Rant and Rave: Loading screens

[Evonisia]

I think they've only gotten better, of course you'll get a few exceptions every once in a while.

Though I agree with your example, Skyrim seems to have longer loading screens than Oblivion (have both on PC) which baffled me but it wasn't too long. Of course it's balanced by Oblivion occasionally pausing the game for two seconds to load in a third of the world.

Silent Hill 2 slaps a loading screen on every time you enter another room, so yeah loading has gotten much better.

As said before, World of Warcraft deserves some form of award for greatest handling of loading screens.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

I actually quite like the odd loading screen...it gives me a chance to put the kettle on or roll a cig. I also like the way they tend to put usefull hints and tips on them so i don't ever need to bother looking up controls or features elsewhere. It also gives me a chance to reflect on what i did to end up needing a load screen - be it a silly death or an area complete and whats coming next.

Sure, it slows things down quite a lot but when my average completion time for a game is between 6-24 hours it adds a little more time wasting and better value for money (not that i actually pay for games anymore, they aren't worth it). I might have to review that statement since LoveFilm discarded my business...but thus is life.

 

[takemeouttotheblack]

Loading Screens don't really annoy me, but then I haven't played much recently that's had a whole load of them. Sometimes, they're even quite welcome, because if you've been playing some really quite button mashy level, it gives you a few seconds to relax before it all starts over again.

The one thing that does annoy me a little is having to backtrack over levels you've previously played across simply to pick up one thing, and the fast travel hubs are in rather useless places, when you might have to go back through five levels to get back to where you where. It's one of my minor peeves for the original Dragon Age; if you wanted, say, to go from Denerim to the Palace at Orzammar, you'd get maybe three or four loading screens just for the purposes of doing a single quest, and it would inevitably drop you outside of Orzammar itself just to go for a jog up to the front gates...

 

[Innegativeion]

Depends.

I don't understand why more games don't go the Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime route of background loading while things are visually happening to keep you occupied.

In Galaxy it's the star-launcher flight sections.

In Prime it's the elevators and doors.

Loading, yes, but you don't feel like your flow is being interrupted.

 

[CrystalShadow]

That's not actually the main reason. Cost was a much bigger factor. Compare the N64 with the PS1 and it stands out quite dramatically - the cost, to the publisher, per copy of a game is dramatically different. a PS1 disk (or equivalent CD, DVD or blu-ray in modern systems) costs about $0.10 per disk to manufacture. The cost for a cartridge is between $25-35, just for the cartridge.
Cartridges cost an absolute fortune to make. Optical disks are dirt-cheap. Seems quite obvious this would have an impact given the games sell for about the same price regardless...

You might think modern equivalents are cheaper, but look at SD card prices VS blank CD's. For the cost of one 8gb memory card, you can often get something like 25-50 blank DVD's. - Sure, the cost is lower for manufacturing, but the relative proportion of the costs aren't going to be radically different...

While cartridges are more expensive to manufacture, I don't think comparing end-retail price for the consumer is the same as, say, the wholesale rates negotiated behind closed doors between hardware companies and publishers. If cartridges were still prohibitively expensive in this day and age, we wouldn't have seen Nintendo stick with them for both DS and 3DS. Nor would we have seen Capcom and Atlus put so much weight into handheld exclusive, cartridge based games like Professor Layton, Ace Attorney and Shin Megami Tensei IV.

It's not a reliable measure, no. But it does give a reasonable benchmark as to the relative cost.

And as to Nintendo sticking with cartridges for their handhelds... There are other potential reasons for that. Disks with mechanical parts are overall more fragile. Notice, to date, even after switching to disk based media (reluctantly, it seems, taking the N64 into account), Nintendo has yet to make a system that uses mechanical hard drives.

And in a handheld this is an even bigger issue, because people are much more prone to moving those.
As an aside, the manual for my laptop says you shouldn't move it while the system is powered on... (Hard drives are more fragile when switched on than when powered down). There are also anecdotal accounts of people with certain consoles damaging their game disks severely if they moved the console while the disk was spinning...

Basically, there are reasons other than cost to continue to use solid state storage in a handheld system...

I think at this point, production costs are such that it's not really an issue any more. Nintendo managed to turn a profit on FE: Awakening, despite it initially selling around 500,000 copies or so (probably more at this point, but I haven't checked yet). It's more a matter of convenience at this point. People are used to discs, so that's what companies stick with for consoles. I'd love to see at least one console return to cartridges before the medium goes entirely digital, if only because I want to experience that glorious N64-like no loading once more.

Well, expensive cartridges don't preclude making a profit. It just makes it somewhat more difficult.

But costs probably have come down significantly... In my example I noted flash memory costing something in the region of 40-100 times as much at retail these days compared to DVD's... (For equivalent capacity)

But, consider the N64 days and you'll notice that a CD costing $0.10, vs a cartridge costing even $25-35 (low end estimate) is already 250-350 times the cost...
Then consider that the CD held 600-700 mb, while the largest N64 cartridges ever, were 512 megabits (64 megabytes), and you see that the cost per megabyte for a cartridge back then was something like 2500 to 3500 times as expensive.
If it's now only 40-100 times as expensive, you can see that, yes, the cost has reduced by a huge amount. (at least 25 times lower).
But solid state storage still remains more expensive.
(Though perhaps not by enough to be as big of an issue anymore.)

I'd love to see a new cartridge based console as well though. It'd be amusing. XD

Also, if it could pull the same trick as the SNES, that'd be fun too. - Starfox is impossible on unmodified SNES hardware. It just isn't owerful enough. - Luckily, the cartridge design allowed expansion chips in the cartridges. - This allowed the starfox cartridge to contain an extra CPU, designed specifically to handle floating point maths. - Not only was this second CPU about 5 times faster than the SNES's main cpu, in being designed for floating point calculations, it was doing stuff the main CPU couldn't calculate regardless of how fast it was... - In effect, while the Mega Drive ended up with weird things like the 32X, the SNES was actually doing the same kind of thing, but hiding it away in the game cartridges so people didn't notice there was basically a system upgrade involved...

Then again, while I'm sure you could design something like this into a modern console, I'm guessing the hardware you'd have to shove into a cartridge these days to pull off a meaningful improvement would be bulky, expensive, require huge amounts of cooling, and demand excessive power.

It'd still be amusing though... Upgrade people's consoles without telling them... XD