Holy Never Ending Load Screens

[Netzach Sloth]

Do they cache nothing?

I mean seriously, why does everying always take so long to load?

I am honestly confused at how they've managed to do such a poor job here; I'm pretty sure they had to explicitly tell Unity not to cache things, there's no way that a modern commonly used engine doesn't have something we've been doing for decades baked in.

We have load screens when going to the world map, load screens when going into a building, load screens when leaving the tiny building, load screens when going to the building screen; I don't think I've ever played a game with so many load screens.

I have 32GB of RAM; use it please.

[Notabot187]

I don't have any issues with long load times. Certainly nothing as bad as the old infinity games. Then again I have a brand new computer with intel optane on top of having a decent amount of ram and a currently mostly empty HD.

[Krakenlord]

I know what you mean, the load times are a complete joke. They remind me of Playstation 1 load times. I don't see understand why games like Witcher and even other CRPGs have perfectly fine load times and more or less seamless transitions while this game seems to be on life support most of the time.

[Phoenix Jam]

One thing that certainly helps is to keep only a few saves, for some reason the save files are huge

[omegazeda]

loading times are long even on SSD

[Altumnus]

I've read reports of someone timing their load times on an HDD with a stopwatch, clocking over 6 minutes per load screen and over 13 minutes for loading a save.

Even on an SSD, it gives me time to get stuff done around the house. Kitchen sink is empty and clean. Clothes are washed, dried, folded, and put away. Bathroom's never been cleaner. If this was their intention, bravo. Bravo indeed.

[Netzach Sloth]

Originally posted by omegazeda:

loading times are long even on SSD

I've got a 970 Pro M.2 and I've had to turn the game off a couple times, because it hung up on the load screen.

It seems to get worse the longer I've played.

[odin442]

There are a lot of loading screens, yes. At first I thought it was just my bargain basement equipment, but based on the complaints I've seen around here, it's probably just an optimization issue. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I choose to hope they'll give the game at least a couple good passes for optimization once they've fixed the game breaking bugs I keep hearing about.

I love the game, though, don't get me wrong. Glad I bought it, looking forward to the days my schedule clears up enough that I can play more, loading screens or no.

[raubrey]

Any of the following can cause longer saves.

Not clearing out your Save Directory (limit the amount of saves)
Modding
Editing save files
Save Bloat or Corruption (look at save file size jump)
Relying on quicksave/autosave when bloated/corrupt
Background program/antivirus/sync/cloudsaves

The loading time can be annoying esp in Kingdom Management but in no way should it be minutes long.

Originally posted by Altumnus:

I've read reports of someone timing their load times on an HDD with a stopwatch, clocking over 6 minutes per load screen and over 13 minutes for loading a save.

Even on an SSD, it gives me time to get stuff done around the house. Kitchen sink is empty and clean. Clothes are washed, dried, folded, and put away. Bathroom's never been cleaner. If this was their intention, bravo. Bravo indeed.

[Netzach Sloth]

Originally posted by raubrey:

Any of the following can cause longer saves.

Not clearing out your Save Directory (limit the amount of saves)
Modding
Editing save files
Save Bloat or Corruption (look at save file size jump)
Relying on quicksave/autosave when bloated/corrupt
Background program/antivirus/sync/cloudsaves

The loading time can be annoying esp in Kingdom Management but in no way should it be minutes long.

Originally posted by Altumnus:

I've read reports of someone timing their load times on an HDD with a stopwatch, clocking over 6 minutes per load screen and over 13 minutes for loading a save.

Even on an SSD, it gives me time to get stuff done around the house. Kitchen sink is empty and clean. Clothes are washed, dried, folded, and put away. Bathroom's never been cleaner. If this was their intention, bravo. Bravo indeed.

With an m.2 SSD I see 11ish seconds to and from the world map while in the throne room; it's not minutes, but it is 22ish seconds that I get to see quite often.

[Elgroscriss]

Love people saying "I dont have that problem, it loads pretty fast" ...."oh but I do have a 8000$ computer with 8 cores"

But yea, loading timers are getting longer the farther you are in your game. Hell, I keep myself from going back to my throne room simply because loading my main square and then my throne room takes about 8 minutes total. I cant even spawn directly to my throne room anymore for some reason so I gotta go by my main square every time and it takes forever ....add to that the fact that you cant leave to the world map directly from your throne room ....its a pain in the ass.

