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Which gen had the worst load times?
- Thread starter bell_hooks
- Start date
I'm 36 and the worst loading in my experience has been the PS3 gen. lol. My first console was the NES.
My first gaming experience was playing the atari at my nans house.
First games machine we owned was a C64. Eventually picked up other stuff too like vic20, Atari, NES, Master system etc and continued from there.
As someone who grew up with a C64, they take the cake. I used to set a game up to load, have dinner, a shower and watch TV before some games would even boot. Even then they weren't guaranteed. Some of them had a load to title, then a load to options, then a load to the game itself that could be 10-40 minutes.
Same here. Metal Gear Solid 4...oh my.
That some games that gen could be either ran from disc or installed meant it could really vary from person to person, game to game.
Maybe xb1/ps4 since it's most recent?
I hate loading screens, that put you into more loading screens.
Like Super Lucky, sit for 2 minutes to see press start. Then another 2 minutes to select a level, then another 2 minutes for the level to load.
I hate loading screens, that put you into more loading screens.
Like Super Lucky, sit for 2 minutes to see press start. Then another 2 minutes to select a level, then another 2 minutes for the level to load.
Not a problem now. When they added trophies they also made it have an option to install the entire game at once.
PS1 and the PS2/Xbox/GC era had some brutal load times towards the end of the generation.
360/PS3 got bad too but not as bad as the previous, I assume more content installed to speed it up.
360/PS3 got bad too but not as bad as the previous, I assume more content installed to speed it up.
I thankfully never had a cassette based computer, so I can't really comment on those. From personal experience, it would be the PS3 / 360 gen.
ps3/360 may have generally longer load times the os1, having a a 1-5 second load for the most standard shit for me. won a round in a fighting game 4 seconds until the next round.
IIRC it had an install for each act, so 4-5 (?) throughout the whole game.
I remember people joking at the time that the Photoshopped 360 version on a dozen DVDs would actually have been quicker because you just had to swap discs.
But they later added an option to install the whole thing and do it in one.
The PS1 gen seemed pretty long to me. It's probably compounded by the usability stuff. I'm playing Tomb Raider 4 on PS1 now and every time you die it loads to the title screen, you have to load your save, then you have to load the level again. EVERY TIME YOU DIE.
There it is.
You put a game on load, and then you would spend 10 minutes doing something else.
I remember trying to load morrowind on my first pc - a pentium 4 machine that had 128MB of Rambus Ram and a Riva TNT 2 32MB card.
That was painful. I got stuck with that chipset at the worst possible time. RDRAM was dead, but I didn't know it. So another 128MB of ram cost something like 2 bucks per MB or something crazy like that. I never did upgrade that pc, ended up doing a whole new build around a radeon 9600.
I missed the whole c64 or even earlier pcs. I used consoles as a kid rather than pcs. The Atari 2600 or NES must have felt like a dream to some pc gamers back then.
That was painful. I got stuck with that chipset at the worst possible time. RDRAM was dead, but I didn't know it. So another 128MB of ram cost something like 2 bucks per MB or something crazy like that. I never did upgrade that pc, ended up doing a whole new build around a radeon 9600.
I missed the whole c64 or even earlier pcs. I used consoles as a kid rather than pcs. The Atari 2600 or NES must have felt like a dream to some pc gamers back then.
It was split up because some launch PS3 models had a 20GB HDD and the full game is about 26GB. Years later the patched the game for trophies+full installation.
I mean, yeah, generally you can't beat this.
But in modern gaming, it's definitely the 8th gen. It had a ton lot more to load than 7th gen at the same old speeds of HDDs.
Worst for me was C64 or Amiga. Amiga was generally a lot faster than C64 but some games came on multiple discs and ended being as slow as C64 with the added bonus of having to swap discs around all the time. I remember Final Fight on Amiga was constantly interrupted by needing 5+ minutes of loading time and swapping between 7 or 8 discs.
Depending on the game, Switch can be really bad. 3rd party games in general are pretty slow - I guess compression to save on cart sizes - some like CTR are just not worth bothering with.
Depending on the game, Switch can be really bad. 3rd party games in general are pretty slow - I guess compression to save on cart sizes - some like CTR are just not worth bothering with.
After watching some videos on Commadore and cassette game systems, those. I think I watched one once where it took 3 or 13 minutes to load a Transformers game?
On a personal level:
I only remember one game from my childhood having really bad loading times: Lego Island 2 on PS1. It took about 1 min to load, each time going inside and outside a house too, which made exploring in a kids exploration game, painful.
Besides that, GTA Online is the worst I've experienced modern times. It's one of the reasons I told my friends I'm done dragging myself along to play it with them.
On a personal level:
I only remember one game from my childhood having really bad loading times: Lego Island 2 on PS1. It took about 1 min to load, each time going inside and outside a house too, which made exploring in a kids exploration game, painful.
Besides that, GTA Online is the worst I've experienced modern times. It's one of the reasons I told my friends I'm done dragging myself along to play it with them.
