Quick saving and loading times increased greatly after 20~ hours

[Gringos]

Hi everyone!

 

After 20~ hours in Pillars, the game began to slow down considerably in loading times.

I'm 30 hours in right now and the issue persists after computer restart.

 

I like to save often. When I saved in early hours of the game it took about a second - now it's up to 6 seconds per save.

Loading screens take about 10 seconds+ now. Going through 4 loading screens of purely waiting to advance a quest became the most annoying thing.

Does anyone have a clue how I can get the load times back down again?

 

My specs:

Windows 7

Intel Core i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX960

16GB RAM

 

Edit: Here's my latest quicksave

Since the upload cap is 1mb here, had to host somewhere else

Edited March 28, 2015 by Gringos

[Ozrick]

Again, unplayable with V 3.01.977

 

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B5A187BB7E84FB4D!1658&authkey=!ALlNGHIDLR9evwc&ithint=file%2c7z

 

Loading times between 35 to 65 seconds

Saving times between 3 to 7 seconds

 

How many affected players does it take to have this fixed?

[Sup3rman]

I'm really enjoying the game right now again. I'm on my second complete playthrough, this time with white march I+II. The only thing that really bothers me are the load times when entering new areas or just little houses. It takes up to 20 sec or more each time ! In a longer playsession I often think about stop playing because it's no fun wasting time staring at the load screen.

I tried to reduce the amount of savegames....i have it installed on SSD - nothing helps.

So, is there even a way to get rid of these high load times? Is it an engine problem? 

I don't think the developers will take any effort in that matter anymore - the game is fully released, minor patches i guess... but please let us know!?

[pagulhan]

I installed PoE on a large sdd (ssd works the way capacity = speed). It looks like loading times are siginificantly faster.

[makoshells]

I deleted other files from my system drive SSD until I had 25% free available space on the SSD (now approx 60GB are free). 

Sadly, it did not reduce my area transition load time by even one second, still takes 25 seconds. 

 

Still hoping for developer response. 

[DorianGray]

I deleted all my saves, had a ton, now just the auto and quick, even reinstalled, still the same wait.

I have done the same for the same exact reasons... still encountered a lag on game loading and any time a new map is loaded.

 

For me, at 1st the game performs fine.  But then after around 20 hrs of game time, I notice a sudden decrease in loading performance where time a new map is loaded (like changing levels in a dungeon or exiting a city map), times take as long as 40 secs +.

 

It doesn't take too many of these before you lose interest in the game and quit for the night.

 

And I have a reasonably fast gaming system recently issued by SMU Guildhall for game development purposes:

 

Processor: Intel i7-4720HQ @ 2.60 GHz ( 4 Cores, 8 Logical processors )

Memory: 16.0 GB DDR3

Disk C: Samsung SSD PM851 512GB

Disk D: 1 TB SSD (i forget the manufacturer)

Video 1: Intel® HD Graphics 4600

Video 2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M (I have PoE configured to use this video card)

 

I cannot imagine a reasonable explanation that should require 40+ seconds to load a new game screen.

[theBalthazar]

Same problem...

 

The problem persist.

 

Start of the game : 4 sec.

 

In end game, its horrible to load. ~15 sec.

Edited March 12, 2016 by theBalthazar

[the_only_normal_1]

I have just bought this game after hearing all the rave reviews on it. Really enjoying the beginning, but am really not enjoying the load times. More than a little let down to see this is a longstanding issue with apparently no direct developer support or response (!?). Surely if this many people are complaining about this issue here, many more are experiencing it and either dropping the game, not recommending it, or playing through it with grit teeth. Let's get a reply already!

[Ozrick]

Personally I dropped the game. It is a pity since the game is great. I am about 30 hours far in the game and loading times are horrible.

 

Can we please have an update on this? Can we still hope for a fix?

[epu]

I gave up in October. I'm sorry to see it hasn't been addressed yet; I am the best market for this product (a patient RPG lover who grinds through and replays for content, and has worked on a game before), and I haven't revisited the title or bought add-ons. And I have a lot of patience. But I have a family, and only time to play a small number of games annually to the length of play hours they deserve.

 

Some thoughts;

 

The level save menu is a different problem from the level data / persistent item problem. Probably the level save menu is an easier fix; cap the number of save slots to 10. Or work harder to make an index that loads quickly async. There's probably a way to engineer it. But either way, users would never encounter long lists and multiple-minute save menu entry times (the first load of the save menu to display the saves themselves).

 

The persistent item problem is harder, because it degrades over time; as the complexity of the save game requirements skyrockets, you still need access to all the things you've ever touched - they control the game state going forward, so their status can be updated (or used to inform what dialog is available) whenever you go visit something. I'm sure the team has already made hard tradeoffs here. Maybe they'd have to be harder tradeoffs that make the story unsatisfying (make story bottle necks, where you toss out all but a few flags, but now dialog for the people you re-interact with is no longer custom to that play-through). Or discard entire scenarios or maps once you make a decision, so they carry fewer data points down to the end-game. But would that feel real and immersive? Maybe those decisions/flags are stored in multiple text files instead of a faster database or in-memory filesystem, and speeding it up is too risky or too much engineering. Can they afford to re-engineer something as basic as saving/loading?

