Game load time

[Sykes179]

If you're of a certain age like me you'll remember playing computer gams in the old days (on a C64 maybe) where you had to load the game up on a cassette player. It could take 15 minutes and involve turning the tape over or even more than one tape. There was a great turn based D-Day game (Crusade in Europe) as well simulators for a stealth bomber and an Apache attack helicopter.

Things moved on and games loaded much faster. But now it seems we've gone full circle and we're back to long load times where you have to set it loading and then go off and do something else while it loads.

 

[Futumch]

It's true. I remember the Amiga with it's multi-disk games. Cinemaware were notorious for their disk swapping. Team 17's project X, a 4-disk shoot-em-up. Don Bluth's "Dragon's Lair" which was something like 8 or 10 disks. The bad old days. Still, they had buckets of gameplay which sometimes seems lacking today.

As far as Civ 6 goes, I usually get myself a cup of coffee while Sean Bean natters away in the other room.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Given what this game is actually doing, the load times are absurd

 

[Socrates99]

My favorite was a turn based RPG called Tunnels of Doom. I think there were multiple cassettes and once you got far enough in the dungeon you had to load another cassette. Civ VI loads slow but I have to remind myself of the days I used to listen to "beeedoobeeepbeeepwawawbeeeepdoo..." for 10-15 mins.

 

[Miserable Old Git]

Since the new Launcher release a few days ago, it's a nonsense. Leave a huge map game resting in its window for an hour, and you come back to find you have a 5+ minute wait before the game comes to life. They need to roll back that release pronto, till thwy get performance back to where it was.

 

[the_sun]

True, Civ 6 needs quite long to load, and I usually use the time to prepare a slice of bread or something, but actually I recently had the impression that after the last patch the game loads faster than it used to.

By the way, I always delete all the files of the languages I don't play with (in the Base folder), and also all the language content that comes after the one I need (German) in all the DLC text files, so the files become much smaller. I think this helps to reduce the loading time. One has to repeat this after each update. (Didn't touch the original English language files, though. Those are in separate folders)

 

[auximenes77]

I remember the C64 days, and loading was definitely a project that took 10+ minutes for many of the games we were playing at the time.

LOAD *.*,8,1

 

[LMT]

I remember playing Adventure (Colossal Cave Adventure) on a Radio Shack TRS-80. Sometimes I feel like I waited less to get that game booted up than loading my current game in Civ VI.

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

I have these problems with CK3: It takes around 10-20 minutes to get to the main menu, and the computer has a chance of spontaneously shutting down for no bloody apparent reason. Ah, well... At least we have the bypass Aristos made.

Edit: By bypass, I mean the one for Civ 6.

 

[Kwami]

Have you all tried to bypass the launcher? The new launcher seems to negatively impact load times and performance.

I bypass the launcher. Unless I'm playing on a very large map, it's usually ready before Sean Bean finishes the generic first part of this intro.

 

[kryat]

SSDs help. Usually you can load the game before Sean Bean finishes his spiel.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I have these problems with CK3: It takes around 10-20 minutes to get to the main menu, and the computer has a chance of spontaneously shutting down for no bloody apparent reason. Ah, well... At least we have the bypass Aristos made.

Hold up

HALF AN HOUR

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

Hold up

HALF AN HOUR

I sometimes do things on my non-gaming computer while waiting, it takes that long sometimes.

 

[Aristos]

The C64 cassette player was to Hard Disks what Hard Disks are to SSDs.

So, move to SSD and you will see the difference. Do not overcomplicate things if you are happy with your machine, just use SATA SSDs.

 

[auximenes77]

Even with a SSD I feel like the load times are way too long. Back in the day in old Civs you could usually load games so quickly I was certain that there was something wrong with my machine when I first started playing Civ 6.

 

[Kwami]

Even with a SSD I feel like the load times are way too long. Back in the day in old Civs you could usually load games so quickly I was certain that there was something wrong with my machine when I first started playing Civ 6.

Like, 1 or 2 maybe? Even by 4, the load times started to get long. With 5, they were horrible and the turn timers were really bad.

 

[Chefofrats]

I have a 2020 mid-range gaming laptop (HP Omen 15), and with its SSD on a NVMe interface game load times are short, perhaps up to 20 seconds on larger maps.

I also have a 2014 PC with a SATA interface SSD, and the load times are much longer.

So while SSD itself makes a difference, how it connects to your motherboard is also important.

 

[auximenes77]

Like, 1 or 2 maybe? Even by 4, the load times started to get long. With 5, they were horrible and the turn timers were really bad.

I was thinking of Civ2 and Civ3. I remember save scumming Spy actions and I could reload the game almost instantly on a very crappy computer.

 

[Abaxial]

A thing I notice is that if I play Civ 6 for a while, then exit and do something else, then come back and start it up again, it is much quicker to load the second time.

 

[Hans Castorp]

Agreed, load time is probably the single biggest negative with the game for me.