History Main / LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading

* ''VideoGame/StreetFighterAlpha 2'' saw a port on the Super NES saw infuriatingly long load times. Using the SDD-1 chip for decompression, it took about 8 whole seconds at the start of each fight (in a genre where rounds usually have a time limit between one and two minutes, this is a long time); the screen would stop dead in its tracks, music and all, to load everything, despite the many, many, ''many'' technical shortcuts they had to take to even pull the port off.

* The [=XBox=] 360 version of ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion'' had long loading times as well. Granted, the average loading screen didn't last as long as some of the record-breakers on this page (30-40 seconds tops), but they pop up whenever you enter a building/dungeon, exit a building/dungeon, or fast-travel. You could even initiate a "Loading..." prompt by ''running really fast'' (i.e., faster than the game can render the landscape). By contrast, the PC version has much shorter load times; some are even short enough to omit the loading screen!

** ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'', also suffers from this.

* The longer you play a character overall in the PS3 version of ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'', the longer the load screens get. This has led into GameBreakingBug territory for the PS3, where save files can get so large that the game just stops working. This does not affect the other versions.
** The Xbox 360 version has loads of loading as well. You could get something to eat and go to the bathroom (although not in that order) and get back before the loading screen finished.

* ''MassEffect'' tried to disguise some of its loading screens by putting the player on an elevator while data loaded. It didn't work very well, according to [[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/16 Penny Arcade]], at least.
** And it backfired somewhat once Microsoft's [=NXE=] allowed you to install a game to your hard drive. Loading times in most games, including ''MassEffect'', are reduced, but the length of the elevator rides is hard-coded, meaning they still take the same length of time even if the load finished half-way.

** That said, especially the later, HTML5-based interactive "walkaround" pages can take a ''long'' time to load, and slow down your browser to a crawl (and each room must be loaded separately and hogs a lot of memory; on slower computers, they all but break your computer a few rooms in.) Below a certain point, your best bet is to watch the Youtube video of the walkaround instead.

** Somehow, there's a single partial [[AvertedTrope aversion]] to this in the entire game; one of Shadow's missions, where one has to drive a buggy on an a highway to destroy some obstacles, only has two load times. The mission giver tells you what to do, you accept, load, do the mission, get the ranking (or not if you fail), load, back in town. Even if it's still got the painful loading, that's only two compared to the usual four-five of ''every single other town mission in the game.''

* The Commodore [=C=64=] was the king of this trope. Long load times were actually ''inherent'' to the design - the floppy drive went from having four data lines in the original design to ''one'' by the time of release, due to ExecutiveMeddling in the name of [[TheyJustDidntCare "simplicity"]], ''quadrupling'' the load times already inflicted by the floppy format. Tapes were even worse. If you plan on playing any C64 games, do it in an emulator with turbo mode.
** Not ExecutiveMeddling, just cost reduction combined with some bad luck. The original [=IEE488=] interface used on the Commodore [=PET=] was expensive to implement, and required equally expensive and clunky cables that were only available from a few sources, so they tried to design a simpler, lower-cost serial interface for the [=VIC-20=]. Unfortunately, they discovered at the last minute that there was a flaw in one of the serial-bus chips they'd used, and the only way to ship on schedule was to intentionally slow down the data rate far enough that the flaw wouldn't occur. Once that was done, [[StatusQuoIsGod backwards compatibility]] dictated that even after they fixed the flaw in the chips, every computer and disk drive made after that ''still'' had to run at the same glacial speeds so the drives would still be compatible with the million-plus [=VIC-20s=] already sold and shipped, and so that [=VIC-20=] users could upgrade to the [=C=64=] without having to replace their $400+ disk drives too.

* The original {{Xbox}} set out to subvert this by allowing games "cache space" on the internal HDD - data could be copied there for fast access during gameplay. But games which actually ''used'' this feature took forever to initially fire up (eg ''VideoGame/{{Fable|I}}, NinjaGaiden''), as it basically amounted to copying a few hundred megabytes in one massive loading spree (it still generally did a better job than the PS2, due to a superior DVD drive - the Xbox knocks about a minute off ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas San Andreas']]'' start time, for example).

*** Thanks for the solution, pal! You really hit the nail on the head, there! -PK

** ''SimCity'' (not the original, the one released in 2013) took this trope to '''absurd''' extremes. The [[DRM servers]] the game relied on]] could not hold the strain of all the players. This caused many issues, the most glaring being the ''half hour'' or '''LONGER''' wait times just to connect. The this is also before the in game loading screens, which also could be time consuming as well.

