Vampire: Bloodlines Takes the "Suck" Out of Loading Screens
By:
William Thompson
|
September 13, 2011, 8:23 pm

I spent the past weekend playing the excessively punctuated Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines because a friend gifted it to me with enthusiastic recommendations.  Now, understand: vampires aren’t normally my thing. Anne Rice never made it onto my bookshelf, and the only part of True Blood that I really like is the opening. I have nothing against the supernatural; if they were just immortal, smooth-talking people who wanted to bring the cape back in style, I’d have no problems with them.  It’s just that they’re so sad about it.  So, I went into Vampire: The Masquerade expecting a lot of emo characters whining about the burdens of immortality and how they long -- oh, how they long! -- to see the sun again.

 

If there was whining, I hardly noticed, as I was too wrapped up in an amazing game. It’s great for a lot of reasons, though some of them more obvious than others.  The first time I backhanded someone and the force of the blow sent them crashing through a window brought a smile to my face, for instance.  But what really impressed me were the loading screens.

Now, now -- take your cursor off the Back button, please.  Give me a second to explain.  Loading screens get a bum rap among gamers, and understandably so. They pull you out of the action and either leave you sitting there reading the same tip for the tenth time or (and I’m looking at you Tenkaichi series) playing some ludicrous mini-game that makes your thumb hurt.  It’s not enough time to grab a sandwich, but just enough time to realize you want one.  

Developers have tried a dozen different ways to make loading less painful.  I personally didn’t mind Mass Effect’s infinite elevators, but I might be alone in that opinion. Many games claim a seamless world with no loading at all, but until that’s the standard, we’ll have to make the best with what we’ve got.  Bloodlines does that in a way that took me a few levels to figure out: it puts the loading screens in entirely the wrong places.
 
 
Let’s say you have a quest that involves walking down a long corridor with a door separating it into halves.  Conceptually, that divides the quest into two areas.  If you’re reading this article, I’m going to assume you’ve played a game or two and expect the loading screen will happen when you use the door.  That makes the most sense; it’s the most obvious place to divide the two zones.  Bloodlines takes advantage of your expectations and puts its loading screen in the hallway well before the door.  You go through the loading screen and then you’re back in the world, and when you open the door there is just more world beyond it.  You expected to have to load a new zone, and when you don’t, it makes the world seem larger than it is.  Bloodlines does this frequently, and it makes the city of nights feel more real and interconnected.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it really impressed me that Troika spent effort manipulating the player’s preconceptions about level design to make their own level designs better. Have any of you played something recently that made itself better by breaking the rules?

Let me know in the comments, and I’ll check back right after I get my Malkavian his new apartment.
Page URL:
blog comments powered by Disqus