Recorded how long it takes for me to load Destiny 2, since it feels like an eternity before I can start actually doing stuff. Loading into the game itself is annoying, but the fact that Bungie brought back bounties that pretty much force you into the tower every time you load up the game exacerbates the issue. Everything in this game seems to take forever to load.

PS4 (from Dashboard):
1:34 before I can pick a character.
1:45 before I can use the director.
3:20 to load into the Tower to start the process of picking up the day's bounties.

Xbox (from Dashboard:
2:14 before I can pick a character.
2:44 before I can use the director.
5:51 to load into the Tower to start the process of picking up the day's bounties.

So yeh. About six minutes (if I'm lucky) before I can start the process of going to all of the vendors to check out the bounties. It often takes me way longer before it'll let me pick a character on Xbox.

I was discussing the loading times with Cheap, wondering how the PC community is doing on that end (Apparently there's no Trial version on PC, so I can't check it).
Either way, loading times on either console were nowhere near this bad during Year 1, so it's kind of annoying every time that I boot up the game (especially when I get invited to a Fireteam), and it doesn't help that other games can have you walking around their social spaces in under a minute and a half.

Oh my god, I thought I was losing my damn mind...back in November my somewhat decent PC irreparably snapped on me and I had to downgrade to a crappy snail-pace W7 from at least 10 years ago. I thought the terrible unresponsiveness and slowness of the computer was playing tricks on me with playing D2 on my Xbox!! I knew it had been taking longer and longer to access the pause menu and loading into stuff, even before FoTL! Crap like this, where weapons, items and players weren't even loading at all in public. It's even WORSE now—loading up the pause screen in D2 is now, somehow longer than D1. I get hit with a loading wall EVERY time I go somewhere. Fast travel has me sitting at a black screen for a good minute and a half while a public event just flies by. And going to the Tower is pretty much a full restroom break--for myself and my dog.

You're right, that's absolutely ridiculous. I haven't played in quite a while(since at least Solstice), so when I tried to infuse a weapon and found out I needed Glimmer, rocks, cores AND planetary items, I was furious! After the whole Gambit deal, I said I was on the fence about buying Forsaken. Now the fence has been knocked over, and I'm not paying to build it back up.

I could go on for hours and hours about how Bungie and Activision straight up Sonic Adventure 2'ed us, but my doctor told me to keep my blood pressure down. I'm just glad that I wasn't the only one experiencing this.

Honestly, I'm just going to keep my Destiny 2 playing limited to events such as this one, my other characters for when I get a better computer to use my capture card with, so I can do transcripts(how punctual, Morpheus) and maybe raid lairs if I can get a controller that works with my microphone. Bungie needs to fix problems like this and prevent themselves from losing players. Well, more players at least.

On the off-topic: nice background on your Xbox dashboard, looks cool. ;-)

Wow. So the Xbox loaf times are nearly TWICE the PS4 version? What could cause that? You on the One or the One X? I’d have thought they’d have been similar, or at least the One X coming out ahead.

But nobody cares about load times anymore, and if you complain they tell you that you just don’t understand:

https://destiny.bungie.org/forum/index.php?id=133935

Load times IN game. It's pretty annoying when I'm chasing a bounty for "Get [XX] kills in a strike..." but I'm having to wait 15-45 seconds to load the next section, meanwhile my teammates are clearing everyone out ahead of me.

Everything everyone has said, same deal. D2 was a little irritating at launch with load times approaching D1 end of life. Now? Now it's downright obnoxious.

I have my suspicions some of it is the difference between a One and a One X, but it wouldn't be this dramatic. I also have suspicions it's partly tied to being installed on an external drive. People in my fireteam regularly suggest I dump the game and reinstall it.

I am not keen on this suggestion for obvious reasons, nor should it be a thing I have to do to begin with.

Quick breakdown of my own:

2:38 from Press A to Character Select with model (it takes six seconds to load the model)
0:20 from Character Select to Earth Orbit (four additional seconds for my ship to load)
2:45 Earth Orbit to Tower

Inventory from Orbit: 4 seconds
Item load from Orbit: 6 seconds
Similar load times (at least today, right now) in the Tower

I feel like these times can easily be twice as long if I'm in a fireteam, and god help you if your connection isn't 110% happy with their servers. I've had to leave my fireteam and break to Orbit from the Tower before just to LOOK at my inventory in a timely fashion.

