Designing around Load Times

Since video game consoles have gone past the snes days and into the cd/dvd era load times have become a big problem in gaming. To sum things up they completely rip the player out of the environment and all the effort from the developers to engross a player in their environment have been lost because now they are waiting for the game to load the next area. It was thought that this generation with better hardware and installing games to the hard drive of the console this would no longer be a problem but it appears like it is here to stay.

A few different approaches have been used in the past to try and deal with load times. Certain games such as the Grand Theft Auto series prefer to have one long load time before the game even starts mixed in with a few shorter load times depending on the situation. This is good once your in the game but what gamer really wants to wait 3-4 minutes to play a game, usually when we want to play we want to play now. Another method consists of scattered load times throughout the level / area. Many maps for games are now being converted into loading zones so you might deal with many load screens that are not very long (5 seconds or so).  This method can be nice but at the same time depending on the load times it can be a problem. The goal is to never pull the player out of the game experience and be sure to never see a now loading screen.

Now UGO.com is claiming they have found the little black book of game design (which i would love to have) and for those of you that have not seen it I will sum it up for you.

The answer to the loading problem consists of doors and elevators. The way I interpret it is you basically need to try and keep the player in an area that has little demand on the console for a period of time so that you can load up the next area which is much more demanding. If you put a huge door in a level it will immediately grab the players attention, they will want to see whats on the other end of it and once they approach it you just open up the door very slowly to “build suspense” meanwhile your actually taking that time to load up the graphics intense area behind the door. Pretty well done in my opinion, next  time your playing a game pay attention for this you may notice that it happens more than you think (in good games).
This is how they described the situation:

FOR LOAD TIMES THAT ARE…        USE A…
Normal                                           Huge Freaking Door
Long                                                Slow Freaking Elevator
Very Long                                     Really Freaking Slow Elevator

Pretty simple philosophy. The thing that you need remember as a developer is to make the situation still interesting to the player. A few examples of this is in Mass Effect 2 during elevator rides your communicating with other members of your party so that you can still feel immersed in the game even though your not interacting at all. Another method could be using Bioshock as an example when these huge doors are opening or on an elevator it is a perfect time to play voice from Andrew Ryan speaking of how you can never ruin is creation or something to the like. The main point I am trying to get at is that you can’t just put your player on a 2 minute long escalator and expect it to be good just because you did not revert to a black screen with a loading bar on the bottom. Creativity is something that part of the industry is lacking at the moment, you have thousands of possibilities to load in the background while never allowing the player to know its happening.

Images and chart have been provided by UGO.com and their Little Black Book series. If you would like to see the original article click here.  I have intentions to follow this series of design choices they are going to be releasing considering I am an aspiring game designer as well as I would love to continue making posts on my thoughts on them!