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[THIAGO DE ARAUJO MENDES]

I'm playing on xbox one and the loading screens are horrible, it takes more than a minute on the screens, any updates planned?

 

[AeonsLegend]

No?

[Boeroer]

It took me more than a minute to sidescroll that post. Love the playful sarcasm.

[Dyxx]

It's not possible to decrease those loading times, because it's the same engine as in PoE1.

But if I'm honest, I feel like those loading screens from PoE1 have been way worse.

I never thought about quitting a good game that often.

I still haven't thought this about PoE2

 

[Boeroer]

An SSD for your console would help a lot.

[Hayashi.226]

I'm playing on PC and the loading time, especially when loading a save in a new session, has always seemed abnormally long to me.

[Boeroer]

An SSD for your PC would help a lot.

I have one and the loading times are quite short. Also Deadfire uses asset streaming - PoE did not - so loading times should be shorter in general even without an SSD.

[Dyxx]

12 hours ago, Boeroer said:

An SSD for your console would help a lot.

A SSD for the Ps4 Pro yes.

But why pay that much money ?

I play on a regular PS4. Sometimes a loading screen takes two minutes.

That's sometimes annoying but most of the time I do something in the loading time. It would be fine if Versus Evil would make a fast travel system via map. 

I mean like it is when you reach for example Neketeka. You can choose then Queens Berth and then the Cartographer house.

The same system available from everywhere in a city would be great.

So it would be possible to skip a few loading screens which results in overall less loading time.

But I don't think something like this will happen 

[Boeroer]

17 minutes ago, Dyxx said:

A SSD for the Ps4 Pro yes.

But why pay that much money ?

Well it would upgrade your system for all games, not just this one. 

18 minutes ago, Dyxx said:

I play on a regular PS4. Sometimes a loading screen takes two minutes.
That's sometimes annoying but most of the time I do something in the loading time. It would be fine if Versus Evil would make a fast travel system via map. 

Yes, that would have been great. Not only for the console version but for PC as well. As a QoL feature that everybody would appreciate I assume. 

[Dyxx]

35 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Well it would upgrade your system for all games, not just this one. 

Yes, that would have been great. Not only for the console version but for PC as well. As a QoL feature that everybody would appreciate I assume. 

I suggest it on Discord to Versus Evil.

I don't have that high expectations or hope for it.

But who doesn't try doesn't know.

 

[thelee]

PoE1 also suffered from an issue where the more items you find, the bigger your saves bloat, causing loading times to become excessively long the longer you get into the game. Deadfire doesn't have that issue (I think in part because it dumps items that have been sold to vendors). On my pretty-nifty gaming PC Deadfire loads are pretty consistently on the order of seconds, whereas on the very same machine a late-game PoE1 save can literally take upwards of a minute. (I've mentioned before this is literally the primary reason I will never play PoE1 again now that I have Deadfire. Life is too short for long load screens, I get it.)

 

That being said, on PC there is a very weak fast-travel system where in cities you can directly click on the name of a landmark within a district (mostly useful for Nekataka, Port Maje, Dunnage, and to a very limited extent Tikawara/Sakuya) and when you travel to that district you'll warp directly into that landmark. Not sure if you can do this on console or if people already know about this, but even on my gaming PC it saves me a lot of tedium to be able to warp directly into e.g. Dark Cupboard or Radiant Court instead of having of first having to load in the district, walk a bit, and then load in the shop.

Edited April 15, 2020 by thelee

[Dyxx]

@thelee its the same on console.

But it would be nice if you could do that in the middle if the district or location.

I mean you are in the Bardatto house in Queens Berth, open the map and go directly to the sacred stairs into the temple of Berath.

I think it would be possible but all cutscene and scripted interactions had to be implemented to work properly.

I guess it's to much work and Versus Evil isn't interested in anymore than bug fixing and stabilization.

[thelee]

4 minutes ago, Dyxx said:

But it would be nice if you could do that in the middle if the district or location.

[...]

I think it would be possible but all cutscene and scripted interactions had to be implemented to work properly.

Yeah, I agree with both points. I don't think it's impossible to have done this - already in-game if there's supposed to be some very important scripted interaction, you're either blocked from accessing certain areas, or you get interrupted mid-travel. But it's definitely non-trivial.

[Dyxx]

15 minutes ago, thelee said:

Yeah, I agree with both points. I don't think it's impossible to have done this - already in-game if there's supposed to be some very important scripted interaction, you're either blocked from accessing certain areas, or you get interrupted mid-travel. But it's definitely non-trivial.

I'm no programmer or code-monkey but it shouldn't be much more then some if causes and boolean checks to keep it going.

[wih]

They need to allow fast travel from the map and then just tell the players that only using fast travel will cause some scripted interactions to not work. So take a stroll from time to time.

In principle, the best way for such a thing to be introduced is by a mod. But mods are unaccessible for console players, I assume. So it has to be part of the core game.

[AeonsLegend]

I'm not bothered by the loading times. It's like 10-12 seconds for me. And allowing fast travel from the map seems redundant. Just get an SSD and you're good. I mean if loading times are this bad in this game it's going to be bad in other games as well.

