5 Current Gen Games with Painfully Long Loading Screens

Bloodborne

FromSoftware’s PS4 exclusive Bloodborne was a critical and commercial darling that’s sure gone down as one of the games of this generation. Typical of the developer behind the iconic and seminal Souls series, Bloodborne featured superb combat and top-notch level design, all wrapped in a brooding, wickedly dark atmosphere. It was also punishingly, no, infuriatingly hard, which meant dying… a lot. But that wasn’t even the upsetting part, oh no. What was truly upsetting was having to wait endlessly for Bloodborne to load time after time in between each aggravating death.

It truly was the loading times that were almost worse than the deaths themselves. It’s one thing getting your ass handed to you, it’s quite another to have to sit there, red with anger, twiddling your thumbs patiently before having the chance to try again. Sometimes I think Souls games are like therapy, raising your adrenaline to panic-attack levels before teaching you to breathe, woosah, and keep your composure. But we didn’t need minute-or-two-long loading screen times for that, thank you very much. Luckily, a subsequent patch fixed the issue in the months after release.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

CD Projekt Red touted The Witcher 3 as an open-world fantasy RPG larger than Skyrim in the build-up to its launch, and all without the loading screens that were such an annoying part of Bethesda’s iconic title. That turned out to be only a half-truth in the end, with its main areas of Velen, Skellige, and Kaer Morhen all segregated by compulsory loading screens. By itself, the lack of a seamless open-world wasn’t actually a deal-breaker by any stretch of the imagination -only seldom would you travel from one area to the next in quick succession, and the size of each was so substantial and well-detailed that one hardly could complain. The pain was the amount of time each took to load when they did occur, and not just between areas, either.

Indeed, more than just an issue when traversing was the agonizing wait between deaths. The Witcher 3 wasn’t an easy game at all, and those playing on higher difficulties had to endure countless irritating waits in addition to fast travel loading times. Thankfully, this was just about the only problem in a game that was, by and large, a total triumph of aesthetic, design, and storytelling.

Fallout 4

Where The Witcher 3’s loading screens are intrusive only very occasionally when traversing the open-world, the same could not be said of Fallout 4. Still running on the archaic engine that powered Skyrim (which itself was likely an iteration of Oblivion before it), Fallout 4 still frustratingly required us to sit patiently at almost every opening of a door, entrance to a town, or hidden path to a dungeon. Seriously, I don’t know how many damn times I read about Power Armor and Bobi No-Nose, or how many times I rotated the information left, right, upside-down, and everything in between, but I can tell you that it got old… real fast. The whole sordid process was only more exacerbated by the fact that the game didn’t really run that well anyway, so I found myself scratching my head as to what all the waiting was for in the first place.

For all our sake’s, Bethesda, please make sure Fallout 5 is a modern, seamless open-world with as few loading screens as possible. I’ll take smaller dungeons and whatever other penalty needs be, but no more waiting.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V has seen virtually every record in the book and raised it, and five years after launch we’re still marveling at its presence in the NPD top 10 each month. Long loading screens certainly haven’t been enough to rain on the parade, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to complain about them anyway. I’ve just done some quick research for this piece to remind myself of the severity of the problem, and one guide reads: if your game has taken longer than five minutes to load, there may be a problem. Five minutes! You’ve got to be joking?

Look, I get it, Los Santos is a sprawling, hugely detailed open-world, and when you throw online into the mix, even powerful PC processors are going to start chugging, let alone a vanilla PS4, but come on. I can make a sandwich or two in that time, and run down the road to top up my supply of peanut butter. Roll on the next-generation, I say…

Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but there’s no doubt that Square Enix created a gorgeous open-world for us to get lost in. Boosting around with your bros on Chocobos, or relaxing in the Regalia listening to Prelude on full blast (as all cool J-Pop lookin’ dudes do) to the backdrop of awesome scenery and monsters of epic scale was all pretty special. But there were definitely some odd design choices, not least of which was the fast travel system.

Final Fantasy XV doesn’t just hit you with a single loading screen when you want to fast travel. Since you need to be in Regalia to actually fast travel in the first place, you’ll first have to fast travel to the Regalia. Heaven forbid you’re in a dungeon at the time, then it’s a case of fast traveling back to the entrance, then to the car, then to an outpost. All with their own long AF loading screens. Why, oh why, Square Enix? Surely just the one loading screen would have sufficed?