From 2000s onwards? Well, I had a pretty poor PC so I remember Baldur's Gate 2 and Black & White having like 4min loads. And playing at 15-ish fps. Freezing every now and then.
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Which gen had the worst load times?
- Thread starter bell_hooks
- Start date
for the more modern consoles, ps3 always felt annoyingly slow to me. especially games like SSX where you might be re-trying something over and over and have to sit through loading each time for 20+ times
As bad as the cassettes were, one thing that I think should maybe be noted is that if you know you need to wait 10 minutes to load a game, it's not difficult to find something to do for 10 minutes, even in the early 1990s. You can watch TV, read a book, make some food, whatever. Most games would happily sit at the loaded screen waiting for you.
What was worse than a 10-minute load was games with involved loading processes. Like on C64 there were some games where you needed to load to a title screen, then zero the tape deck (so that you could more easily rewind to that point later if the game demanded it) and then start the game loading again, with each level then requiring a separate load. Some games needed you to turn the tape over or (rarely) use a different tape. Some games even told you to fast forward to a certain point on the tape (and different cassette drives measured tapes differently so that wasn't reliable).
Back when I had a C64 I very much preferred games with a long single load to games with involved loading processes that included the kind of nonsense above, even if they were technically sometimes shorter.
What was worse than a 10-minute load was games with involved loading processes. Like on C64 there were some games where you needed to load to a title screen, then zero the tape deck (so that you could more easily rewind to that point later if the game demanded it) and then start the game loading again, with each level then requiring a separate load. Some games needed you to turn the tape over or (rarely) use a different tape. Some games even told you to fast forward to a certain point on the tape (and different cassette drives measured tapes differently so that wasn't reliable).
Back when I had a C64 I very much preferred games with a long single load to games with involved loading processes that included the kind of nonsense above, even if they were technically sometimes shorter.
Odyssey was a strange one because if you were playing it near-constantly then loading almost wasn't a problem (it supported rest mode so getting back into the game at the same point you left off was near-instant), but for anyone doing weekly checks it was a bit of a loading nightmare, as that meant loading into the menu (~1 minute), loading into the game, fast travelling to the store to check the weekly items and grab weekly contracts, then fast travelling to wherever you needed to be to complete the contract. Each of those loads and fast travels would be over a minute (I think it averaged 70 seconds) so getting to the point where you were actually playing the game took maybe 5 minutes.
Yes, originally MGS4 needed to install each of its five chapters. That was three or four minutes each chapter, though it felt a bit longer. The reason for that was that Sony were limiting the amount of space that each game could take (which is why so many PS3 games had installs of around 5GB). MGS4 needed more so the workaround was to install ~5GB at a time.
Wasn't around for the cassette days, so it's PS3/360-era for me. Just before Skyrim came out, I got a pair of SSDs for my PC and the difference in Skyrim (and other games') load times was so huge that it made the consoles look glacial. The PS4 and XB1 era was just more of the same since it used the same atrocious drives, not helped by the huge memory pool upgrade.
I lived through the C64 cassette era, but it didn't bother me that much tbh. Probably because I had so few responsibilities and no other gaming experience to compare it with.
Later in life, when playing games on Amiga that came on 12 floppy disks or something though, that was frustrating. Walk a couple of rooms in a point and click game - uh oh, gotta change floppy! Slowly load game. Walk back a couple of rooms, but - oh no, change back to the previous floppy, slowly load game again.
I also remember playing the first Civilization on a Mac Classic II. Every time the AI opponents made their moves , I had to wait... a few minutes. lol
Later in life, when playing games on Amiga that came on 12 floppy disks or something though, that was frustrating. Walk a couple of rooms in a point and click game - uh oh, gotta change floppy! Slowly load game. Walk back a couple of rooms, but - oh no, change back to the previous floppy, slowly load game again.
I also remember playing the first Civilization on a Mac Classic II. Every time the AI opponents made their moves , I had to wait... a few minutes. lol
Cassette stuff was pretty bad. Sometimes you'd get an error and you would have to start over.
Amiga floppy disk loads were pretty bad.
But I don't really think of computers (8-bit, 1-bit, or PCs) as being part of 'generations'. I would guess that the PS3 load times off a bluray would be among the worst, as it's a slow machine with a high-capacity disk. Battlefield 3 on PS3 takes minutes to load.
Amiga floppy disk loads were pretty bad.
But I don't really think of computers (8-bit, 1-bit, or PCs) as being part of 'generations'. I would guess that the PS3 load times off a bluray would be among the worst, as it's a slow machine with a high-capacity disk. Battlefield 3 on PS3 takes minutes to load.
Yeah. Only correct answer. Hilarious reading posts about PS4 load times etc. Kids these days don't know they're born.