Edit - In reference to Console versions of the game. ALSO, the main focus is on loading when entering small rooms or caves.

This has not been brought up yet (searched the site and couldn't find). Has anyone heard about loading times yet?

The load times in Oblivion were long. (Edit - Mostly noticeable when moving quickly from one door to the next in a city)

The load times in Fallout 3 were just as long, but bearable.

The load times in Fallout: New Vegas are VERY long, and unbearable. (Edit - Also crashes when loading or corrupt autosaves..... just terrible!)

The load times in Skyrim are ?????


I find myself NOT wanting to explore a building because I have to wait 30 seconds (IN FALLOUT NEW VEGAS!!) to explore the building in 15 seconds. It discourages exploration if you have to wait for a load screen every time you enter a small building or another part of the same area.

Thoughts?

It's not to horrible actually. but they could shorten it a little bit...

Cities were suppose to be open right?
At least that removes "some" loading screens.

If one played The Witcher, forever takes only a second.

I thought the load times weren't that long. They better keep it at those lengths you mention though. It's always surprising if you get dropped in a cave and you don't even really remember the moment and the circumstances wherein you got there.

Well, I find the load times of Oblivion pretty bearable. Maybe because I am used to load times of more than a minute in other games. Anyway, the lesser the time the better, of course, but there are other factors like stuttering or stability that I find way more important and could be worsened depending how much load time reduction is priorized. I would be hapy with load times a little longer than in Oblivion (like Morrowind for example).

Exactly! I forgot where I was going this weekend because of that!

I was playing Fallout: New Vegas and was switching back to watch the games this weekend.

I turned to the TV when I entered Camp McCarren and after the Jets scored, I switched back and it was STILL loading. It took 2 plays for the Jets to score. That is over 45 seconds!!

They have to be what they have to be I suppose. Just something you have to learn to live with. ( admittedly easier for someone my age who remembers loading Fort Apocalypse from a cassette onto the Commodore 64. )

Kinda early for speculation, dontcha think? I have Oblivion installed on my 360 harddrive. Loading screens on average are about 4 to 5 seconds as is, at least for me. The only thing faster is real life.

The load times in all of these are extremely short and about the same for all three games you mentioned on my current laptop which has an SSD and 16GB RAM (few seconds to load the game, 1-2 more seconds to load savegames, interior/exterior almost instantaneous), except I noticed when playing a heavily modded version of Oblivion the load is increased to 30-40 seconds.

the load time for The Witcher started taking a long time if there were a lot of save games in the directory, after removing most of them it is about the same as vanilla Oblivion.

Anticipayayation...it's making me wait....:whistle:

I've never really been put-off by loading screens :shrug: Maybe it's my original Wizardry game heritage where if something went badly, you cold always rip out the floppy during the read/write red light Or maybe the numerous "you must gather your party before venturing forth" warnings that I had in Baldur's Gates..

*enter obligatory bandwagon immersion statement here*

Oblivion load times are ok for me. Maybe only 5 seconds at the most.

Fallout 3 load times were about the same.

Fallout New Vegas was about the same for me as well. (I feel sorry for those who haven't installed New Vegas on their 360's hard drive yet)

Then again, I am on PC, so load times are pretty much a non-issue.

But I expect Skyrim's loading times to be around the same as all of Bethesda's titles.

The one thing I do hope for is that it doesn't have the loading hiccups in the middle of the game, when you're riding a horse around Cyrodiil and such. That was quite annoying and really took away from what little immersion vanilla Oblivion had.

Honestly, with an issue such as this shorter is always better. That's just self explanatory. Nobody WANTS to watch loading screens. However, I'm willing to accept them, almost without limit for an Elder Scrolls game.

That said I hope they're working on "on the fly loading" with this new engine to allow for more seamless worlds. I'd love a game where I just walk into a cave or building in realtime with no loading screen at all. Of course that is a major concept that I doubt I'll see for a while. But it's what try should be attempting to create.

I'm assuming you're referring to the console version? Because I barely noticed load times in New Vegas on the PC.


I don't mind load times in general if there's something to distract me (like a bit of lore to read etc). Even 10 seconds watching a little disc spin can drive me to despair though.

Eh? You lucky... The Witcher Enhanced Edition still takes like forever compared to Oblivion on my new rig.

I never found them an issue

Not to turn this into a vs issue but I'll assume you are referring to the console versions?

Concerning the PC, I saw huge gains in speed when I shifted to an SSD drive.

Loading new sections (into RAM) takes 2-3 seconds. If I enter, then leave a building it loads pretty much instantly with the info in the RAM already. So sweet!

Load times have to do with the disk/HDD speed (HDD being faster.) and the RAM. Seeing the consoles are RAM limited (Both speed and amount of.) there is not a whole lot of leeway in improving load times. I can see some improvement if the engine is well optimized but it still boils down to hardware resources in the end.

I'm hoping for Oblivion's load time. The load time in Oblivion was nothing compared to Morrowind. Sometimes I wouldn't know whether my Xbox had frozen or whether it was just taking forever to load Morrowind up.

On PC, loading times on vanilla have never been an issue for me, being perhaps a few seconds at most, so as long as they don't increase much I'll be fine. Modded loading times can be a tiny bit longer, most noticeably on game load, but that's not really a concern for consoles, and as wulfpup said, you can't load faster than you can read from your data source.

Even little longer than oblivions ... Is just worth to wait

If it takes too long, I guess I'll have to upgrade my PC. :biggrin:

Something around Oblivion's length would be fine to me. Of course, I think the load times would be much more bearable if you didn't have to sit there and read crappy gameplay tips that are covered in the manual. If they employed something like Morrowind's concept art on the other hand (where you could effectively always find some little detail of interest), I wouldn't mind.

While this is probably not yet possible with today's hardware, I'd prefer a massive 5 minute preload whenever I started up the game in return for no loading screens during gameplay: one big seamless world.

The load times in Oblivion were long? :blink: Pick any other game that has as much content and see how long it takes it to load. Seriously, one of the few good things about Oblivion's engine was how short the load times were.

It basically boils down to this. A game may be optimized to its maximum potential, but having a slow CD/DVD, HDD, CPU, GPU and/or slow RAM of your system are usually the real factors that decide the lenght of your loading times. From what I've been told it's all about bottlenecks. You might have the fastest CPU ever created, but pop in some substandard RAM or a HDD that takes ages to access and it's all for nothing. I guess that's why a lot of people handbuild their PC's so it performs at optimum efficiency, instead of these 'all-in-one' complete systems where the builders may have set you up with a few cheap components

They can try to optimize it for the consoles though so loading times will be as efficient as the hardware allows, but in the end it's the hardware (for both consoles and PC's) that matters in the end.

Won't it matter more so on your computer's specs? If you are using a SSD, the load will be little to none.