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What games had the worst loading times?

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I remember reading a Game Informer article back in the day where people were complaining about loading times for Mortal Kombat on PS1. Apparently, whenever you transformed with Shang Tsung into another character it took like 2 seconds to load the new texture.

Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD was bad as well, with it taking up to 3 seconds to load in between matches.

I also remember watching a friend play the Chrono Trigger port for the PlayStation 1 and every time he went into the character inventory screen (which is a frequent thing in rpgs) it had something like a 10 second loading time. It was painful to watch.

Sad Jimmy Fallon GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
 
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I recently gave BattleTech another shot and the loading times are absolutely brutal. It takes nearly 2 minutes to load a save and enter the main hub before you've even done anything

Then loading into battles takes almost as long again. Instant uninstall unfortunately.
 
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Lost Odyssey took over 10 seconds to load a random battle IIRC. It felt like you were being punished every time you triggered one. Thankfully the encounter rate was reasonable.

FF IX was pretty awful in that regard as well.
 
I remember Bloodborne on release had some very bad loading screens. Not just they were long as fuck but all they displayed were the game's logo, and it wasn't until a bit later that they patched it to at least show some item's descriptions to make the wait more bearable.

Also GTA Online on the PS4 Pro. Hot damn. I could take a shit, roll a spliff and have a chat with the friends before the game finished loading. :goog_relieved:
 
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Diablo and X-COM: Terror from the Deep on the PS1.
I played on PC, but I did try them. X-com required the entire memory card too.

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Ps1 games for sure, felt like they had 5 minute load screens.

Recently, space marine 2 has really long loading screens. They are between 30 seconds to a minute.
 
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I recently gave BattleTech another shot and the loading times are absolutely brutal. It takes nearly 2 minutes to load a save and enter the main hub before you've even done anything

Then loading into battles takes almost as long again. Instant uninstall unfortunately.
what the tactics one on steam from the shadow run devs. have in in the backlog.. this sounds bad unless you have a low spec system?
 
None of these compete with soldiwr of fortune on the dreamcast
2 minutes of loading 30 second cut scene , 2 minutes of loading, 10 second cut scene 2 minutes of loading and so forth
 
The Total War: Warhammer games when loading a campaign or hitting "next turn". Faster storage helps this a lot but I swear they patched #3 last year and the same suddenly runs a lot better and loads a lot faster too.
 
what the tactics one on steam from the shadow run devs. have in in the backlog.. this sounds bad unless you have a low spec system?
It's this one:


I don't exactly have top of the line specs, but I kept reading posts from people with much better builds having the exact same issues. I tried looking for solutions but it honestly seems like the game just has notoriously bad loading times and performance problems for some players

The game is from April 24, 2018, and the last update was back in 2020. I've played plenty of far more demanding games without any issues, so I really don't think it's my hardware
 
It's this one:


I don't exactly have top of the line specs, but I kept reading posts from people with much better builds having the exact same issues. I tried looking for solutions but it honestly seems like the game just has notoriously bad loading times and performance problems for some players

The game is from April 24, 2018, and the last update was back in 2020. I've played plenty of far more demanding games without any issues, so I really don't think it's my hardware
yikes - sounds bad... will test to see if a 9800X3d with really fast drives will make any difference
 
Postal 2 on PC gave you enough time to make a cup of tea

Creation Engine games are absurd with the sheer number of loadings and the fact that they get progressively longer the more you play due to sheer number of strings in a late game save file.
 
Was going to say this:
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But honestly it took maybe 3 minutes to load a game from tape. For the size definitely the slowest - but not slowest overall.
 
My brother and I were so excited to play Half-Life 2 around the time it launched that we played it with a less than adequate PC.
I shit you not, every single loading screen lasted a solid 5 minutes.
Both of us completed the game several times under those conditions.
It's that good.
 
Lost Odyssey took over 10 seconds to load a random battle IIRC. It felt like you were being punished every time you triggered one. Thankfully the encounter rate was reasonable.

Playing Lost Odyssey before and after they started doing the NXE installs to hard drives was a revelation. Random battles which took 10+ seconds to load would load instantly over HDD.
 
I remember always being annoyed by the loading in Destiny 1. Specially since the only part of the game I liked was the crucible.
A long Loading for The Tower.
Then a long loading to get into orbit.
Then a long loading to get into a match.
Then a long loading to get back into orbit after every match.
If at any point you need to head back into the Tower it's another 2 long loading screens each time.
 
yikes - sounds bad... will test to see if a 9800X3d with really fast drives will make any difference
In theory, it should. I don't want to state the obvious, but honestly, I'd say buy it on Steam and just refund it if you end up having the same issues.

There are also a lot of great mods for it. I was mainly interested in the BTA 3062 overhaul. It's absolutely massive in terms of content (and even more loading lol)

Good luck, man if you decide to pull the trigger
 
MGS4 had to install and load in between chapters and I could outside for a smoke break, come back and it would still be loading. GTA 4 and Oblivion were also up there but not as bad as MGS 4.
 
You've never witnessed the horror of loading unless you've played Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the Amiga. I think there were 10+ floppy disks in the box that required constant swapping.

Going back to Spectrum 48K and C64 sometimes you'd be forced to piss around with a screw to get a game cassette to load.

Just rewinding a tape felt like forever. Check it out:

 
On my previous PC Crusader Kings 3 would take like 10-15 minutes to do the initial loading into the game every time. It was crazy. It wasn't even a bad computer, just something weird about how that game is coded. I think my new PC is either more close to what the programmers expected, or it just brute-forces its way through, because the load times are way better now.

I remember when it came out Wolfenstein the New Order, compared to its competitors, had really bad loading times, especially on ps3. A shooter shouldn't make you wait for that long every time you die, you should be able to be right back in it asap. Call of Duty's always understood that.
 
Was this ever fixed with the Xbox 360 HDD?
yeah it made a big improvement if you installed to HDD.

Hard to find a comparison anywhere but IIRC battle load times went from maybe 11-15 seconds down to ~5 seconds when I tried it on my OG 360 (that I got on launch day)

Gemini claims they dropped from 30-45 seconds down to 4-5 seconds but I don't remember them being that bad.
 
From the newer generations XCOM 2 had very long loadings on PS4 (with an hdd), especially late game. What's worse is that the game could still crash despite the wait.
 
I remember reading a Game Informer article back in the day where people were complaining about loading times for Mortal Kombat on PS1. Apparently, whenever you transformed with Shang Tsung into another character it took like 2 seconds to load the new texture.

Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD was bad as well, with it taking up to 3 seconds to load in between matches.

I also remember watching a friend play the Chrono Trigger port for the PlayStation 1 and every time he went into the character inventory screen (which is a frequent thing in rpgs) it had something like a 10 second loading time. It was painful to watch.

Sad Jimmy Fallon GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Oooh, 10 seconds, luxury

Daley Thompson on the Spectrum... 10-15 minutes
 
The cassette tape games are the "winners" of this particular competition.

For modern optical drive systems, I'm sure plenty of PS1 games were slow to load.
For me, the most annoyingly slow loading game was KOTOR 2 on OG Xbox. Because the areas were carved up into small clusters of rooms, so you'd have to load for two minutes, have one fight, then enter a door and start another two minute load. The whole game was like that.
 
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