The first Jak & Daxter has no loading screens. If the player for whatever reason is going too fast for the game to keep up, Jak will slip and fall which is way more immersive. It also never happens unless you're trying to make it happen, like in a speedrun.

surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.

You would rather see a loading screen every 40ft than have them hide asset streaming?

Yes it's overused, but that just means they need to get a bit more clever with their slow-downs. I would take them over a loading screen any day.

I like that Dunkey's running joke is if it has some cave you need to squeeze into then that's how you know it's a AAA game

what pissed me off about Jedi fallen order was when they would put in an elevator to hide a loading screen, and then when you got to the end it would still stutter for a couple seconds to finish loading. don't make the elevator a real fixed distance dumbass, just make it a looping animation that continues arbitrarily until the loading is completely done

I was always under the impression that these were here specifically because loading screens broke immersion and were just as disruptive. And honestly I prefer it over a loading screen myself. God of War 2018 was one continuous camera shot with fade-to-white only when fast-travelling, it was immersive as fuck. And that was only possible because it wasn't chucking a loading screen in my face every time an area loaded.

If they're only there to bloat playtime they can get fucked, for sure, but I am a sucker for immersion.

You may have had your fill of shimmying on a ledge, but have you had your fill of shimmying on a ledge, and then a rock slips and you need to frantically press X?

My theory is that today's load times are the Xbox 360 era of graphics. Wait let me explain.

When the 360/PS3 came out, graphics were suddenly really good. But the industry didn't just want really good graphics, they wanted cinematic photorealism right now and the 360/PS3 weren't good enough for that.

So, we got many games in that generation full of brown filters, blurring, lens flares, and bloom effects in order to hide the fact that games still had visible polygons. They looked worse for it.

Today, load times are pretty small. But the industry wants load times to be non-existent right now, so they're using all of these scripted sequences to hide it. I suspect that, in hindsight, people will say that a lot of games from this generation had poor level design because of it. I definitely think that a lot of 360 games look bad because of their "cinematic" visual effects.

Besides masking loading, I think these are put in to break the pace in games. If all you’re doing is going from one fight to the next, your mind is a bit too locked in. Climbing is less effort on your mind, without making you pay attention to story.

I also found in games like Expedition 33, they help make the world feel more alive if you’re clambering through low caverns and climbing up cliffs. The way the verticality lends to better vistas is itself pretty valuable.

Oh, you'd love the Hololive game I played recently. You shimmy along the wall, sure, but you shimmy as a temporary 2D image projected onto the wall.

No not me. I love stealth mechanics.

One thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there's no guarantee that

especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers

the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.

Static loading screens don't have this problem.

I kind of like Fallout 4's approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It'll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there's something the player can fiddle with for a few seconds.

Walking sideways through a bookcase, crack in the wall, crevasse, is often to mask a load screen, as you suspect. I forget who coined it, but someone online observed that these are literally "load-bearing walls", and I've been calling them that ever since. In the case of Assassin's Creed, there used to be sort of a puzzle of "how do I get from here to there with only those observable handholds?" Perhaps that eroded over time as the series went on. The last one I finished was Unity, and I sampled Odyssey, but that wasn't a very vertical climbing game. Assassin's Creed came from Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell roots, one of which retains that traversal puzzle, and the other is a stealth game, where you have to get from one place to other either without touching the ground or without being in the light. I would argue Hitman's ledge-climbing fits the same bill that stealth games always have, so it's not out of place there. I can't speak to Sekiro or Jedi.

Unless it's a vent and I have a crowbar though, that's still great.

Time to barrel, sewer counter, squeeze score, etc

I see your squeezing through cracks and raise a long press a button to do an action. Jesus, if the action needs a certain amount of time to complete, and 99% of times it doesn't, just make a freaking animation while at it instead of making me press a damn button for 2 seconds.

I like them. Even if it doesn't hide a loading screen in a specific instance, as others have pointed out, it breaks up the pace. It's never very long and usually it makes me focus on some art, animation or music that I hadn't noticed or was taking for granted. It usually lasts a very small amount of time. I think our attention spans have just shrunk so much.

How did Sekiro get roped into this? I mean, sure it has ledge shimmying; but it's pretty much optional, except in the tutorial where it's needed to reach the kid the first time and then at the big snake for like a second before getting into the sedan.

I'm a couple of hours into the last of us 2, and I have already edged through a bunch of cracks. And done the ledge thing too. I don't hate it.

Final Fantasy 7R was so egregious with the shimmying loading screens but I blame Sony for using a 5400RPM shitty hard drive in the PS4.