usually can’t afford to dedicate more than their time & resources budgets allow and still expect to deliver in shape and form.
I have developer friends who tell me that, since there’s always something to do, when something just “works” at the minimum required spec, they leave it at that and move on to the next requirement. So yes, they’re lazyWhat you are describing is not a lazy person. It’s an overworked person.Lazy people don’t work 60+ hour weeks for months at a time so you can have your toys.
I’m just describing the 2 sides of the coin, as it very much makes sense to me how they may be perceived like that. Also, don’t pull shaming on me for looking forward to the end product. If anything, blame it on the project’s management for setting unrealistic goals, not the end user.
The fact that you’re trying to “both sides” such an obviously cynical and childish statement as “game devs are lazy” tells me you could do with a little shame.
The only lazy one is Batman, taking his SWEET ASS TIME moving that light aluminum air vent.
It’s less about optimization and more about total content. Load times exist because there is a lot of stuff to do. Load up terrain, textures, loading save state data, etc. As overall technology improves, the amount the devs/programmers can do with it increases. The amount of details in the textures will increase, the view distance will increase, the amount of characters on screen will increase, etc. Eventually that really fast load time will slow back down again as they push the limits of the tech. It’s cyclical, and any long time gamer can remember the cycle if they think back. With every generational leap things got way faster and more impressive…and then they slowed back down till the next leap.
I’ve started using the idea of load screens while running D&D groups with friends on Roll 20. Instead of just sitting on a map screen for days-on-end, I’ve added a few “load screen” slides so that, when describing a new location or chatting about expansive setting-based ideas, the art does half the work of setting the atmosphere for me. Bonus points when I’m running a published module and can use artwork pertaining specifically to the adventure.
You’re almost describing the feeling of ‘clueyness,’ the phrase coined by the amazing Wait But Why blogger.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/05/clueyness-a-weird-kind-of-sad.html
That was a great read, thank you.
Are you saying that Doom and Elderscrolls games will actually load instantly and not take a hundred years?
Oh you failed one of the suit upgrade challenges? You can try again in 4 minutes, Slayer!
My question is, will the new SSD tech improve Destiny’s menu screens? I’ve gotten back into it in anticipation of Beyond Light and the huge pause you have to account for every time you need to pull up your inventory is galling.
Actually one of the reasons I eventually gave it up. Even after upgrading my ps4 hard drive its was just silly. I do miss it tho and may just return for Beyond Light.
I always kind of liked the historical trivia on the Assassin’s Creed load screens. Never really got why your characters could run around in them, though. I guess it helped the time pass.I remember “No Load Screens” being a big deal for the first God of War. True, there little-to-no load screens – but you had to run down a lot of long, featureless hallways while the game fetched the next area.
I remember feeling stupid for not realizing it at first but also very impressed when I discovered that the random tunnels you would come across in Metroid Prime were deliberately designed to be winding and with dozens of little annoying enemies slowing down your progress to help mask loading.
No kidding, doing the run around the bi-frost was fun, but it was definitely a loading screen that still let you run around.
Assassin’s Creed’s historical facts help out with the wait, but damn are their loads some of the longer ones out there. This franchise will need the quick feature more than anything else I play.
Also, a full gen before God of War, I couldn’t recall any loading screens in Metal Gear Solid.
MGS hid load times behind 32-minute cutscenes
As a software developer, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Loading data from disk to memory has nothing to do with “code optimizations”.
Nobody really ended up doing it, but now, five years later, the whole thing has been rendered pointless because the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have effectively killed video game loading screens.Yeah, sure.
I think loading screens will be shorter for a bit, but they’ll probably grow again as time goes on, and I definitely think it won’t be going away. I play games on both a ps4 (mainly) and a gaming pc with a very fast SSD (Samsung M.2, I forget the exact model but starts with a 9), and while yeah the PC loads games very fast, I definitely still see loading screens, and some games have loading screens that last a few minutes despite the crazy speed of the SSD.Plus there’s the fact that games will just grow into the new hardware. They’ll start including higher res textures, more complex models – games will get bigger and bigger as they always have. Surely, my PC can load the original 90’s Doom (assuming it would load at all on a modern os, I’ve never looked) faster than the eye can blink, but that’s not the kind of game I’m playing anymore.Then there are online games where loading screens also take into account connecting to servers and matchmaking and not just streaming textures and whatnot from storage.
Cartridges still faster. Save us, Nintendo!
I want to play Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero now, not in three minutes!
I’m giving it two, maybe three years before we’re back to getting load screens long enough for two tips to go by.There is literally zero chance that AAA developers don’t look at the ‘no more loading screens’ bullet point as anything but an excuse to make their games load more things. It’s like how advancements in storage sizes didn’t mean you could fit more games onto a hard drive; it just meant that developers made their games bigger.
Sometimes, loading screens weren’t so bad…
Truth is, as much work as some devs put into load screens I won’t be sorry to see them go.
The biggest tragedy comedy in the world of loading screens is definitely The Bouncer. I watched a Let’s Play on Youtube due to my Square Enix obsession and the game’s rarity (one of the main characters may have been a design base for Sora from Kingdom Hearts, so I of course had to learn all about him). For some reason, Square Enix decided to put not just trivia, but plot-relevant info in the loading screens. For example, the entire past relationship between two characters (which turns out to be highly important depending on which route you play) is confined to loading screens like the one I attached. There’s no in-game flashback or anything. You just have to be fast enough to read the info, or you’re screwed. I was watching a video, so I could thankfully pause and read at my leisure, but I can imagine how irritating this must have been in the Days Before Youtube.