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.
#CancelShimmySqueezes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Fuck, even fallout 4 got that right lol
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
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 see your squeezing through cracks and raise a long press a button to do an action. Jesus, if the action needs a certain amount of time to complete, and 99% of times it doesn’t, just make a freaking animation while at it instead of making me press a damn button for 2 seconds.
It can be overused, but that one’s useful for avoiding a thousand different “are you sure?” prompts.
Unless it’s a vent and I have a crowbar though, that’s still great.
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.
