this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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It's there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it's simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. "Press any key to continue". It's not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn't count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same "You'll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game" screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It's a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren't allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don't know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
God I wish they wouldn't try to adhere to these awful requirements in PC games.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they're not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go "now let's remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!", I don't think devs typically have that much free time
It wouldn't be that hard. Devs already have to make all sorts of adjustments for different platforms
Getting rid of that screen would be a negligible improvement and also might mean getting rid of any unique art that some may indeed want to see.
And they are better off using their time to do those improvements rather than something inconsequential like removing the press to start screen.
The save warning is helpful for kids who don't get how game saves work yet.
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don't tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you "2min since your last save", but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
Seems pretty common in games with auto saves that they will show a little icon whenever they are doing it.
It's usually a really subtle and easy to miss icon though, especially in a game that otherwise demands all your attention.
IMO it's a good feature and it's a good thing it's required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary "interactive within 1 second" blanket rule, leading to this whole "press button to continue" workaround.
That's like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt... but it's a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that's still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn't check if it was accepting feedback.
Well that was educational. Thank you good sir or madam.
Neither of these things can be true, because they've been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I'm pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
https://blog.csdn.net/baozi3026/article/details/4272761
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn't in active use and had an "Insert Coin" flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just "insert coin" replaced with a "press start".
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it's just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Wouldn't just going straight to the main menu qualify as an "interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds"?
Yes, but you'd have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn't count.
TIL