Sleight of Hand: Hiding the Downtime

Garret — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:52:04 +0000

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.

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Sleight of Hand: Hiding the Downtime