Someone was watching me play in the dreaming city, and I crossed a loading zone into the area with the oracle.

"Holy cow" he said. "There was NO loading? I'm on Xbox, and it freezes for like 10 seconds".

I've never had it stop other than a slight faction of a second hiccup. On the PS4 Pro with a 7200rpm drive. I would just in general be weary of anything external on USB. USB is not a good protocol, as it utilizes the CPU and is not Isochronous, unlike Firewire or Thunderbolt.

Someone was watching me play in the dreaming city, and I crossed a loading zone into the area with the oracle.

"Holy cow" he said. "There was NO loading? I'm on Xbox, and it freezes for like 10 seconds".

I've never had it stop other than a slight faction of a second hiccup. On the PS4 Pro with a 7200rpm drive. I would just in general be weary of anything external on USB. USB is not a good protocol, as it utilizes the CPU and is not Isochronous, unlike Firewire or Thunderbolt.

I know a couple people on Xbox have mentioned that section specifically (I do know they're not on the X). My X never has any problems (using the internal HD) right there. I assume PS players on Slims or day one PS4s probably also have problems. :(

That’s sort of odd, because the One X hard drive is awful. It’s a shit 5400 rpm drive. I don’t get hung up at that spot (although plenty of others I play with do), and I’m generally near the top of the party in load-in order when we go somewhere, but a good external blows it out of the water.

This was my life on the 360 during d1. It took 4 years to do anything.

PC is better in my experience. I feel like 20-45 seconds to log in 20-45 seconds to et to orbit. Loading into the tower can be long though, I wonder if that's a matchmaking issue.

Also: I always thought the order on bounties was backwards. It should be easier to pickup bounties from a UI, then you turn them in at the tower. I want to get right to the action, then I like having a bit of downtime after an intense activity. I'm also coming back to the cryptarch/Postmaster/eververse so I'm already there.

That’s sort of odd, because the One X hard drive is awful. It’s a shit 5400 rpm drive. I don’t get hung up at that spot (although plenty of others I play with do), and I’m generally near the top of the party in load-in order when we go somewhere, but a good external blows it out of the water.

Yeah. Now that I have an X I’d like to get a real fast external HD.

It’s amazing the things I can get done while Destiny loads between activities: feed the dogs, load the dishwasher, get a snack, answer an email, work on a project, read a news article, check up on the forums, clean up the house...

Seriously. I start Destiny or launch an activity, put down the controller, and go do something useful. It’s pretty ridiculous.

It’s amazing the things I can get done while Destiny loads between activities: feed the dogs, load the dishwasher, get a snack, answer an email, work on a project, read a news article, check up on the forums, clean up the house...

Seriously. I start Destiny or launch an activity, put down the controller, and go do something useful. It’s pretty ridiculous.

I laugh at this, but I literally was cleaning the kitchen last night between crucible games...

This was my life on the 360 during d1. It took 4 years to do anything.

PC is better in my experience. I feel like 20-45 seconds to log in 20-45 seconds to et to orbit. Loading into the tower can be long though, I wonder if that's a matchmaking issue.

Also: I always thought the order on bounties was backwards. It should be easier to pickup bounties from a UI, then you turn them in at the tower. I want to get right to the action, then I like having a bit of downtime after an intense activity. I'm also coming back to the cryptarch/Postmaster/eververse so I'm already there.

I don't know why we have to pick up bounties at all. Just have all the daily bounties active everyday. All the weekly bounties active every week. It's a pain to pick them up. So don't make me.

That’s sort of odd, because the One X hard drive is awful. It’s a shit 5400 rpm drive. I don’t get hung up at that spot (although plenty of others I play with do), and I’m generally near the top of the party in load-in order when we go somewhere, but a good external blows it out of the water.

Yeah. Now that I have an X I’d like to get a real fast external HD.

A 7200rpm external is a great choice, and you can grab a 3TB one from Amazon for $100 (with free, but non-Prime shipping).

I picked up a SSD recently. When I loaded into the Haunted Forest I was wondering why it didn't matchmake me with anybody. I started playing through and then two people dropped in. It does that on pretty much every strike too. It's about a 30 second difference.

