Loading times! This is becoming the single biggest hindrance to enjoyment of game.

[Iankas]

 

Pretty much necessitating having SSD and pretty fast CPU lest one'd smash his head on the wall with frustration. 

I can tell you the SSD is no panacea with respect to the loading times either. Still taking 10 to 14 seconds per load screen.

 

 

Haha.

That is exactly what I wrote in this very thread a few days ago ( see below).

 

 

Man, I wish people would stop bleating "SSD SSD SSD"  as if it were a panacea to loading times problem.

(.. .snip ...)

Now as for myself, I have a Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD and loading time is somewhat annoying (15 - 20 seconds).

The SSD has a high burst of activity in the couple of seconds but after that the loading time is gated by my weak CPU (AMD A8-7600). It seems PoE only able to use up to 2 cores. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be improved by patches.

 

 

Basically : One has to have both fast SSD AND fast CPU to achieve a barely tolerable speed.

 

Crazy thing is you could play games like Shadow of Mordor which has huge and detailed 3D open world with superb graphics yet the loading time will be faster than PoE then after the initial load it will be almost seamless.

Edited April 20, 2015 by Iankas

[Crucis]

14 loading screens might have been simply been exaggeration to drive the point home.

 

But 14 screens are actually just 7 area transitions since he has to go back the same way.

3 screens to go up 2 levels then use Master Stair back to stronghold

2 screens to go sleep in your bed (or an inn)

2 screens to go back to stronghold courtyard

2 screens to go to a vendor with supplies then back to courtyard

3 screens to go back to the original level

 

That would be 12 loading screens. 10 if he slept at an inn which also sell supplies.

Either way, pretty ridiculous.

Pretty much necessitating having SSD and pretty fast CPU lest one'd smash his head on the wall with frustration. 

 

Or maybe more patience. 

[Hassat Hunter]

Can't say I noticed 1.0.4 loading faster, loaded savegame same size too. Though maybe you needed to re-save for the size-drop, didn't actually do that to check, don't want to boot the game now just for that.

Atleast I got the Stronghold achiev

[sparklecat]

I had the load times speeding up on new saves only under 1.04, yeah.

[Hassat Hunter]

Well, loaded save and then saved again to test 1.0.4, sadly it seemed only about 0.4MB was shaved on my savegame (still giving 7.2MB at the end)

 

Checking the Summoned(clone)'s they shaved off about half (from 4400 to 2000), but 2000 is probably still too much. Probably best saving with a new game rather than using an older save?

[zuperduperboi]

Sigh... we meet again, loading times. They say history repeats itself.

 

The way I view it, this issue has two parts:

 

1. Game design: instead of loading everything upon entering an area, each instance seems to be loaded individually. This means that all the houses in a town are loaded upon entry, and as you exit them, the town area is loaded. The sheer amount of loading screens is problematic in itself.

2. The length of said loading times. For me, they're about ~15-20 seconds. For some, they're even longer. Then for others, they're not so bad at all. What causes some people to have longer loading times than others is still something of a mystery.

 

It would be interesting to see how Obsidian developers react to this issue. Right now, there's a lot of frustrated players, and as far as I know, this issue has been given little attention. Course, while they're working hard on other stuff, they just might not be aware of the seriousness of this issue. With how good the game is, it drives me crazy to think that it's just not playable for a lot of people.

[Krajzen]

oh dear ten seconds is soooo long

 

It is a bit irritating when it happens every small house you want to explore in a city/village...

[Dinky Dino]

Well I won't lie when I dread going more and more into my play throughs because the more you play the longer it becomes then it's a problem. Not to mention I constantly have to plan routes to get the least amount of loading screens and forget running through my keep. When I forget something it's another long trek to retrieve it from the stash and having to go all the way back to an inn to rest ughh.

 

At least let us disable autosave since that' slows it down.

[Idleray]

I said it before and I'll say it again: I do not expect to be loading this much in an isometric rpg when I load other first person 3d games much faster.

 

If they can make things load faster with conventional 3d environments rather than the hand-drawn ones then I say toss out the hand drawn environments. No matter how pretty they are it's not worth the loading time hassle. Or maybe a compromise if there exists some way to turn down graphics settings.

