Still very long load times, can't play like this :-(

[makoshells]

Hi, 

 

I love this game, the music, the feel, characters, the story and more. Amazing job, will buy every sequel and expansion in the future.

Bought the main game at release, I think + the season pass. 

 

However, the loading times are very frustrating.

 

I just Steam-downloaded and started 'The White March II' .. but after 10 minutes of playing, I just can't bring myself to continue.

 

I timed it. When I go from the Great Hall in Caed Nua to the courtyard area - it takes 25seconds to load.

I need this to take 2-3 seconds, that is the kind of speed I need for a pleasant experience. 

It's so long, I'm literally close to standing up and walking around the room, or reaching for my phone to browse the internet. 

 

You try looking at a loading screen for 25 seconds AFTER you loaded the game normally, just for a simple map transition. This can't be okay for you, this is no way to play a game. 

 

My rig is pretty good. 

Windows7 Pro, 64 Bit, SP1

 

Steam Version of game, updated today. But the problem has always been there.

I don't think it was like that in the beginning, but after I progressed a bit in the game, it got like this.

 

32GB Ram

i7-3930K @ 3.20 GHz (6-Core)

Samsung SSD 830

nVidia Geforce GTX 980 

 

23GB of free space available on system SSD.

 

I save a lot. My latest savegames are now 7.7mb big.

 

I have Avira and Zonealarm running concurrently, but I do not think it makes a difference. 

 

I really hoped it would be fixed with this new expansion. 

 

I understand very little about software engineering, but can't you just load the whole game into my ram? 

I have 32 GB of Ram and your game takes up 24GB at the moment. 

Can't you just load all the map files, or what the heck, everything into my ram? 

I would 100000% prefer to wait a few minutes when starting the game, if I can then play without all these interruptions during simple map transitions. 

 

Also, simply saving the game takes too long. And loading too. 

It should be instant, but it takes so many seconds, it takes me out of the experience. I actually dread pressing the saving-button.

 

Can you help me?

Thanks.

[Teucer]

It might be because you have a ton of saved game files. Try slimming it down to 10-15 saves (and keep it that many by saving over previous saves). That should help.

[makoshells]

Hi, 

 

Thanks for trying to help me out here. 

 

I backuped/moved all save files except the last 3. So in Pillars, there are now only 3 save games visible/available.

Then I disabled the Steam Cloud Synchronization and restarted Steam and Pillars. 

 

Still takes 24 seconds to load from Caed Nua Hall to Courtyard area.

And still takes 5.5 seconds to do a quicksave, which is also too long to have a normal gameflow. 

 

:-/ 

[makoshells]

Bump hoping for a developer response.

[Triscopic]

Sadly nothing, I see.

 

I too have the same problem. I never finished PoE, completing the main story up to the point of no return, but then heading off to do the White March Part 1. Even then I was getting long load/transition times (long enough that I was surfing the web on my laptop while waiting for my PC to load the next area), and was dreading anything the required me to go into houses (or god forbid, to a house's upper floor - aarrgh!). Eventually, after a relatively short amount of time in part 1, I just gave up, bought another game on steam and archived PoE.

 

With Part 2 out I thought "maybe they've attacked this issue" and have given it another brief go. Transition times are about 25 seconds (I timed them this time) which feels better than I remember, but is still shocking. Unsurprisingly, all the activity appears to be HDD related (CPU barely breaks 15% usage, memory usage is only @ 6gb for the whole system out of 12gb). Guess an SSD would help, but really, it's daft that I'd have to upgrade my SSD just to play this one game.