The Thaumaturge Has Made Me Realise Just How Much I Miss Loading Screens

Summary

Fast load times in modern games like Spider-Man 2 mean we miss out on thoughtful, detailed loading screens like in the past.
The Thaumaturge's beautiful loading screens offer lore about 1905 Warsaw, but load so quickly they're hard to appreciate fully.
While quick loading is great, the art and storytelling potential of loading screens are being lost as technology advances.

One of my fondest gaming memories from when I was a kid was sitting in front of the television, playing on my , and staring at the loading screens. There were a lot of them, because this was long before instantaneous load times were a thing♐ – I’d sit on my musty beanbag, finger pushing the right joystick, watching the 3D models spin and reading lore snippets I’d already seen tens of times before.

In a console generation where 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 boasts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:such quick loading times that fast travel is near instantaneous, there isn’t much reason to sit and stare at your television, swiveling models of items and characters and meditating on tips and lore the developers deign to feed us anymore. Nowadays, because PCs and consoles alike have gotten so powerful that load times are not such a significant issue anymore, we rarely see thoughtful, detailed load 💫screens for more than a second at a time.

I’ve been playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Thaumaturge lately, partly because 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I got it on sale recently and didn’t want to see it languish, partly because I love publisher 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:11 Bit Studio’s games, and partly because my colleague Ben Sledge 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:wrote about it so compellingly that I felt moved by the holy gamer spirit (or Rasputin’s ghost, maybe) to boot it up as soon as possible. I should be finishing as part of my journey to , but I have ADD, so here we are.

Hannibal Lecter with other characters from serial killer stories in the background

168澳洲幸运5开奖网: We Need More Serial Killer ♌Gameဣs

Movies like Longlegs and The Silence of the Lambs ar๊e extremely popular, but there aren't many big games about serial ki♊llers.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: 𒉰

The Thaumaturge is great on , so that’s where I’ve been playing it. It has these gorgeous loading screens with gꩵame tips and information about its Warsaw setting, but even on the Steam Deck, the game loads quickly🐻 enough that I can never finish reading the text before it blinks away.

First world problems, I know. My game loads too fast, boo hoo. But these loading screens are obviously made with lots of thought and detail, and I want to give them the attention they deserve. The art is beautiful, rendering 1905 Russian-occupied Warsaw with a close eye. The text is often in protagonist Wiktor Szulski’s voice, and it’s an opportunity to see his home city of Warsaw through his critical eyes after over a decade away.ও His observations about its filth, its stench, and its people frame the game’s historical setting through genuine perceptions and pains of the time. I’d go so far as to say it’s part of the storytelling.

Or rather, that it should be part of the storytelling. Each loading screen zips by so quickly that I’m 🎃left ♒without time to digest what it’s telling and showing me, so much so that I find myself actually wishing the game loaded more slowly, or at the very least that it prompted me to press a button to continue the game when it finishes, instead of whisking me away into the next thing.

Loading screens are often seen more as a hindrance than a feature nowadays – 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:people complained about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield’s loading screens because it stopped them from having an authentic space travel experience, and games are often marketed as being technically superior to others because of a lack of loading screens, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Space and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill 2.

I’m not going to say I wish games forced me to look at loading screens, but i𒉰t feels that as technology trucks along and keeps getting more powerful, the subtle art of a great loading screen is being lost along the way. Yay for lightning quick SSDs, but sometimes I just want to look at some concept art and really feel like I’m learning about the world I’m inhabiting right then. That’s more immersive to me than instant fast travel.