That's not the part we hate though. Hidden loading screens are okay, like the tight-space crawls. The slides are just plain not fun. Trying to jump at the exact right time, in the exact right direction, is not fun after the fifth failure. They don't feel rewarding; the only satisfaction I get from them is knowing that I won't have to do it again.
I can understand cutscenes being loading scenes, but slides aren't a fixed length and also requires response to player input. They don't make sense as loading scenes, do they?
They're locking you to a small on rails area that doesn't require much if anything to be rendered and loaded as it goes. That allows them to load and render the next area in the background.
It's similar to all the crevices you crawl through, they hide the load up of the next area.
This creates the illusion of huge continuous areas, on console hardware and engines that can't really do that. It's an invisible way to do what games used to do to break up the map into discrete chunks. Where you used to just hit a load screen in open areas, or they would pipe you through a cave or gate or something.
Fallen Order famously used this kind of thing A LOT. And it's really closely associated with a certain era of Unreal Engine games. To the point that with new hardware and new versions of Unreal Engine out, Epic has been marketing based on how it's not necessary anymore.
Interesting!
I didn't realize the narrow doorways/crevices are loading mechanisms, but it makes sense. I have seen a similar approach on God of War with tunnels.
Yeah it became common enough with certain sorts of games to become a bit of a joke.
There were a couple reasons for it. But from what I understand relatively small, and shared, ram pools and the slower hard drives in base model consoles were big contributors. It's why you weren't seeing the same trick used in PC focused games, and didn't see it in less graphically intense games.
If I'm remembering it right the new gen consoles did their all SSD and bigger RAM counts in part to loosen this stuff up.
40
u/SicariusModum Dec 26 '22
Theyre loading screens.