Probably they did that so the game would be compatible with the 20GB version of the PS3.
Oh my God yes. Sometimes we would have to wait closer to 45 minutes, and we were kiddy as FUCK once the game loaded up. Technology was so incredibly new, exciting, and fragile back then lol.
I remember these days, but we couldnt afford these.
Yeah, I think age is gonna have ppl choosing different gens. PS4, XBO is not it IMO.
Good point. Even though C64, Atari800 and the ZX Spectrum had very, very long times, they felt different as they were something you had to endure only at the beginning. You could do something else while waiting for the games to load. On top of this you had some clever Turbo systems in cartridges that could speed up the process 10x. There were games on the Amiga that forced you to constantly change the disks and wait for the load and these times added up quickly. The fancy Game Over screen in Shadow of The Beast was doubly frustrating as you have to wait for it to load. To be fair, some C64 disk only games were also guilty of this .
Every disc-based generation has been pretty similar, but it's gotten better over time.
I'd say Playstation/PSX was probably the worst because it was the generation where developers were still figuring out how best to load stuff. In subsequent generations, especially by the PS3/360, even though the load times were bad, developers were adept at hiding loading sequences through gameplay moments like crawling through bricks or opening doors. People complain about these sequences now, another "Lara Croft squeezing through rocks moment" but it's much better than going to a menu screen and staring at "loading....." which could take anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes, and then you wouldn't be sure if the game froze or not.
Load times on PSX games were horrible because the game frequently would load at first boot, a long loading time, and then for 3D games it would load between rooms. When you died, it'd load again, and frequently take as long as the initial load. Compare this to the PS2 which had huge, vast worlds and relatively quick loading times once the game loaded. Developers also figured out how to improve this within the generation over just a couple years. GTAIII had the very long loading time to launch the game, and then also loaded every time you went between islands. Vice City improved it a bit to prevent you from backing into a loading area by giving a small grace-location over the bridge in the center of the map that was available on both zones. By San Andreas it was pretty amazing that the entire game world could load initially and if you were going around the open world even in an airplane the world never loaded again, that was incredible.
Also any game that required you to swap a disc to load the next area is worse than anything we've had in the last 10 years. In MGS when you had to swap discs in that center area that was really rough especially if you backtracked wrong or were stuck on where to go next. Or Driver 2 for PSX, you had to insert Disc 1 to launch the game and get to the main menu, and then you'd go to load your progress and be prompted for Disc 2, you couldn't just launch the game off of Disc 2 and pick up where you left. I feel like there's a generation of gamers today who will never know how bad we had it and the shit we put up with 20 years ago, hahaha
Even recent games with notoriously long load times like Red Dead Redemption II, once the game loads, you're pretty much in the game world with minimal loading, mostly seamless transitions between gameplay and missions, pretty much instant reloads when you die. So that initial 2minute loading time is extremely long, but once you're in the game it's fairly rare to ever see another loading screen beyond a few seconds.
I never played C64 or Amiga, and didn't play much of the Philips CDI, Atari Jaguar, etc., to really comment on the loading times. Mostly thinking about the mainstream successful consoles.
I'd say Playstation/PSX was probably the worst because it was the generation where developers were still figuring out how best to load stuff. In subsequent generations, especially by the PS3/360, even though the load times were bad, developers were adept at hiding loading sequences through gameplay moments like crawling through bricks or opening doors. People complain about these sequences now, another "Lara Croft squeezing through rocks moment" but it's much better than going to a menu screen and staring at "loading....." which could take anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes, and then you wouldn't be sure if the game froze or not.
Load times on PSX games were horrible because the game frequently would load at first boot, a long loading time, and then for 3D games it would load between rooms. When you died, it'd load again, and frequently take as long as the initial load. Compare this to the PS2 which had huge, vast worlds and relatively quick loading times once the game loaded. Developers also figured out how to improve this within the generation over just a couple years. GTAIII had the very long loading time to launch the game, and then also loaded every time you went between islands. Vice City improved it a bit to prevent you from backing into a loading area by giving a small grace-location over the bridge in the center of the map that was available on both zones. By San Andreas it was pretty amazing that the entire game world could load initially and if you were going around the open world even in an airplane the world never loaded again, that was incredible.
Also any game that required you to swap a disc to load the next area is worse than anything we've had in the last 10 years. In MGS when you had to swap discs in that center area that was really rough especially if you backtracked wrong or were stuck on where to go next. Or Driver 2 for PSX, you had to insert Disc 1 to launch the game and get to the main menu, and then you'd go to load your progress and be prompted for Disc 2, you couldn't just launch the game off of Disc 2 and pick up where you left. I feel like there's a generation of gamers today who will never know how bad we had it and the shit we put up with 20 years ago, hahaha
Even recent games with notoriously long load times like Red Dead Redemption II, once the game loads, you're pretty much in the game world with minimal loading, mostly seamless transitions between gameplay and missions, pretty much instant reloads when you die. So that initial 2minute loading time is extremely long, but once you're in the game it's fairly rare to ever see another loading screen beyond a few seconds.
