Load screens are diminishing. PCs have already been here, for awhile. What with very potent CPUs, tons of memory, and fast storage devices. Consoles are about to be there with AMD Ryzen CPU cores and presumably, SSD for storage.
We simply will not have time to finish reading the sort of tips or lore info, which some games present on loading screens.
Do you guys like those screens? Should we figure a way to replace them? Is it ok if we don’t? Is it ok to button prompt to leave the loading screen, so you can finish reading it?
I’ve never been a big fan of loading lore or tips; often they aren’t implemented well enough to avoid giving me info on things I haven’t encountered yet. I’d be fine if the practice goes away entirely.
I like loading screens, if they only take a couple of seconds every now and then. It’s like the curtains closing in between scenes of a play. The best thing to put on a loading screen is a spinning thing.
That’s from DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2, which burnt into my memory from playing it a couple times at a friends’ house. While I was trying to find that I found out that not only were the DBZ loading screens minigames - you could button mash to make it move - but the idea of minigames on the loading screen is patented. You hear about companies patenting these concepts that go unused and vanish, right? How many cool ideas have gone down the hole like this? (insofar as they do go down a hole, idk even how much this stops people from doing it)
if you play a game for more than 2 hours in one sitting, every 2.5 hours there is an unskippable intermission that tells you to go to the store and buy some more gamer fuel (dew, 'ritos, etc)
Only game I can think of that benefits from load times is classic RE where door transitions have a scary anticipation behind them and a mini pacing shift (this is also true for rail games which often have moments of nothing/animation to give the player a second), but this is fixed through intelligent level design.
dragonball z budokai 3 had a minigame that spawned saibamen as you spun the analogue sticks. the best part was that both controllers worked, so you and whoever you were playing it with would burn holes in the palms of your hands vigourously spinning the stick.
also, oneechanbara vortex on 360 had a little game where you killed crowds of little 2d zombies.
I would’ve posted the youtube video of the saibamen one but it has some guys crowing obnoxiously over the top. I guess that’s accurate to how the dbz minigames sound irl but…