Someone was watching me play in the dreaming city, and I crossed a loading zone into the area with the oracle.

"Holy cow" he said. "There was NO loading? I'm on Xbox, and it freezes for like 10 seconds".

I've never had it stop other than a slight faction of a second hiccup. On the PS4 Pro with a 7200rpm drive. I would just in general be weary of anything external on USB. USB is not a good protocol, as it utilizes the CPU and is not Isochronous, unlike Firewire or Thunderbolt.

I know a couple people on Xbox have mentioned that section specifically (I do know they're not on the X). My X never has any problems (using the internal HD) right there. I assume PS players on Slims or day one PS4s probably also have problems. :(

If I approach that loading zone directly along the “road”, it’s fine. But if I jump across the gap just to the right of that rock pillar (as a tiny shortcut) I’ll hit a loading freeze and get stuck in the air for a few seconds. This is on a One X, using the internal drive.

That's a theory, but it doesn't bear out in practice, at least not on a launch XBox. My load times on all games got noticeably better when I went to an external hard drive, and others I spoke with had similar experiences. The general consensus is that the internal drive that came in those things is butt slow. It's possible later revisions or the X have faster hardware, can't confirm though. But it should not be automatically assumed that anything external is a hindrance.

That's a theory, but it doesn't bear out in practice, at least not on a launch XBox. My load times on all games got noticeably better when I went to an external hard drive, and others I spoke with had similar experiences. The general consensus is that the internal drive that came in those things is butt slow. It's possible later revisions or the X have faster hardware, can't confirm though. But it should not be automatically assumed that anything external is a hindrance.

Most of the drives are 2.5" 5400rpm, which are indeed butt slow, often with bad seek times as well. I'd guess just going to a 3.5" external would speed things up despite the connection.

That's the assumption, yeah.

I recently got a 500GB SSD and it really improves things. I think it was something like 3 minutes flat from a fresh launch of D2 to the Tower On an original One (no bloody A, B, C, D, or X). In game, it also helps me almost entirely avoid all section to section loading pauses. Bungie should fix their stuff, obviously, but adding on an SSD helps with load times across any games you move over to it.

Except... my load times are so fast now that I often load in more than a minute before matchmake players in things like Strikes. And for some odd reason, D2 seems to always hand the job of running and updating mission scripting to the last player to arrive. I have, in some Strikes, loaded in, killed all the enemies to be killed, then have had to wait well over a minute for the last player to arrive since the barrier blocking my path won't go away until they enter my section. Heck, I have fully charged my Super a couple of times during these waits.

So... not only should load times be looked at... I'd also love to see something that starts all players off at the same time in a Strike. It sucks to load in a minute late and have to run and run to catch up. That was me pre SSD. And now is sucks to load in early and wait on the other players to transmat in...

When I sit down to play a game, I intend to play a game. If I need to do errands, I’ll do that instead.

That said, the load times genuinely don’t bother me much. I constantly fiddle with equipment and shaders. I mostly use load times as a way to check out the gear I have acquired recently. I don’t pay much mind to drops while I’m actually playing unless it’s a new drop. So the loading times are a great time for gear inspection and comparisons.

This was my life on the 360 during d1. It took 4 years to do anything.

PC is better in my experience. I feel like 20-45 seconds to log in 20-45 seconds to et to orbit. Loading into the tower can be long though, I wonder if that's a matchmaking issue.

Also: I always thought the order on bounties was backwards. It should be easier to pickup bounties from a UI, then you turn them in at the tower. I want to get right to the action, then I like having a bit of downtime after an intense activity. I'm also coming back to the cryptarch/Postmaster/eververse so I'm already there.

I don't know why we have to pick up bounties at all. Just have all the daily bounties active everyday. All the weekly bounties active every week. It's a pain to pick them up. So don't make me.

Destiny needs to keep a few things in balance all the time.

1. Convenience, does it take too long to do things, is annoying to fly around etc
2. Player collisions. Players need to be in the same spaces, to show off, to kind of guide each other, even if the actual interactions are minimal.
3. Clarity of purpose: a player needs to know what they are pursuing, and how to pursue it, even if that pursuit is puzzling how the world works.

