Baldur's Gate 3 - In Development ?

I've played 123 hours according to Steam and haven't been annoyed by load screens. Are you restarting your computer? That seems to help. The longest one I have is about 7 seconds going into or out of the throne room. The rest are fine for me.

Found an older article about game load times, and the reason why.

Link - https://kotaku.com/why-games-still-h…mes-1795548921

Oftentimes, developers don’t even know their own game well enough to effectively finesse the load times until near the end of a development cycle. Game development is made up of countless moving pieces, each of which is on the verge of catching on fire at any given moment. It’s a series of trade-offs. Implementing one thing over here might cause longer loading times or crashing bugs over there. It depends on the game engine, too. Some engines handle the particularities of certain loading techniques better than others, and most general-purpose game engines are built before developers really know how their particular game will turn out. There’s guesswork involved, and those guesses don’t always pan out.

To avoid breaking stuff, developers typically like to have the content of their games locked in before they start surgically slicing away at things like load times. Problem is, that doesn’t usually happen until near the end of development, when there’s just a pinch of sand left in the hourglass. Developers can only address so many problems before it’s time to send a game off to certification and then release. And load times aren’t the highest thing on the priority list.

“When you enter the home stretch to ship a game, you take stock of all the problems it has and prioritize each based on the costs and benefits of fixing [or] improving it,” JP LeBreton, a designer who has worked on games like BioShock and Spacebase DF-9, said in an email. “For launch, devs often prioritize stability—making sure the game never crashes, and is fully playable/completable—over performance.”

Originally Posted by TheRealFluent
I've played 123 hours according to Steam and haven't been annoyed by load screens. Are you restarting your computer? That seems to help. The longest one I have is about 7 seconds going into or out of the throne room. The rest are fine for me.

I seem to be the unlucky one with every Unity RPG game released. The small percentage that gets, and still has longer load times & leaks. It freaking sucks I tell ya.

Though based on Steam, and Meta-critic I'm not the only one.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Found an older article about game load times, and the reason why.

Link - https://kotaku.com/why-games-still-h…mes-1795548921
I seem to be the unlucky one with every Unity RPG game released. The small percentage that gets, and still has longer load times & leaks. It freaking sucks I yell ya.

Though based on Steam, and Meta-critic I'm not the only one.

Thats why you get an I7 processor. Unity games are CPU bound unlike most engines.

Yea, I never had any trouble with Wasteland 2, and I know its Unity. It ran very smoothly. No long loading times or issues that I can recall.

I do have an I7 processor, so maybe that is part of it. I don't have a SSD though, and want to get one. I know with a lot of today's games, it can make a big difference.

Originally Posted by Silver
Thats why you get an I7 processor. Unity games are CPU bound unlike most engines.

Maybe but the latest AMD CPU's are similar if not a bit better in some areas. Still it sounds like a coding problem as all the hardware, and system specs are optimal.

Someone should do a survey to see if it really is a AMD vs Intel CPU problem.

I'd be very surprised if these big discrepancies have much to do with CPU speeds, unless you have a really low power system.

Originally Posted by Ripper
I'd be very surprised if these big discrepancies have much to do with CPU speeds, unless you have a really low power system.

Yep like we talked about before bad coding & the Unity Engine.

If you didn't play any of the Unity Enginge created RPGs recently, let me tell you this: I played PoE, Torment: TotN, Tyranny and this one (maybe I'm forgeting one).

Each and everyone of these games has problems with the loading times. A SSD won't do that much either. It doesn't even matter which platform you play on.

(I even played Torment on a PS4 & A PC).

The Unity Engine isn't made for games like this as it seems.

So the most important thing for the devs should be: Cutting loading screens via shortcut-transition.

I also see various forum threads about this issue.

Anyway I know there are some fixes that you can make in the unity engine to cut down a lot of loading times with just a few clicks. These type of problems should be a priority.

Yes, I remember talk about a bug in Unity causing some sort of network call during loading, which would then hang for ages waiting for a response. I do wonder if there's still some funny business going on - the differences in loading performance just don't seem to line up with huge differences in hardware.

BG3 will be a mobile card game co-developed by EA and Bethesda.

There. One sentence and I managed to piss off almost everyone.

