Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime
Gwyntale@lemmy.world 19 hours agoOne problem I have with this trend is that squeezing through a gap or running down a artificially long corridor will always take the same amount of time.
A loading screen only takes as long as it needs, meaning that the gameplay interruption shortens with better / newer hardware.
One amazing thing about playing 20-30 year old games is that they have practically no load times anymore. Squeezefests like the FF7 Remake will always stay a slog, even when your fridge can run it in 20 years.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
Good point about hardware upgrades, though it doesn’t work for consoles where the hardware will never change.
It’s a difficult problem because it spans multiple domains: part of it is gameplay mechanics (players often get power ups that make them move faster, which could make the same corridor take 10s or 2s), part of it is level design (the layout of the building in the story is compact, but two adjacent rooms both need a lot of content or have complex set pieces), and part of it is artists intention (they want you to feel claustrophobic or like your character is taking an unintended route, which an arbitrarily long hallway wouldn’t convey).
Something related that games used to do (more than they do now) that no one ever complained about were points of no return. Your character would drop down a ledge that they couldn’t climb back up, or they’d walk into a room and the door behind them would lock or debris would fall and block the path. This served a similar purpose: to bar the player from backtracking so they could unload unused assets. I guess it was just a more subtle method of misdirection, people never complained. The sideways slow shimmy is just so in-your-face without anything else to misdirect that it’s become a meme.
Gwyntale@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Consoles tend to be backwards compatible to an extend and often even come with an inbuilt emulator for older games. You can play the first Zelda on the Switch.
Bloodborne had load times up to a minute on vanilla PS4, around 25 sec on PS4 Pro and around 15 sec on PS5.
Imagine they had you squeeze through a gap for 60 seconds to hide that load. Even a 30 second squeeze would have handicapped both Pro and PS5.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
Hah well luckily I’ve never seen anything close to a 60 gap squeeze. But if the game is half decent, then there is story being conveyed during that time, not just the shimmy. TLOU has a few sections where you’re squeezing through a cramped wall that most certainly hides loading, but at the same time your character is hiding from an enemy, or some emotion other than bordom is trying to be conveyed.
Obviously I’m not arguing in favor of slow shimmies, I just think the better, well funded devs with the resources often come up with much more immersive excuses for hiding the loading. So at the end of the day, we’re just asking the overworked, under funded, possibly less skilled devs, who are often already crunching for a due date, to also think about how their game will run on hypothetical bandwidths of future hypothetical hardware. That’d be nice, but if they had that time, then they’d just spend it making the experience less boring on current hardware.
Gwyntale@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Agreed