The old destiny 2 system of challenges that pulled from the destination menu was more convenient in many ways, but getting players in social spaces is valuable. Especially since the Cryptarch's role has been so heavily diminished. Where it really falls down though is clarity. Going to a menu or vendor, and purposefully selecting "I'm doing xyz" is a great way to keep the kind of psychogical load in check.

It is fair to say that Bungie does a lousy job with player conveniance. Instead of breaking the other two, I'd prefer if they loaded you directly into the tower, or maybe they could pre-load the tower while you select your player, or something, or better yet, really pushed on player collisions so that I want to head to the tower to find like minded folks to group up with.

It’s amazing the things I can get done while Destiny loads between activities: feed the dogs, load the dishwasher, get a snack, answer an email, work on a project, read a news article, check up on the forums, clean up the house...

Seriously. I start Destiny or launch an activity, put down the controller, and go do something useful. It’s pretty ridiculous.

I do my destiny chores lol. I've always got some shit that needs dismantling or some build things I need to tweak.

I've been trying to get better with the steam controller so I'll often jump out to tweak my settings.

The old destiny 2 system of challenges that pulled from the destination menu was more convenient in many ways, but getting players in social spaces is valuable. Especially since the Cryptarch's role has been so heavily diminished. Where it really falls down though is clarity. Going to a menu or vendor, and purposefully selecting "I'm doing xyz" is a great way to keep the kind of psychogical load in check.

So have every bounty listed in a menu, and you press X to acquire the ones you want to do. Or bring back bounty bot, and have it list everything. But especially with the load times, having to go to the tower, then to the spider, then back to the tower because you forgot the gambit bounties sucks and is draining on the fun.

- No text -

When I sit down to play a game, I intend to play a game. If I need to do errands, I’ll do that instead.

That said, the load times genuinely don’t bother me much. I constantly fiddle with equipment and shaders. I mostly use load times as a way to check out the gear I have acquired recently. I don’t pay much mind to drops while I’m actually playing unless it’s a new drop. So the loading times are a great time for gear inspection and comparisons.

The issue that I have with this is that I'm the kind of player who will ENTIRELY reconfigure their build and gear at least once a night, sometimes more. These long load times give me more time to fiddle, and I end up getting a wild hair to try something and I'm nowhere near finished getting dressed to fight and wait there's one perk on my pants that doesn't serve my weapons and--oh shit the game is starting.

Literally the best time to do fold all that laundry little by little, its amazing how much a 3 person home can go through in a week.

The lack of an easy access Bounty Board is frustrating. Don’t remove them from the individual vendors, just pipe them to a central location. I don’t want everything in my menu especially given we are in a thread abot loading times. But I really don’t want to have to listen to Hawthorne to get bounties from her.

This was my life on the 360 during d1. It took 4 years to do anything.

PC is better in my experience. I feel like 20-45 seconds to log in 20-45 seconds to et to orbit. Loading into the tower can be long though, I wonder if that's a matchmaking issue.

Also: I always thought the order on bounties was backwards. It should be easier to pickup bounties from a UI, then you turn them in at the tower. I want to get right to the action, then I like having a bit of downtime after an intense activity. I'm also coming back to the cryptarch/Postmaster/eververse so I'm already there.

I don't know why we have to pick up bounties at all. Just have all the daily bounties active everyday. All the weekly bounties active every week. It's a pain to pick them up. So don't make me.

I see what you're saying, but I'm also thinking that making people pick up the bounty is the only way to make sure people actually read them. And even in the current situation, people sometimes don't read them fully.

Getting rid of the explicit pickup sequence means you won't miss out on getting credit for something you've actually done because you didn't pick up the bounty for it. But it also means that you might not look at them at all before entering a play space, and therefore might not know that you could have gotten a reward if you'd only gone somewhere else and done some other activity.

As with so many problems with Destiny I can't say I really have a solution I like. Putting all bounties directly into the UI, even if you still want to charge players tokens or glimmer to buy them might make sense, but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

Loading times do seem to be much better on SSD. It certainly seems like, between slow load times on HDDs and framerate issues in public events, like current Xbox and PS4 games are being built around the assumption of PS4 Pro or Xbox 1X capabilities, including an SSD, with just a nod to backwards compatibility.

When I sit down to play a game, I intend to play a game. If I need to do errands, I’ll do that instead.