[Gorbag]

 

2. The length of said loading times. For me, they're about ~15-20 seconds. For some, they're even longer. Then for others, they're not so bad at all. What causes some people to have longer loading times than others is still something of a mystery.

It's no mystery, its mostly CPU, RAM and the speed of your disk (SSDs, newer ones anyway, tend to read and transfer faster). Also the loading time (area transition) depends very much on the area you are trying to access. For example: if you go to Copperlane and try to enter one of the houses there (or The Goose and Fox), your loading time will be shorther. Once you go in, if you try to go back out to Copperlane, your loading time will be much longer (imo there's not a whole lot you can do there).

Also the time necessary to save and load from a save tend to be shorter in the beginning and longer near the end, as saves become more and more bloated (imo this is the process that needs enchancement).

 

I said it before and I'll say it again: I do not expect to be loading this much in an isometric rpg when I load other first person 3d games much faster.

It is a common misconception that 2D isometric games should load faster than fully 3D games. Actually a 2D game has a hell of a lot to load. And if you think that ditching the 2D environments would solve the problem, it might, but consider that you probably wouldn't be able to run PoE as it is (not to mention that Obs wouldn't be able to make it) at all if those areas weren't pre-rendered. 2D is gorgeous, budget-friendly and PC-friendly at the same time, and loading times are a relatively small price to pay for that (though they can be further optimized imo).

On a more positive side, if you intend to upgrade your PC in order to play high-end 3D games like the Witcher 3, going back to PoE, you'll notice that loading times have been at least halved. So, like it was with BG games, the problem will resolve itself in a couple of years.

[Horrorscope]

"It's no mystery, its mostly CPU, RAM and the speed of your disk"

 

And it doesn't matter if it is an entire area or a small little area, same speed. It is the game/engine, not peoples pc's for the most part. Something is off here, however doesn't seem like any improvements are coming here. And the save files aren't big at all.

[FlyinJ]

Ok, I just played this for the first time on my work computer, using the save from my home PC.

 

My work PC is lower spec than my home PC, but loading transitions took about 2-3 seconds. I ran all over the place to check this... going outside in defiance bay was the longest load time, it took 4 seconds.

 

On my home PC, loads can take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds.

 

What the heck is going on here?

 

Home PC: i5 3.1ghz 12 gig RAM 970 Win7 64

Work PC: i5 2.7ghz 8 gig RAM 770 Win7 64

 

Both have the latest Nvidia drivers

[zuperduperboi]

What the heck is going on here?

Actually doing work just got alot more difficult

 

Seriously though, this is the kind of foul sorcery which makes me disbelieve that the issue has a lot to do with hardware specs. The fact that some people get by using semi-decent computers, whilst people with really hi-end rigs are having issues. That would be the whole 'mystery' part I was referring to. I've yet to hear a satisfactory explanation for it.

[Iankas]

Ok, I just played this for the first time on my work computer, using the save from my home PC.

 

My work PC is lower spec than my home PC, but loading transitions took about 2-3 seconds. I ran all over the place to check this... going outside in defiance bay was the longest load time, it took 4 seconds.

 

On my home PC, loads can take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds.

 

What the heck is going on here?

 

Home PC: i5 3.1ghz 12 gig RAM 970 Win7 64

Work PC: i5 2.7ghz 8 gig RAM 770 Win7 64

 

 

Now this is an interesting one.

You have done your homework and check the obvious, right ?

 

Do both computers have storage medium with roughly the same speed ?

for example both have SSD of about equivalent performance like Sandisk Extreme Pro in one computer and Samsung 840 Pro in the other.

 

Are you sure both have nothing else going on that can slow them down ?

No compiling, virtual machine running, serving web site, torrenting, and the like.

 

Both have the same version and the same save game ?

IIRC people tell me the longer you play the longer the autosave and in consequence area transition will also take longer.

 

Did you check in Task Manager during load screen where the bottleneck is ?

CPU is the likeliest culprit but storage is a possibility if you're not on a good SSD.

SSD does become slower as it fills up but it shouldnt be this dramatic.

Edited June 2, 2015 by Iankas

[Ivonbeton]

What really helped me was to use the IE mod and disable autosaves. Now with the 1.06 update I have to wait till they update the IE mod though. I think this should really be an ingame feature. Disabling autosave for some strange reason lowered my loading times from 30s-60s to only 10-20s.