Originally Posted by Caddy
BG3 will be a mobile card game co-developed by EA and Bethesda.

There. One sentence and I managed to piss off almost everyone.

Yep that sounds like something EA would do.

You only omitted you know it's what we really want despite complaining.

Originally Posted by Caddy
BG3 will be a mobile card game co-developed by EA and Bethesda.

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!

I started hearing "Quit playing games with my heart" (Backstreet boys) in my head when I read the topic of this newspost. Even after treading through the thread the damn song is still playing inside my skull.

When I think about it though, why Baldurs Gate 3? If just to cash in in the name then fine, but the story is finished so I hope they don't try to build on it in some convoluted way.

Another proper DnD game set in FR though? I'll take it. Don't know about the rulsesets except I wouldn't want it to be an early version, Baldurs Gate is pretty pale when in comes to character building compared to NwN or Kingmaker…

The original developer Bioware is still in production with large studios. Just shows how bad their last few singlepayer "RPG"s have been that no one is even bothering to mention them even as a joke.

Originally Posted by TomRon
Another proper DnD game set in FR though? I'll take it.

Guys, I have a radical new idea, just hear me out please!

Okay we got the FR settings with dozens of countries and regions, and hundreds of cities, right.

So I thought to myself how about a game, wait for it, set in Neverwinter and its vicinity, huh?

I always thought a new forgotten realms game ought to be set in Waterdeep. I guess that won't happen.

Originally Posted by TomRon
I started hearing "Quit playing games with my heart" (Backstreet boys) in my head when I read the topic of this newspost. Even after treading through the thread the damn song is still playing inside my skull.

When I think about it though, why Baldurs Gate 3? If just to cash in in the name then fine, but the story is finished so I hope they don't try to build on it in some convoluted way.

Another proper DnD game set in FR though? I'll take it. Don't know about the rulsesets except I wouldn't want it to be an early version, Baldurs Gate is pretty pale when in comes to character building compared to NwN or Kingmaker…

I think it is really just about the value of the name. I know I'd rather release an RPG called Baldur's Gate 3, than Sword Coast Legends, or similar. Beyond the name, I'd actually hope for as little connection to the original saga as possible, as trying to extend a finished story seems likely to be forced and clunky.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
I'm using a HD/SSD Hybrid drive Fluent.




The load times get worse the longer you play. Sounds like a memory leak.

Pathfinder is not the only game as most Unity RPGs have this problem.

Also various sites have talked about this problem and concluded it's due to coding.

This sums up Pathfinder: KingMaker.
Repeat for as long as you play.

Hybrids won't help that much, they have a small SSD area (8GB here) where the 'most used' content is stored (typically Windows files, some game files, etc), the rest is basically a normal HD.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
I seem to be the unlucky one with every Unity RPG game released. The small percentage that gets, and still has longer load times & leaks. It freaking sucks I tell ya.

It's not luck or a mystery, you said it yourself in your previous post. You're not using an SSD, that's your problem. The HDD/SSD "hybrid" drives aren't much better than an actual HDD. They're nothing at all like an SSD, and there's a world of difference there.

Here are CrystalDiskMark results for the FireCuda 3.5" SSHD and a Samsung 970 Evo SSD:

FireCuda: https://hddmag.com/wp-content/upload…ds-300x273.jpg
Samsung 970 Evo: http://www.cdrlabs.com/images/storie…70-EVO-CDM.png

Those results are literally night & day.

Anyway, I've played every major Unity RPG, and never had noticeably bad loading times in any of them that I recall. But I also haven't used any disks other than SSDs for 7-8 years now, which covers all those RPGs.

I don't recall ever have super long load times with a Unity engine game, but it's still a mediocre engine imo.

Unity uses way too much resources for producing such average looking visuals.

Originally Posted by vidder
Why not the guys from Pathfinder: Kingmaker? The engine could be used 1:1. "Just" implement the new rule set for 5e and maybe hire better writers: done.

Hoho, what a dreamer! When is writing ever a priority for a big studio? Though maybe the problem isn't spending the money on writers, but who they choose for Narrative Designer.

And what on earth is the point of a hybrid HD/SSD?? Doesn't it totally defeat the purpose of upgrading to SSD?