That said, the load times genuinely don’t bother me much. I constantly fiddle with equipment and shaders. I mostly use load times as a way to check out the gear I have acquired recently. I don’t pay much mind to drops while I’m actually playing unless it’s a new drop. So the loading times are a great time for gear inspection and comparisons.

The issue that I have with this is that I'm the kind of player who will ENTIRELY reconfigure their build and gear at least once a night, sometimes more. These long load times give me more time to fiddle, and I end up getting a wild hair to try something and I'm nowhere near finished getting dressed to fight and wait there's one perk on my pants that doesn't serve my weapons and--oh shit the game is starting.

This further underscores the idea that the game in its current state is nearly unplayable without external gear management, which I don't think was Bungie's original intent.

I have an idea to go back and do a no-vault, (possibly no-postmaster?) playthrough of D1, because I think that would result in a game that requires less prep time to play and also results in a more varied and interesting (if necessarily less complete and less powerful) collection of gear to play with, and more variety among fireteam members as players are forced to decide which pieces to keep and which to get rid of, plus allowing for empty slots for potential new gear to drop into.

None of this is as annoying as Adobe suddenly reversing proportion constraint with the shift key in Photoshop 20.0.

This is the ultimate "WTF are you doing".

The issue that I have with this is that I'm the kind of player who will ENTIRELY reconfigure their build and gear at least once a night, sometimes more. These long load times give me more time to fiddle, and I end up getting a wild hair to try something and I'm nowhere near finished getting dressed to fight and wait there's one perk on my pants that doesn't serve my weapons and--oh shit the game is starting.

This further underscores the idea that the game in its current state is nearly unplayable without external gear management, which I don't think was Bungie's original intent.

I agree that it wasn't their original intent, but I'm not sure why that specific conclusion is the one you reach. Shooting from the hip, my best guess is that they intended a more mainstream-friendly, simplified system for managing gear. And my personal experience has been that the Companion App serves my needs pretty well. I haven't fully adopted DIM yet, but I respect what it allows us to do.

Unfortunately, the feeling I'm always left with is of running around with my pockets full. I keep 7/9 inventory spaces full for each gear slot, because I want to change weapon types and tactics on the fly if something isn't working. Or, sometimes something new will drop and I'll want to play with it, which requires a quick re-tune of my build. This usually means I have 7 unique weapon types available for each slot. And consequently shorter intervals between Tower runs. Sometimes I'll use the app to toss stuff into the Vault, which certainly bolsters your first point.

I have an idea to go back and do a no-vault, (possibly no-postmaster?) playthrough of D1, because I think that would result in a game that requires less prep time to play and also results in a more varied and interesting (if necessarily less complete and less powerful) collection of gear to play with, and more variety among fireteam members as players are forced to decide which pieces to keep and which to get rid of, plus allowing for empty slots for potential new gear to drop into.

That's a pretty compelling thought. I'm very much the buffett-style player; where I want to try a little of everything, play with every class and weapon, so while I understand what you're getting at and might be willing to try it, I think it would only work because we know the ropes, the odds of drops, and game mechanics already. If a game I didn't know expected that of me, I'd have issues. That kind of attrition expected against all the possible gear (read: play experiences) available would not leave me with the warm fuzzies.

And then they have the gall to not even give us the option to switch back!

Also, Premiere 2019 is broken AF.

Don't have the space to film the process (I need to clear out old clips, I guess), but here are my numbers for the critical spots in your Xbox video:

0:00 at Dashboard
0:16 to Press A to Start
1:03 to choose character
1:13 to Director
2:59 Loaded into Tower

I have a 4-year-old Xbox One - according to Amazon, I bought it in October 2014. The only thing I DO have that you don't is an external SSD (OS is on the internal, games are on the external).

It's always been fast -but since Forsaken has come out, it's totally paid for itself in blood pressure medication savings.

They did what now?

Adobe is the undisputed king of change for the sake of change, with a side of inability to get everyone on the same page so far as consistent UIX and keyboard shortcuts.

This is why I haven't upgraded since CS3. So far as I can tell, I'm never missing anything of value.

And then have a walk around, get a pop or drink, do stuff. It reminded me of trying to load an image heavy page on a 28.8k modem. Punch it in, go read for a fee minutes, come back.

Pretty silly, IMO

Back before IE2 and the introduction of tabbed browsing that was a nightmare. Load 20 pages at different rates so you always have one to interact with.

