What prevents....my immersion...and worries me.

I appreciate you sharing your feelings, dude, and trust me I can understand that.
I used to load my games from tapes, and that was a frustrating experience - imagine a 30-45 minutes loading time. Also consider that some loading screens/music were actually better than the game itself.

However, premature optimisation is generally bad and may cause huge delays in ambitious projects like this.
Imagine if they spent a few months/releases doing just that: optimising the current build to achieve a blazing 5 seconds loading time... and then Unity 5 comes out, and they have to spend another two months doing that all over again... and then they finally change all NPC animations with better ones and realise that it will break the NPC loading routines, so re-optimise again.

What I would suggest is a UI upgrade on the loading screens, similarly to what has been suggested above.

Lastly, I must add that I have no idea where the comparison to WoW comes from: a completely different game which does not even try to reach any level of immersion, and has extremely simple maps. It would be ridiculous if any WoW map took more than 10 seconds to load since there is very little data to load in the first place (loading an item's "description" is not comparable to loading an item's mesh, texture, shaders, lighting...).

 

Ehi Fox, i completely agree about Wow...like comparing apples and salmons...

I disagree, on a commercial side, about not optimizimg. We now reached Steam, this means we left the safe dock of hard core ppl, embarking on a journey full of sharks (press and not) that will try the game, find it terribly unoptimized and 2 minutes later starting the negative viral marketing stating that sota is 10 years later, preventing this way thousends of ppl from playing it. I saw this happening too many times, id like Sota to avoid such critics...

Ps
I remember the old times of "look for" searching..."found" ...but it was more then 30 years ago....

 

It doesn't work like that.

The writers working on dialogue and the artists working on models can't optimize how scenes are loaded. Should they stop making new content?

 

This is a low budget project. The good new is that this project is developed by enthusiastic people. I know they will optimize when the time is come

 

WHAT?! Low Budget?! It's 2mil+ and that's just with Backer Money, there's no risk for the developers other than looking bad, UNLESS they've invested their money, which I haven't heard yet if they have. Anyone know? I know Lord Brittish can fly into Space, so I know he has money

 

Discussing other people's finances is generally a little rude. But because he spent so much money going into space, he couldn't finish building Britannia Manor 3, which is still uncompleted. He may not have tons of wealth left. He has some personal financial involvement in that before the Kickstarter all expenses came out of his pocket.

Brian Fargo said the bare minimum budget for a SINGLE PLAYER AAA game is $25 million these days. Chris Roberts said it was more like $33 million.

Richard Garriott said he envisioned he'd need at least $5-$7 million to make episode 1.

Games like SWTOR cost $200 million for initial development. Yes, this game is low budget compared to the industry.

 

But this should NOT be compared to a AAA studio. This is an indie studio, or was I under the wrong impression? And it's not rude to discuss that the man went to outer space, if I know it...because it's public knowledge right? If he didn't want anyone to know, he could have built himself a rocket and flown up there himself without making a fuss about it

Those expecting this to be a AAA game with a AAA budget will be disappointed. Those expecting this to be a AAA game on a Indie budget will be extremely happy.

Just saying.

 

It is an indie studio, which is why he might be able to pull this off for $5-$7 million as opposed to $100 million plus that we might see for a large online, multiplayer game. But $5-$7 million is still a very tight budget for what they are trying to do.

You acted like $2 million was plenty. Name a single recent game that has pulled off what they're trying to do here on a budget like that.

 

Terraria

 

And many of Indie Game that never even got close to 2mil...I don't play single player games as much though...so it's hard for me to compare. But Terraria is close enough. With multiplayer elements.

 

You do realize that the budget for a 2D sidescroller isn't remotely comparable to a 3D game, right?

You might as well compare Tetris to Halo.

The recent Tomb Raider reboot doesn't have an MMO mode. It doesn't have persistent housing, crafting, or anything crazy like that. It is just a straight forward action game. And that cost $100 million to make.

 

I m 40 i nad the luck ofworking in the gaming industry for 15 years(Atari,mileston,Artifact Entertainment, microsoft) with three published MMO titles on my cv and i dont dare to say what has to do first this or that department, cause each project is different and each team has diff. priorities. I only share my vision from an obviously external point of view.

Kudos to you that it seems have got the knowledge.

 

And yet you said no content should be added until the engine is optimized to minimize load times. What should the rest of the team do in the mean time if they're supposed to stop creating content? Are the artists and writers going to instantly become master programmers?

 

Enderdrew, you are the man, it seems you've got replies for all.
Sorry i've got no time or will to reply anymore...Have fun Kudos for the 3106 (3107 with your next empty reply) messages...

 

You don't need to go ad hominem and attack me as a person.

You specifically called for the game to stop adding content until load times were optimized. I explained that not all game design assets are fungible. You explained that you've worked on 3 MMOs. If there were the case, you'd understand that not all assets are fungible.

Furthermore, you'd also understand that load screens are largely unavoidable in MMOs.

 

I read this and was like...I know that looks like Latin...and then I was like...Googling:

Definition of AD HOMINEM

1: appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect
2: marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made

Origin of AD HOMINEM

New Latin, literally, to the person
First Known Use: 1598

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ad hominem

 

I 100% DISAGREE. Now, is the technology there AS OF THIS MOMENT?! Probably not. But is it close? Yes. If not, we need to make it so.

There is no freaking reason that in 2015 we can't have a 100% persistent online world that updates real-time and has no load screen as you move from one area to the next. However, comma, if needed, there could be areas that implement the load screen in a very devious way that most people will easily overlook it (ships crossing the sea for example)

 

If it was possible, then games with $200 million dollar budgets would be pulling it off rather than giving us 2 minute load screens.

Aside from SSDs, hard drives just aren't that much faster than they were 10 years ago and that is the biggest problem. We want to load high resolution textures, 3d models, large levels, etc. The quality, quantity and size of those assets has to keep going up to maintain pace with the "next gen", but we don't want load times to increase despite the fact that hard drives are still largely the same speed.

I think there are some solutions not enough games use (such as just going full 64-bit all the time and just keeping more in RAM since RAM is more plentiful today).

 

Every game studio should have their servers running on 64bit Haswell/Xeon CPUs and SSDs! With DDR4 Ram. No excuses. Let's get the best for your servers so they run smoothly. Oh don't forget Tier 1 ISp.

 

It isn't the servers that have to load the assets from disk. Your client has to load and unload the assets from your disk. The server isn't keeping textures in memory because the server isn't rendering graphics.

If it was just a matter of buying faster servers, then games like WoW and SWTOR wouldn't have load screens.

Edit: When I was playing SWTOR every day I put the cache files on a RAM drive so they always stayed in RAM and it didn't have to load/unload from my hard drive and it really cut into load screen times. It was amazing.