[Boeroer]

Not really. PoE's and Deadfire's Loading times are pretty unique on console (I mean uniquely bad - and on PC as well if you haven't an SSD - PoE's more than Deadfire's of course).

[AeonsLegend]

To be fair, it's a port to consoles so it's to be expected that not everything works well. Consoles are not PC's. Their games are built differently to work specifically with the hardware.

I also have an M2 SSD with 500.000 IOPS, 3400MB/s read and 2500MB/s write. Which is like ~2000 times faster than the PS4 Pro HDD. Yea it's pretty insane. Also not expensive anymore.

[Dyxx]

1 hour ago, AeonsLegend said:

To be fair, it's a port to consoles so it's to be expected that not everything works well. Consoles are not PC's. Their games are built differently to work specifically with the hardware.

I also have an M2 SSD with 500.000 IOPS, 3400MB/s read and 2500MB/s write. Which is like ~2000 times faster than the PS4 Pro HDD. Yea it's pretty insane. Also not expensive anymore.

When a game is ported to console I can expect it to be as good as the pc version because I give the same money for it as you as a PC user ! 

It would be the same the other way around, I think no one would say "ok this was a PS4 game so I'm fine if I only get 75% of the game working fine on my PC".

With PoE it's the Engine. Witcher 3 is a full 3D game with good graphics and it loads way faster then PoE2 with its 2D. 

There are enough games with high graphics for console witch have way less loading times.

[AeonsLegend]

1 minute ago, Dyxx said:

When a game is ported to console I can expect it to be as good as the pc version because I give the same money for it as you as a PC user ! 

It would be the same the other way around, I think no one would say "ok this was a PS4 game so I'm fine if I only get 75% of the game working fine on my PC".

With PoE it's the Engine. Witcher 3 is a full 3D game with good graphics and it loads way faster then PoE2 with its 2D. 

There are enough games with high graphics for console witch have way less loading times.

It's a port, not a complete build with engine that was created to work with the hardware. So if you're expecting it to be the same, then your expectations are way off. Consoles in general have pretty crappy stats when comparing them to modern PCs. They have a different focus on how to create the performance, but they cut costs to make it cheap. You can never ever expect a pc game to perform the same on a console. You can talk about how much money you spend on it, but that is also your choice. Some games perform ok when ported, some don't. 

And the other way around? Nope, because my PC is like 10 times more powerful than a PS4 Pro. And funnily enough PC games are always cheaper so I buy games that are on PS4 and buy them on PC for 40% less and get better performance.  Win. I saved so much money on my games that my way more expensive PC paid for itself. The only reason I use my PS4 controller now is on my PC to play games with a controller. My PS4 pro is just catching dust being useless and taking up space for no reason.

POE is not optimized, not even on PC. It's not a good engine in terms of performance. That's just how it is. It sucks. Although POE is not true isometric. It's actually 3D.

You can't compare Witcher to POE because Witcher was created with both PC and console in mind. POE was not. It was "ported". If anything you got lucky it's actually on console.

[Dyxx]

Sure a modern PC is way better than a PS4, no doubt about it.

That's why there's every few years a new console.

But I have to relay on my console cause I don't have a PC anymore and since wife and kids I don't have much time to play anyway. 

Maybe I play 4 games a year from start to finish, that's way way less then a few years before but now family comes first.

And if I'm honest I quite enjoy sitting on my couch playing a good CRPG, but no matter what you say I expect every port from PC to console to be quite as good as the "original".

I know I can't expect the same brilliant graphics on my PS4 than in your computer.

But everything else should be the same.

I exclude loading times of PoE1 and 2 cause that's a different story. 

About the 3D thing, I have in my mind that it has more 2D pre-rendered environment than actual 3D elements.

But that's not my piece of cake, I bet 

@Boeroer  or @thelee can say more about that

Edited April 16, 2020 by Dyxx

[AeonsLegend]

Definitely not a 2D prerendered environment. It's a full 3D environment.

[Boeroer]

It is not. It's prerendered 2D environment which is then handpainted over. There are 3D-objects in it though (trees, characters etc.). 

You can tell once you want to cast some line-of fire spells like Rolling Flame up or down a stairway: perspective doesn't work then because actually the environment is flat.

There's also some video footage where the devs rotate the camera and you can see how the environment (which is basically only a background) behaves then. Maybe I can find it. 

That's the main reason why the maps have to get reloaded (screen goes dark and then comes back again) if something of the environment changes. 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Boeroer

[thelee]

yeah, there were some dev updates where they actually showed it. they also talked about the difficulties of doing dynamic lighting and reflections in deadfire, because they basically have to do a lot of "fakery" since the world has no actual depth. it was actually astonishing to see one of these updates because it seemed like a whole lot of work to emulate the low-tech IE engine in a decent way. (Kind of reminds of the lego movie looking like being made completely of legos but having been made with top-of-the-line CGI rendering farms)

[AeonsLegend]

Well that's really interesting. Maybe even inefficient, but possible to give the idea of isometric. So what in this pic would be 3D and what isn't? I mean I can imagine the floor is 2D, but objects on it aren't as your character has to move around or interact with them and having them 2D would just not work.