I have one character, and nothing in the vault afaik. Before forsaken, I picked my guns and armor, then just infused if I got better ones. Now, I'm just using the ones with highest light at level 500+.

This isn't particularly difficult, IMO.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

Booted up the game, and got this:

https://xboxdvr.com/gamer/kornymunky/video/62142762

I forgot to download the Orbit DLC. I thought Bungie went with Activision, not EA...

Someone was watching me play in the dreaming city, and I crossed a loading zone into the area with the oracle.

"Holy cow" he said. "There was NO loading? I'm on Xbox, and it freezes for like 10 seconds".

I've never had it stop other than a slight faction of a second hiccup. On the PS4 Pro with a 7200rpm drive. I would just in general be weary of anything external on USB. USB is not a good protocol, as it utilizes the CPU and is not Isochronous, unlike Firewire or Thunderbolt.

Regardless, SSD over USB 3 is damn fast and has improved my load times drastically

Xbox (from Dashboard:
2:14 before I can pick a character.
2:44 before I can use the director.
5:51 to load into the Tower to start the process of picking up the day's bounties.

Last night I timed these on my One X:

1:47 to get to character selection screen
0:15 to get to orbit
:57 to get to the tower

I have had days when it's been worse, but never more than 5 minutes total. I agree they need to look at loading issues, especially for the older hardware.

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

I dunno, but it was definitely not as big of a problem in D1. I wish you could at least interact with the unloaded tiles the same way you can interact with the Director before it loads. I know where my Raiden Flux is. Let me equip it without waiting for the images to load!

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

I dunno, but it was definitely not as big of a problem in D1. I wish you could at least interact with the unloaded tiles the same way you can interact with the Director before it loads. I know where my Raiden Flux is. Let me equip it without waiting for the images to load!

EXACTLY! It is very irritating. Also whats bad is when you are stuck in loading screens, thats the time to play with inventory/shaders. That is also when its the SLOWEST. I will try and preview a shader and it may take until its done loading into the planet/tower to render. I know its not my connection, its blazing fast.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

I dunno, but it was definitely not as big of a problem in D1. I wish you could at least interact with the unloaded tiles the same way you can interact with the Director before it loads. I know where my Raiden Flux is. Let me equip it without waiting for the images to load!

EXACTLY! It is very irritating. Also whats bad is when you are stuck in loading screens, thats the time to play with inventory/shaders. That is also when its the SLOWEST. I will try and preview a shader and it may take until its done loading into the planet/tower to render. I know its not my connection, its blazing fast.

But why are the tiles not cached? These are tiny images. Oh no, we can’t set aside 1.8MB of RAM to cache the inventory screen. Nope not enough of that 8GB remains. A crisp responsive user interface is super important.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Punch in my gamer tag D_P_Roberts into a time tracking utility and compare now to the past. I am pretty much always the lowest level person in a group of DBOers.

Precisely because I’m not doing that shit anymore.

I play on PC. My Tower has an SSD for my OS, the Blizzard Launcher, and Destiny. I barely notice any loading. I recently upgraded my Laptop to have an SSD big enough to have Forsaken (okay, way bugger, but I wasn’t gonna reinstall on the 5400rpm drive it had) and the OS/launcher/Destiny was Previously on the M2. Now it is just the OS and Launcher. But it was even faster than my Tower.

Getting rid of the explicit pickup sequence means you won't miss out on getting credit for something you've actually done because you didn't pick up the bounty for it. But it also means that you might not look at them at all before entering a play space, and therefore might not know that you could have gotten a reward if you'd only gone somewhere else and done some other activity.

Bounties are a dumb solution to that problem. People just asked to be able to see what the challenges on any given destination and activity were. Bungie’s response was to get rid of the challenge system and give us bounties instead. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s completely asinine, and it doesn’t even fix the actual problem, because now I still have to load into a separate space to pick up bounties and see what they are. It’s literally the dumbest response they could have implemented to address the complaints with the old challenge system.

I guess I’m making a huge assumption that bounties are even a response to those complaints and not just Bungie making dumb decisions of their own accord for whatever asinine reasons they can come up with.

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but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Punch in my gamer tag D_P_Roberts into a time tracking utility and compare now to the past. I am pretty much always the lowest level person in a group of DBOers.