This is something of a cyclic trope because of technology changes. Computer gamers of the 1980s learned to loathe the slow-as-molasses tape and floppy disk drives of the era, and cheered when they were replaced by the much faster hard disks. But it didn't take too long for games to take advantage of increasing disk size and grow so big that they took as long to load from the hard disk as their ancestors did from floppies. Solid-state cartridges from the old days had fast random access times that some cases match or is faster than ram(snes), but their severely limited capacity increases the temptation to use data compression in larger modern games, which can take a ''very'' long time to decompress on a game console. So it goes...

* ''VideoGame/{{Daikatana}}'' had notoriously slow loading times when it was released. Almost ten years later loading times are ''still'' slow. It's strange because there is no disc activity at all while a saved game is restored, even though it takes around 20 seconds.

* Nearly all the of Playstation ''TombRaider'' games suffered from loading times in a variety of ways. If you were prone to being killed a lot (and you most likely would due to the series' EverythingTryingToKillYou plus pitfalls), you had to wait for the menu to pop up, which took about a second or two if you tried to skip the death sequence, choose to reload your last save, and then wait for the level to reload. While it is understandable that loading a level for the first time can take a while, the game still takes at least 10 to 15 seconds just to reload your previous save state as if the game simply "forgot" how everything was up to that point.

* ''{{Civilization}} V'' has this bad. On large or huge maps, it takes forever to load the map from the main menu, and the AI phases in between your turns are almost unbearable in the late game. Playing in "strategic mode," with a 2D hex grid helps a lot, though. This problem is most noticeable when you've moved all of your units, but the computer hasn't registered it yet, so it won't let you end your turn until you wait for about 30 to 45 seconds. Then, you have to wait for all of the computer players to move. With games that normally can take 10-20 hours, this gets frustrating.

* The PS1 port of ChronoTrigger had this problem BAD. It took up to 10-12 seconds to load the menu OR any battles. The reason for this is because rather than format the game for being read off a PS1 disc, the developers took the extremely lazy route of loading up the Japanese SNES version, an emulator program, and an English patch, and called it a day. Having to load the patch every time something happened killed the game's speed.

** ''SimCity'' (not the original, the one released in 2013) took this trope to '''absurd''' extremes. The [[DRM servers the game relied on]] could not hold the strain of all the players. This caused many issues, the most glaring being the ''half hour'' or '''LONGER''' wait times just to connect. The this is also before the in game loading screens, which also could be time consuming as well.

*** "SimCity" (not the original, the one released in 2013) took this trope to '''absurd''' extremes. The [[DRM servers the game relied on]] could not hold the strain of all the players. This caused many issues, the most glaring being the ''half hour'' or '''LONGER''' wait times just to connect. The this is also before the in game loading screens, which also could be time consuming as well.

* "SimCity" (not the original, the one released in 2013) took this trope to '''absurd''' extremes. The [[DRM servers the game relied on]] could not hold the strain of all the players. This caused many issues, the most glaring being the ''half hour'' or '''LONGER''' wait times just to connect. The this is also before the ingame loading screens, which also could be time consuming as well.

* ''TheThreeStooges'' on the Commodore 64 probably holds some kind of record for play time/load time ratio. While most C64 games would load the entire game into memory at once, ''The Three Stooges'' was a hefty piece of work comprising numerous {{Minigame}}s (and, this being the '80s, each "minigame" was essentially a full game by the standards of the day). Entering a new minigame meant loading the whole thing from scratch, often preceded by swapping disks (cleverly referred to as "reels"). Even starting the game itself took forever, due to the number of intro cinematics (each of which was, you guessed it, preceded by a long load time) some of which even included then-memory-intensive voice clips.

* ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' suffers from an extremely frustrating case of this, where you can have ten or fifteen second load times for the inside of a moderately sized store. Combined with a sloppy fast travel mode and a large number of zone breaks, it sometimes takes four load screens to reach a quest giver (and four more on your way out).

** Same with ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'', which uses loading screens when entering buildings and moving between indoor sub-areas, although the outdoor Wasteland is dynamically loaded.

* Similar to Red Alert, Evergrace has a load for every area transition AND room, but pads this out with [[TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot extremely interesting background info, much of which is actually not in the game!]] The problem? They're only 2-4 seconds. You spend half that time pulling where you left off at out of your memory, read another line, and bang back into the game. When you DO finally read all the different loading screens.... You [[TheyWastedAPefectlyGoodPlot wonder why the sequel did nothing]] with it.

*** Frustratingly enough, the perfect solution was right in front of Capcom the whole time: The PC version of ''ResidentEvil1'' allowed you to skip the "door opening" simply by pressing the action button again. Why in blazes was this feature never used again, we don't know.