Let’s face it, every game has it’s fair share of painful load screens.  Maybe they come up early, as you boot the game up, perhaps they are sprinkled at the ends of levels, but they’re inevitable.  Technology has certainly improved, but so too have the resources required to run most games, which means don’t expect a load screen-free utopia with fairy tale wishes and rainbow dreams any time soon.  Thankfully, there are a number of strategies developers can employ to keep load screens to a minimum, or at the very least hide them in creative ways.

The Cinematic or Cutscene. Story devices such as pre-rendered or in-game cutscenes are just about as old as gaming itself.  They control the pacing of a game and can portray important story elements in ways the game may not be fully able to, such as complicated action sequences or emotional set pieces.  They also tend to restrict player involvement, which can be useful when large portions of data are needed to play the next area of the game.  Mission briefings in military FPS or RTS games like Gears of War use these breaks to feed you with objectives and background intel, while enormous amounts of texture data are piped in behind the scenes, keeping the actual downtime to a minimum.

Ridiculously Long Elevator Ride. Although similar in nature to the previously mentioned lengthy hallway, this techique differs slightly in that these more blatant transitions do not usually require any player action whist in the load screen. Portal had many such elevator rides, with one after every puzzle. Some games choose to use this time to also convey some story elements, such as was the case in the Metroid Prime series. Likewise, Mass Effect was famous for it’s incredibly long elevator rides, but also supplemented the trip with relevant radio broadcasts pertaining to some of the player’s more recent endeavors. Another similar technique is the laughably long, door-opening animation, found in early Resident Evil games and many other 3D action titles. The animation for opening a desk drawer or treasure chest could even give the game a split second to process whatever random loot you happen to find in that hidden stash.

Lengthy Hallway, Stairway or Cave. How many times have you found yourself running down an empty, lifeless corridor or had to move through a blatantly unnecessary room or crawl space  Chances are, these pregnant pauses were inserted specifically to give the game some much needed prep time.  These designated areas still allow complete control of your character, although sometimes with limited mobility (air duct passageways, stairs).  Usually these vacant spaces offer very little to do, save for traversing from point A to point B, thus allowing the developer to sneakily stream in the next area’s content.  2D games like Castlevania commonly use this technique by inserting unnecessary hallways in between major areas of the castle dungeon for you to run across.  In other cases, a developer will use large expanses of game space to convey a sense of scope, such as in the God of War series, but the effect is ultimately the same.

Copy, Clone, Duplicate. Another easy way to avoid loading in more data and art assets is to simply repeat the same existing enemy types, environmental objects, and scenery over and over, ad nauseam.  Open-world games such as the Grand Theft Auto series often employ this technique to subtly keep car and pedestrian models to a minimum.  Try this little experiment the next time you load up your favorite GTA game get in a vehicle and count how many identical cars you come across that match the one you’re driving.  It can create a fun little “slug bug” mini-game, but it isn’t too helpful when you’re trying to track down that sports motorcycle you like to cruise around in.  Likewise, every game imaginable uses this magic multiplier strategy when dishing out the enemy goons for you to dispatch.  I just always figured bad guys enjoyed similar social company and were generally against ethnic mixing.

Intelligent Streaming. While it might be impossible to outright eliminate all load screens entirely, it is possible to ease the load a bit with a bit of clever prediction and preparation.  Games that use large free roaming environments can try to predict what new content to load by analyzing the player’s proximity to new areas.  Just as a pipelined GPU predicts possible instructions to run, so too can a game engine.  This is necessary in large, open-world game environments where load screens would definitely detract from the feeling of unhindered freedom.  A bit of crafty level design that adds subtle bottlenecks can go a long way toward directing the player to preassigned choke points, making it easier on the prediction algorithms.

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