 

I can appreciate that making games is hard, and the tradeoffs are hard. If we, the consumer, are paying for awesome writing and art, it might mean less money on engineering, or spending that engineering on unity bugs instead of load/save features. Maybe developers have rolled some of those engineers forward to work on another project, or to improve the engine and tools features for development, and can't fund more engineering on low priority issues on an already-shipped title. All of those things happen, and we don't get to see every piece of that.

 

Usually we just get the game.

 

I would ask you, developers: please, rather than sell new material, ensure your next title's load/save system is snappy and responsive. Solve the persistent data/items problem better, or make a different tradeoff that makes it so we see your entire game and experience the entire story (and as many branches of it as we are able to). Because the whole team made it, and even the end game deserves to be enjoyed for the developers who made those final encounters, and the customers who are completion-ists.

 

I don't mean to be an apologist for the developers. Developers, I love your game, you should be proud of it.

But these loading flaws are there. In a better world, they should be fixed.

Beyond gently asking, it's out of my control.

 

Thanks for reading, and sorry about the length.

As your fan, I feel strongly about this.

[epu]

All that blather, but nothing but my own selfish time management is keeping me from completing the game. I wonder what stats look like (Number of owners, percent completes).

[Atreiden]

Damn had hoped to find a solution for this in the thread. Has Obsidian acknowledge it yet?

[RobotMan]

Just returned to the game after a bit of a pause (got the new expansions). my computer is a nvme SSD/64Gb RAM/gtx1080 powerhouse and the game takes for ever to load. I stopped playing at version 2 of the game when it it used to load/play fine.

 

Now returning at version 3 and it so slow to load saves/enter areas. Please please fix this.

 

Will starting a character fix this? My current character/game was created at initial release of PoE.

[CJQ]

I bought Pillars in April 2015 and initially was delighted with it. By late May, I was forced to stop playing the game. The Save Fiile sizes had become so bloated (40 times the inital save file) which may be reason why the corresponding Load time were now a joke (taking more than 3 mintes to load).

 

I tried every suggestion I saw on the forums with no improvement. Playing the game was unbearable and I gave up in despair.

 

18 months later with a newly built PC I reinstalled the game. Unbelievable the same situation is still occurring. With less than 80 hours of play , saves are taking over 2 minutes. I have checked all the settings I can find on Steam and other things on the PC but am unable to get an improvement.

 

Is this a bug in the game - a problem with Steam - an inherent setting in Windows 7 or what? My PC can manage all other recent RPG without a problem

 

I am now stuck a second fatl error. I have been landed with a Party Management Bug screwing up the game as well. According to postings this situation was reported months ago but everyone who triggers it  are completely stuffed as a result.

 

There is little point for any company to release a brilliant "Game of the Year "when many players are reporting they are  unable to progress much more than a third of the way through the game before it falls over. Failing to resolve these unsolved issues are spoiling Obsidian's reputation

[mariusz]

Unfortunately I need to join the complains

I'm playing white march now (113 hours played in total, just started campaign from WM Part I). And the load times are terrible.
Here is my save game if developers would like to try and test it (I have polish language, hope it doesn't matter):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfyxf4k7tj90grb/bddbdfd3e6484da39424e57afc24a5d6%2018553236%20Krzepa.savegame?dl=0

On right I have tavern and on left some house. This are my load time (measures with a stopper):

3 seconds for quick save
26 seconds to load quick save
15 second to enter tavern
18 seconds to leave tawern
13 seconds to enter house of Renegilda
17 seconds to leave house of Renegilda

And I have SSD drive. I can't imagine to play this on normal hard drive...

This times are really ruining the gameplay. I know that PoE is probably considered a "finished" game but this REALLY need to be fixes. You created great game but you can't play it after you play too long (and if you want to play DLC then you probably have a lot of hours played).

There are many people that experience this. Please, investigate it and fix it. We can't play this great game even on good machines. We don't mind how you fix it (I'm not a gamedev, maybe you can have some ugly workaround and "load" nearby locations before we enter them, some kind of heuristic that would increase memory usage, but load times would be better. I guess a lot of people have a lot of free RAM to spear. This is just a guess. The point is: please fix it, so at least it would work well on "good" machines.)


Here is my computer specification:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
i5-4690K CPU @ 3.50GHz
16 GB DDR3
Crucial SSD MX100 256GB 2,5" (CT256MX100SSD1)

I can play Witcher 3 on Ultra...

[FIL97-4nAj-ycWe-PEPr-Ylc]

Hello,

I'm joining the guys that complain...

 

At time, Baldur's Gate using HDD was faster to load areas such as Tavern than Pillar of Eternity on SSD....

That's abnormal and its break the game.

 

And now there is a Pillar of Eternity II announced ... and I can only hope someone at Obsidian will have the guts to fix this issue in PoE II then backport it to PoE.

 

Using Process Monitor, I've seen it was writing to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Obsidian Entertainment\Pillars of Eternity\CurrentGame\MobileObjects.save and it took 30 seconds.

This other topics speak about stuff sold to merchant : http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73986-chanter-rime-and-frost-traps-get-saved-causing-mobileobjectssave-to-grow-out-of-control/page-3

 

And effectively, every time I beat an enemy I sold its stuff

The game should improve by making random garbage items dispersal - that's what the economy is for

Edited March 5, 2017 by FIL97-4nAj-ycWe-PEPr-Ylc

[gabocaba]

Hi everyone! Has this issue been solved? Sadly I dropped the game years ago after hours of playing because the loading times had become unbearable... Anyone know if this is fixed by 2022? Does the sequel have the same issue? Thanks!