Your worst loading times.

[Robert Ewing]

Hey guys, I want to talk about loading times today.

So here is the inspiration behind the thread. I recently got DiRT3. Great game, really amazing and everything, probably the best quality racing game I've ever played. But this bar of gold has one solid turd wrapped around it to keep it warm. Loading times.

The game is STRANGLED with thousands of loading screens. Yes I understand it's a very big game, with some very advance stuff in it, but let me give you a scenario. The loading times are a minimum of 5 minutes for me. I clocked one in on 17 minutes and 14 seconds! If that still isn't enough for you, consider that the races in the game very often last under 3 minutes. In fact, the race with the 17 minute loading time was over and done with in little over 1 minute. The loading time was 17x longer than the actual content it was loading...

BUT, it doesn't stop there. Once you've done the race, it's another shorter loading screen back to the title screen. You spend about 12 seconds on there choosing the next race, and hey-ho another thousand year loading screen. It infuriates me, that even the races featuring the SAME track also took a few minutes to load. I almost think it's something to do with my rig. But it's completely up to standard with all the latest stuff. So I don't know.


So my fellow escapists, whats your worst loading times?

 

[Pharaoh66]

i think it was Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly it was terrible like 10 mins just to get into a level and then the sub levels took longer.

 

[LookingGlass]

I haven't experienced any that were that bad. I remember ModNation Racers taking forever (a couple of mins) to load tracks, but I've only played the demo so I'm not sure how indicative of the full game that is.

As far as PC games go, the worst is Deus Ex: Invisble War. The areas are tiny so you're constantly getting hit with new loading screens, and they take about a minute each to load today, with a new computer. It must have been hell when it was released eight years ago, or on the Xbox version.

 

[Crazy Zaul]

Worst ever was morrowind on xbox, takes literally about 10 mins, followed by divinty 2 takes ages. And New Vegas, most are ok but every so often you get one that takes a really really long time.

 

[FuktLogik]

Duke Nukem Forever and Divinity 2 on the 360 come to mind instantly. Loading interior to exterior in Divinity was 50 seconds minimum.

 

[Robert Ewing]

i think it was Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly it was terrible like 10 mins just to get into a level and then the sub levels took longer.

Dear god I remember that, and the droning music that usually accompanied it. And I remembered that game so fondly until now :L

 

[Rad Party God]

As a PC gamer, it's been a while for me to worry about loading times, but sure there were a couple of games that drove me crazy in the past, like Oni on the PS2, God that game was very hard and you had to wait like 30 seconds for the game to re-load every time you died, also Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex for the PS2, that game had awful loading times and pretty much any CD based game for the PS2, wich was pretty much 90% of it's games for the first 3 years of the system. I also liked Shadow Man: The 2econd Coming, but I hated it's loading times (CD based too), also it took it's time every time I wanted to save, like 20 seconds every time I wanted to save the game.

But not everything's gloomy on the PS2, because pretty much any DVD based game I played had a lot much faster loading times.

I can't think of any GameCube game that had long loading times... except... yeah, XIII, that game had to reload the entire level every time you died. As for the 360, I didn't had many games, Gears of War 2 had virtually zero loading times and Halo 3 was bearable given the size of the levels, even Oblivion and Bioshock had fairly fast loading times, but I can point out 2 culprits, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts N' Bolts and Fable 2.

In Fable 2, I couldn't fart in the city for much time, because many citizens started to gather around and the game has to load their "oohhhss" and "aaaahhhhss". Installing the game into the harddrive pretty much solved this issue, but Nuts N' Bolts, even if I installed that game, it had to load a shit-load of things every time I went from zone to zone and even when I wanted to start a minigame, wich is pretty much 95% of the time.

 

[OverweightWhale]

The worst I've encounter was when my Fallout New Vegas took over 5 mins to load my save. Thankfully it only happened that one time. I thought something might have been wrong with my computer.

 

[Nico III]

I've been playing E.Y.E. Diving Cybermancy lately.

When you die, you appear in a strange place where you are told "You were dreaming, you saw a premonition of what will happen if you don't get your head in the game." This area takes ages to load on my crappy laptop. After the load finishes, you run straight through a portal to return to the game. Cue another, even longer loading screen.
This happens every time you game over, it's frustrating beyond belief.

 

[Xprimentyl]

The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind on the Original Xbox. Hell, I think I'm STILL waiting on some screens to load....

 

[Fishehh]

Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword

It takes me 10 mins to load a save and a few minutes to load into a town

Now I'm off to play Mount and Blade.. thank-you

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I never had a problem with loading times, except for when my Halo 1 CD was so scratched and worn that it generally crashed when I tried to load most of the levels, and often the load bar would get about 3/4 of the way across, and then start going backwards back to around a third. Repeat ad infinitum.

 

[Yosato]

Fable 3's were pretty shit, especially considering the game sucked a massive one. Was just still shots of posters and useless trivia at the bottom, which made it feel a hell of a lot longer.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Portal 2 annoys the shizz out of me with its huge amount of loading screens.

But Fallout 3, thanks to some mods, takes a long time to load certain locations, mainly Rivet City.

 

[TheSaw]

Dead Rising 2.

I managed to face desk a lot of times while waiting for it to load.

 

[genericusername64]

fallout 3 and dragon age 2, I could've spent the loading times getting a doctoret

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

i think kotor II had a problem one time, because i loaded an old save after un installing and re installing the whole game + like 20 different mods that patched it to hell and back and added a whole bunch of stuff.

i was surprised it worked at all, but after a solid 3 minutes or so it worked just fine and boy was i happy.


and oddly enough on Fallout New vegas my load times take maybe 2-3 seconds if that, but then occasionally i'll be entering a random shack and it'll take like 20 seconds to load...which is weird, but oh well.

 

[otakon17]

Worst ever was morrowind on xbox, takes literally about 10 mins, followed by divinty 2 takes ages. And New Vegas, most are ok but every so often you get one that takes a really really long time.

Damn it, ninja'd AGAIN?!?! I was going to say Morrowind on the Xbox as well. Chrono Trigger on the PS1 "Final Fantasy Chronicles" was pretty bad though, with 15 second load times between each sub-menu in your "Party Menu". It literally took a minute to check through your stats, made no sense to me.

 

[baddude1337]

At one point when I was on a really old crappy computer about to die, a section of Half Life 2 took 2 hours to load.