Suggest replacement for info/tips/lore during load screens

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?

Give the developers your phone number and you get automated calls about what the triangle button does at inopportune times.

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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)

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put some really nice high res concept art or something on screen and i wouldn’t mind them at all

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Right but the thing is, loading screens are so fast/gonna be so fast, you won’t have time to appreciate them.

A loading screen that engages your webcam without asking and puts you on a super short video call with a random other player

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credit card information of the devs

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That patent expired (patents last for 20 years)

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But it says 1998, 1998 wasn’t -

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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)

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I should’ve done some research, that patent expiring was a big enough deal to make the news. Here’s some fun facts about loading screen games:

– long before the patent, C64 load times were so unbearable people made programs to speed it up. this one had a game in it

– Splatoon had loading minigames while the patent was in place, but they got around it because the games were on the controller

– when the patent expired people devved a whole jam’s worth

– although loading screens are mostly short now you can once again find games on them, e.g. the ps4 Berserk

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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.

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oh yeah good excuse to post these

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I was thinking about this recently because Hob on Switch has loading screen tips that are often visible for just a second or two. It’s really jarring.

I don’t know what the solution is. Press a button to move on once the load’s complete and you’ve read the tip?

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every loading screen shoukd just be old snake smoking a cigarette and also five minutes long no matter how fast the console is

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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.

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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…