Loading After Swapping Characters
Here’s an annoyance that will soon be a thing of the past. Thanks to SSD drives, loading is becoming instantaneous even on consoles. The long load time might be a thing of the past, but it still totally annoys us whenever it appears in current gen (or older) games. Games like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed: Origins include an eagle companion — if your eagle strays too far away from you, you’ll have to settle in for a few seconds of loading whenever you swap back to your assassin.
The same problem persists in Watch Dogs: Legion — a game that’s all about swapping characters constantly. Even games like GTA5 have issues with character swapping; instead of driving around in the tricked-out super cars you’ve unlocked, they’ll appear in crappy basic models. And if we’re going really far back, the few seconds it takes to swap characters in Castlevania 3 is pretty nerve-wracking.
Hidden Loading Screens
The era of slowing walking while talking on the radio is almost over. Like my previous complaint, this extremely widespread phenomenon is mostly due to the slow loading of Unreal Engine 3 — an engine that saw widespread use in the PS3 / Xbox 360 era. Every game with this engine features tons of slowly walking, opening shutters with allies, or boosting friends up over ledges purely to mask load times.
Every single Gears of War game features these annoying little activities — and rip-offs like 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand keep them going. The original Mass Effect is a painful heavy-hitter when it comes to the masked loading screens — in those games, you’d just get stuck on incredibly slow elevators. Heck, even the Uncharted games have plenty of slowly-pushing open doors, turning cranks, or pausing to watch a cutscene. Actually, I like using cutscenes to mask loading times — anything that does that gets my stamp of approval.
Continue onto the next page for more minor things that just annoy us enough to make it on this list.