Precisely because I’m not doing that shit anymore.

::sigh::

He wasn't suggesting that you haven't made a choice to play less. He was suggesting that your conclusion was flawed.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Punch in my gamer tag D_P_Roberts into a time tracking utility and compare now to the past. I am pretty much always the lowest level person in a group of DBOers.

Precisely because I’m not doing that shit anymore.

::sigh::

He wasn't suggesting that you haven't made a choice to play less. He was suggesting that your conclusion was flawed.

I swear the post said "You keep doing IT Cody". But yeah. It's hollow in my opinion. The worst thing about Forsaken is while they added a lot of awesome stuff, they added even more stuff that is pointless and hollow which you can't avoid. It would easily be the best expansion they've ever done had they not turned all this grindy investment shit up a few notches.

If you need to be rewarded to keep visiting planets and characters, then you've not got much intrinsic fun.

Matter is going to blow, I'm calling it now.

If you need to be rewarded to keep visiting planets and characters, then you've not got much intrinsic fun.

I see what you’re getting at, but I disagree. I like everything I can do in Destiny right now. Literally the most fun I’ve ever had with either iteration of the game. Including just going to the Destinations and screwing around in patrols.

The problem (if you can call it that) comes from the fact that there’s so much to do. The grindy stuff isn’t just for shits and giggles. It serves to get players moving around and doing other things.

The exotic quests mostly have you jumping through different activities, which moves people around. The challenges obviously do the same. I used to get frustrated at the inventory cap for certain items (10 Ghost Fragments, seriously?), but I’ve even come to understand that. Sure, it can be annoying to go buy a Wanted bounty only to realize that you only have 2 fragments. But it makes you get out in the Tangled Shore and do some stuff. If it wasn’t capped, I’d probably be sitting on hundreds of those things, and it would be a long time before I had to actually go into the Tangled Shore for anything. I think it’s a smart way to keep the player population moving around and doing a little bit of every activity. And, at the end of the day, they’re not forcing anything. There’s so much stuff to do, there’s always another option available.

Cody, sometimes it feels like you play this game out of stubbornness. You complain about the grind and intrinsic fun, but you never want to acknowledge that for lots of us, the game is intrinsically fun and enjoyable in nearly every way, and the the grind that you hate so much just gives us a little more direction, a goal to chase. There’s so much to do that I probably wouldn’t choose to go just hang out on Mars very often. But the Flashpoint is enough to point me there, and I enjoy my time there when I go.

I agree with a lot of stuff you’ve said. Forsaken is far from perfect, and I’m still not a fan of the soft cap system (although I’d be completely fine with if it I wasn’t rushing to a blind raid, which I still don’t think I’m going to do again). You call all those things frictions, made to slow down the player. You’re not wrong, but I’m not convinced it’s a bad thing. Destiny players need to be slowed down sometimes, and the realities of making a live game like Destiny means that they need to encourage players to move around, they need to keep everything populated, and those frictions serve that goal. We can argue all day about whether Destiny would be better as a traditional single player game rather than an MMO, but it’s not a discussion worth having—that ship sailed a long time ago.

Don't have the space to film the process (I need to clear out old clips, I guess), but here are my numbers for the critical spots in your Xbox video:

0:00 at Dashboard
0:16 to Press A to Start
1:03 to choose character
1:13 to Director
2:59 Loaded into Tower

I have a 4-year-old Xbox One - according to Amazon, I bought it in October 2014. The only thing I DO have that you don't is an external SSD (OS is on the internal, games are on the external).

It's always been fast -but since Forsaken has come out, it's totally paid for itself in blood pressure medication savings.

I didn't actually measure times, but I just got that 1TB Samsung SSD that got linked last time this stuff came up today. My load times are half of what they used to be, if not even faster than that.

Menus feel faster, too, but that always seemed really inconsistent, so I don't know if that's actually true or not.

I’m pretty sure menus are one part validating server side content tags one part loading relevant local data. So the former might be taking the same time but the latter is performing better.

Hardware manufacturers cheaping out.... making lower cost parts in favor of profit... what's new????

I want SSD options for my PS4! I want load times that rival my PC!
Next generation will hopefully be better, granted at this point I do most of my gaming on PC.

I didn't know there was a new Last of Us theme.