I stopped playing for now in part for this. Im waiting for more fixes and patches before coming back to it. I love the game and the art in it but for now, Im tired of actually watching a load screen more often than I am actually playing.

[raubrey]

Originally posted by Netzach Sloth:

Originally posted by raubrey:

Any of the following can cause longer saves.

Not clearing out your Save Directory (limit the amount of saves)
Modding
Editing save files
Save Bloat or Corruption (look at save file size jump)
Relying on quicksave/autosave when bloated/corrupt
Background program/antivirus/sync/cloudsaves

The loading time can be annoying esp in Kingdom Management but in no way should it be minutes long.

With an m.2 SSD I see 11ish seconds to and from the world map while in the throne room; it's not minutes, but it is 22ish seconds that I get to see quite often.

That sounds about right.

Also for anyone having longer saves wanting to check for file bloat.
So far I've found the file size to be the Act number X 10K KB. (roughly)

Act 1 <10K Kb
Act 2 <20K Kb
Act 3 <30K Kb
Act 4 <40K Kb

Originally posted by Elgroscriss:

Love people saying "I dont have that problem, it loads pretty fast" ...."oh but I do have a 8000$ computer with 8 cores"

My computer is very modest (I'm due for an upgrade and only recently got SSD) so quit assuming. The game is not well optimized but anyone having excessively long load times likely has some other issue going on, including such I wrote above. People are terrible about neglecting to make hard save and not clearing out the save file directory or running other junk.

[Krakenlord]

I think the load times I had throughout the game were roughly 15-30 seconds long. I'm fine with 15 seconds even though it feels a bit long but when it's closing in on 30 seconds it's just unacceptable tbh. Maybe I'm uneducated and 30 seconds is perfectly fine, what do I know.

[Wintermist]

Yeah I have to agree it's a bit annoying with all the loading screens. Even on this fairly fast computer it feels slow compared to other games. I can live with it but it does annoy after a while.

Intel 4930k @3.9
32 GB RAM
SSD
980 Ti
Windows 10 64.

[Netzach Sloth]

Originally posted by raubrey:

Originally posted by Netzach Sloth:

With an m.2 SSD I see 11ish seconds to and from the world map while in the throne room; it's not minutes, but it is 22ish seconds that I get to see quite often.

That sounds about right.

Also for anyone having longer saves wanting to check for file bloat.
So far I've found the file size to be the Act number X 10K KB. (roughly)

Act 1 <10K Kb
Act 2 <20K Kb
Act 3 <30K Kb
Act 4 <40K Kb

Originally posted by Elgroscriss:

Love people saying "I dont have that problem, it loads pretty fast" ...."oh but I do have a 8000$ computer with 8 cores"

My computer is very modest (I'm due for an upgrade and only recently got SSD) so quit assuming. The game is not well optimized but anyone having excessively long load times likely has some other issue going on, including such I wrote above. People are terrible about neglecting to make hard save and not clearing out the save file directory or running other junk.

"People are terrible about neglecting to make hard save and not clearing out the save file directory or running other junk."

These things shouldn't be required; this game is "terrible" for expecting it of us.

Originally posted by Krakenlord:

I think the load times I had throughout the game were roughly 15-30 seconds long. I'm fine with 15 seconds even though it feels a bit long but when it's closing in on 30 seconds it's just unacceptable tbh. Maybe I'm uneducated and 30 seconds is perfectly fine, what do I know.

It's not really about the duration, it's the frequency; 15 seconds isn't bad, but when you're on the building screen deciding on what you have time to build, and decide you want to see the time limits on your Journal, you have to spend 15 seconds back to the management screen, then 15 seconds to the throne room, then once you've checked the journal, 15 seconds back to the management screen, and another 15 seconds to get back to the building screen.

[raubrey]

Many games will cause problems if you rely on autosaves and quicksaves. This is not that unique. So yes, it is up to the player to be wise with their saves or risk not only poor perfomrance but losing their game.

Also knowing that this is a general rule of thumb with Unity Games (not all but many) it helps to make the most out of it to minimize load time. Frequency is another issue and well-known.