I never played C64 or Amiga, and didn't play much of the Philips CDI, Atari Jaguar, etc., to really comment on the loading times. Mostly thinking about the mainstream successful consoles.
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I remember 3DO had some really bad loading times, as well as the "EEE RRRR EEEE RRRRRRRR" sound every time it needed to read from the disc, which was all the time.
It's a shame C64 didn't have that many cartridge based games.
Out of the hundreds of games we had, I only had Terminator 2 and a multigame one with Freddy's flying Circus, flimbos quest, klax on cartridge.
Out of the hundreds of games we had, I only had Terminator 2 and a multigame one with Freddy's flying Circus, flimbos quest, klax on cartridge.
omg I'm literally howling
If I was ever playing this shit my mom or dad would pull the power cord from the wall
ZX Spectrum for me but seeing as I had nothing to compare them to at the time they were okay. You got that sweet loading screen and sounds - sweet if you were there of course - probably sounds awful to any youngsters. Of course, you couldn't be sure it would actually load so you'd rewind that sucker and try again. I loaded up Skyrim on my Xbox One S last night and forgot it was modded with 150 mods and it took a long ass time. PS3 games could be pretty slow from what I remember. Ah, it's all relative I guess.
I'll never forget playing MGS4 at my grandparents house and them being so confused by what I was playing because the first 30 minutes was just Old Snake smoking a cigarette while the game installed.
I've never used a computer with a cassette drive. Believe it or not, I kinda feel like I missed out...
Anyways, stuffing 8gb of ram from a 5200rpm hdd was super shitty. Honestly, the ps4 graphics and capability would satisfy me for several more years. The load times were the only aspect I found to be in dire need of an upgrade. Sometimes I get through a 3 second load in Demons Souls and I like laugh out loud because I'm still not used to it and it's such a relief to have those long load times straight up banished.
Anyways, stuffing 8gb of ram from a 5200rpm hdd was super shitty. Honestly, the ps4 graphics and capability would satisfy me for several more years. The load times were the only aspect I found to be in dire need of an upgrade. Sometimes I get through a 3 second load in Demons Souls and I like laugh out loud because I'm still not used to it and it's such a relief to have those long load times straight up banished.
To me, the PS1 felt the worst because we never had to deal with loading times at all on consoles prior to that. I'm not saying it was the worst, but it was definitely the most jarring as someone who grew up with an Atari, NES and SNES.
Ignoring the super old stuff I'd say 360/PS3. I think loading times still could be a bit tedious on PS4/Xbox One, but every game was a mandated install so at least it was reading from the install. Where as back with the 360/PS3, some games still read from the disk directly, combine that with hd textures and it could get pretty bad.
I remember Soldier of Fortune on the Dreamcast had some pretty long load times so I googled it just now and this is the first thing that came up.
"One thing kills Soldier of Fortune for me; the load times. I played for one hour and 40 minutes for this review and 40 minutes of that was loading screens. I am not exaggerating. I sat and counted each loading screen and added them together and I had to collectively sit through 40 minutes of loading."
Sega Nerds Review
"One thing kills Soldier of Fortune for me; the load times. I played for one hour and 40 minutes for this review and 40 minutes of that was loading screens. I am not exaggerating. I sat and counted each loading screen and added them together and I had to collectively sit through 40 minutes of loading."
Sega Nerds Review
Actual game consoles- PS1 when whole game has to load on the fly from low speed CD-ROMs- the real answer- Commodore 64, or like-era pcs running shit from a 5 1/4 inch floppy. Turning it and just listing to it slowly read the disk.... tap...…...tap...…….tap...……….tap (5-10 minutes later enjoy your game)
Yeah but at least we were entertained with the sound of screeching.
Well, old floppy drives and 1x cd-rom players were pretty slow. I remember playing C&C on a 25mhz 2x speed cd-rom PC and goddamn loading took a long time.
But generations? I remember the 360 and PS3 were pretty slow. Mass Effect 2 took forever sometimes.
But generations? I remember the 360 and PS3 were pretty slow. Mass Effect 2 took forever sometimes.
I found the PS1 to be murder, although, I do remember loading a game of JumpMan on tape drive on a PET computer that basically took all of lunchtime in like 3rd grade.
PS1 load times basically turned me off of the playstation brand as a whole. I'm sure PS2 forward were less problematic, but by then I had gotten used to load times a bit. NES, SNES, and Genesis carts tho. Loved the lack of load times.
All in all, I hate optical discs for gaming.
FAKE EDIT: Oooh. I forgot about my TGCD. It was horrible.
PS1 load times basically turned me off of the playstation brand as a whole. I'm sure PS2 forward were less problematic, but by then I had gotten used to load times a bit. NES, SNES, and Genesis carts tho. Loved the lack of load times.
All in all, I hate optical discs for gaming.
FAKE EDIT: Oooh. I forgot about my TGCD. It was horrible.