But what about AAAA games?
See that mountain? You can fast travel to it!
*if you pay $20/month
When I wanna play a game, I wanna play a game. I don’t wanna watch a damn movie I can’t skip. Or even worse, “follow me!” like it’s Dora the Explorer on tutorial mode. I got like 30 minutes into God of War and gave up.
And make sure the time is synced to the cloud so they need internet connection, and so the player can’t be sneaky and reload the game to reset the timer if they pressed x too many times
Metal Gear series be like
I’ve heard you can pre-order the ultimate mega edition of AAA Game 2 for only £300! It comes with a season pass (but they’ll never finish the roadmap), and extra DLC that isn’t in the season pass too! You’ll still need to buy the extra extra DLC to get the full experience though…
Meanwhile star citizen with no loading screens once you’re in the world
Does it have transition animations or is it actually smooth? Asking from Elite Dangerous where the transition sequences feel pretty immersove to me. Each solar system is an instance with a wormhole jump between. Sublight and FTL have a charge/dropout sequence. The worst is switching between ship/rover/foot where the screen goes black and you hear footsteps. So what does SC do?
Smooth as heck, flying from space to planet surface. There is quantum travel between distant objects but it’s not there to hide anything, you can very quickly travel from a planet to its moons for example (seconds)
So Star Citizen actually does No Man’s Sky travel, but better? Interesting.
Because they have infinite time and money to finish it. They have achieved what many big publishers cannot, they have effectively turned a game into a bank and everyone trusts them and likes them for it.
This joke would’ve worked like 5 years ago but with SSD’s being so prevalent now load times are currently trivial for basically any game, even bulky AAA’s. Elden ring is like 8-10 seconds for me.
it’s not just that though, AAA gameplay has largely evolved to waste time. pointless side quests, pointless collectibles, pointless giant maps, pointlessly going from one end of the map to the other back and forth just to complete some bullshit quest, pointless grinding…
well i say pointless, but there is actually a reason to make playing these games such a chore.
100% XP boost: would you like to pay us for the privilege to play our game half as much this week?
The joke is about load times
i know? are we not allowed to add anything in the discussion? my apologies.
I was just explaining what the thrust was. It looked like you were missing it and talking about something else. Not a big deal, no need for hostility.
fine; i was pointing out that it was applicable to other things since it does require a button input.
I thought it was about the 3-4 different unskippable animations it plays before you get to the main menu
Huh maybe so lol I saw it as “load to wait to load to load again” basically
Whenever people complain about AAA games I wonder what games they are playing compared to me.
I think what you mean is that this joke will work fine again by the tail end of 2025 despite the prevalence of SSDs.
Have you tried The First Descendant yet? It’s pretty rough with load times and beats the cap out a graphics card. Is that considered AAA?
There will always be examples but most of the time it’s poor optimization tbh
most of the time it’s poor optimization
Almost every time. That’s what’s being made fun of…
Right but even poor optimization is dealt with by SSD’s. I’m talking very poor optimization. Even mediocre cases still load quickly.
SSD’s have made load times a non issue 90-95% of the time.
Those 5-10‰ of the time are absolutely excruciating when you’ve gotten used to SSD gaming, though. Especially when you have moderate to severe ADHD so any kind of waiting sets the Gears of Distraction in motion lol.
And it’s almost always an AAA game even though those are the ones with the LEAST excuse for not being optimized
The real joke would have been
A free campaign with a multiplayer menu that allows you to spend $100 or play slot machines for hours to acquire a T-shirt for your character.
Dunno sometimes it’s gotta be something with their asset loading methodology. I put Battletech on my NVME and it still had crazy like 3-5-minute loads. A mod fixes it really well though and made the otherwise-great game much more playable.
Not everyone has them though
I am having a hard time envisioning a significant number of people with 1) current AAA games, 2) machines powerful enough to play them, but 3) without an SSD. That has to be a very small group.
SSDs are expensive, HDDs are not and already exist for blu ray and Linux ISO storage.
SSD’s are not expensive at all to someone buying AAA games and playing on modern rigs. They cost as much as a single game now.
A 512gb external SSD is trivial to get. In the US they’re like $60. If you can afford a modern computer that can play AAA games at half decent settings there’s no way you don’t have an SSD. You can’t even buy computers with internal HDD’s anymore without looking for it specifically.
You were correct in 2020. It’s 2024.
I personally just compensate for my HDD array’s slowness with RAM. Cyberpunk 2077 runs at more than 30fps on an rx580 being loaded off a HDD with 20GB RAM on Linux.
Dude SSD’s are cheap as hell. Less than your ram cost. Your load times will be by like 80% easily. Even crap ones
Yeah I built my pc two years ago. Didn’t bother with an ssd, wound up getting 4tb of ssd last year because it needed it (well I thought that’s what it needed, it did need it, but my problem was in addition to dragging over my old hdds I also just kept the same 8gb ram stick, turns out games actually run when you have 32gb ram)
Wealth issue (not really shits cheap)
That’s not true with me. Forza Horizon 5 takes 90 seconds to load on my 970 Evo Plus. Cities Skylines with some mods takes 3 minutes.
Forza has a known issue mainly due to cloud syncing
C:S is notorious for long load times especially if you have mods/DLC as it loads them all into your ram
This remind me of those random flash… Let’s call them creations as they are neither games or animations specifically.
It starts with 1 A and a wait time of thirty seconds, each time you press the big X, it adds an ‘A’, and increasingly multiplies the time. You end up with the AAAAAAAAAAAAA Game, and are waiting for hours.
Does it do anything? No. It is vaguely humorous? Kinda?
I remember a flash animation that was basically the biggest advertisement of itself based off “reviews”, with stuff like “The greatest animation of all time; A must see animation; Better than Lord of the Rings; Better than sex; Better than chocolate; Better than sex with chocolate” - That was all the animation was.
I can’t stand games like this. You would be lucky if it was only 45 minutes… and then they will tech you how to make every goddamn step cos god forbid you might need your brain at any point
Don’t forget the classic.
Main Menu is a flat 2D selection screen with a JPEG in the background
Presses “Back to Main Menu”
20 second loading screen
Main Menu still lags
Why?
