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Hero+

Re: BRING MASS EFFECT BACK

@mushashi7 wrote:

There is one thing I think is overdone, and that is the departure and arrival cutscenes showing the Tempest. Too much time is spend on these. These scenes are really nice designed and the Tempest is a beautiful vessel. But, well, how shall I put it? It feels as the entire game is an advertisement for the Tempest, so to speak. It tend to get boring looking at these cutscenes over and over again. Every time you travel you see them. Maybe short versions could have been used to avoid the feeling of repetition? I tend to become annoyed having to watch them so often.

@mushashi7 Those scenes are to mask loading screens. The issue is that they're timed for the current generation of consoles, which run on extremely outdated 5400RPM mechanical hard drives by default. If you have the game installed on an SSD, the videos are indeed a whole lot longer than it should take to load the map.

There is a PC mod that does exactly what you want: https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectandromeda/mods/467/

I wonder if this will change in the future for console version. The PlayStation 5 will have an NVMe drive and will be fully backwards compatible. A demo shows that Spider-Man's load times when fast traveling were reduced from 15 seconds to less than a second. I really hope, with PS5 in mind, that BioWare releases a patch for the PS4 version that makes these cinematics skippable.

2 Replies

mushashi7
6 years ago
@Fred_vdp
I suspected this. And after all it's better to look at the Tempest than a black screen?

I have the game installed on an HDD so I guess it's ok.

Some games are extremely fast loading. I remember Fallout 4 before they patches it. The maps loaded almost immeadiately. I guess it's all about good scripting?
Fred_vdp
Hero+
6 years ago
@mushashi7 wrote:

Some games are extremely fast loading. I remember Fallout 4 before they patches it. The maps loaded almost immeadiately. I guess it's all about good scripting?

Possibly. I noticed that Dragon Age Inquisition loads a lot of assets on the spot, which was a problem for me when I first played the game in 2014. Sometimes companion characters wouldn't be at their spot because they hadn't loaded in yet, so you had to leave the room and come back for them to pop up. The issue got away when I upgraded my graphics hardware and switched to an SSD.

I also noticed that load times in Frostbite games are significantly longer when Mantle is enabled as the API instead of DirectX. EA doesn't seem to use Mantle anymore, however, probably because it's an AMD feature and very few people use it.

Some more load time shenanigans that I found in Dragon Age Inquisition: 1. Disabling Origin in-game can make the initial startup take over a minute. 2. Applying a shortcut command to increase the framerate in cutscenes has the welcome side-effect of significantly reducing load times.

I didn't have any load time issues in Andromeda once I applied to shorter cinematic mod. Anthem, on the other hand, is a bit of a joke in that respect. Maybe I could try the Inquisition trick, but I have no interest in reinstalling Anthem, so I won't bother.