It is very likely that charging bar is more false than a wooden euro

You get home after a long work day, you throw yourself into the couch, you turn on your console, you release the game you are already vitiating. Well, no, because before your avatar, the map and your mount appear before you There is a load bar that must be completed. It’s normal, you’ll think. You have to load the textures, the game or whatever, go to know, but that bar advances, so something will be doing. There is little left. A little less. Oh, how slow, will now be with something heavy, surely.

Well, most likely no. Most likely, this load bar will be false and its only goal is to play with your brain.

Charging… Load screens, with their bar, an illustration and perhaps a text with advice or some of LoreThey were necessary. They served to entertain the player while the machine was looking for, read and loaded the game information on a console whose power was not, from afar, the one that the current devices have. It was a normal solution, because the other was a black screen or showing a half -load level that would leave a bad impression.

Load screen of ‘The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim’ | Image: The Elder Scrolls Wiki

However, technology has evolved and, currently, the few bars of progress that we can find in video games have more customs and psychology than useful. That does not mean that there are no load screens, because there are even if they are very well camouflaged, but the speed of the components has allowed us to use alternative methods to avoid them.

It is false. If we are in the tail of an attraction in Port Aventura, we calculate how much a trip lasts and we look forward, more or less We can estimate how much is left to ride. In a process that is happening on a computer without us seeing anything, that is much more complex not to say impossible. Load screens and progress bars are the only way that the software has to indicate that something is happening, that everything is going well, but they are false.

Because? Because players They don’t trust fluid progress bars. A progress bar that moves slowly gives a feeling of bad optimization, but a bar that moves too fast or an instant load could lead to think that something has gone wrong or that is not well done. Mike Bithell, developer and creator of ‘Thomas was Alone’, He already pulled the blanket in 2023 When he confirmed that the cargo bar is fictitious and that, really, it is the pulls that the bar gives that indicate that something is happening.

Load screen of ‘Guild Wars 2’. Below right can the progress bar that, in this case, is circular | Image: Xataka

Basically, the bottom of everything is that we expect to wait, if that makes sense. Rami Ismail, video game developer and well -known industry disseminator, confirmed In X that he had “worked on projects where we simulate load bars, we extended load times or made the load bars move artificially at unequal speeds.” Raúl Munárriz, executive director of the Now extinct Tequila Workshe also said that “I have never worked in a game that did not have a false load bar. The reais cause anxiety.”

Is your whole life a lie? Yes and no. Making a progress bar is something complex because there are many processes that come into play during a load, as many as factors can make it more or less fast. We could make a progress bar based on how many files they have moved from x a y, but it would not be fluid because the files, surely, have different sizes.

Nor would it work to do it based on the transferred data, since moving few heavy files is faster than moving many small files. And neither depends on how much it remains so that all the steps of the process are completed because it is enough for Chrome to open so that the state of the PC is altered and the times change. There is no perfect solution.

The load screens are still there. Although they are not seen as such, many current video games continue to have load screens. More dynamics, more concealed, but visible. Normally, when a game artificially slows you it is a sign that, in the background, it is carrying what is coming later.

A known example is that of the elevators of ‘Mass Effect‘, but we can also think about travel through the hyperspace of’Star Wars: Jedi Survivor‘, any medium of teleport, the time we run through Yggdrasil in’God of War‘, when we receive a call in’Gears of War‘That forces us to walk very slowly or in a kinematics that jumps at the right time to separate one level from another.

The techniques for video games not to disappear with a load screen are wide and varied. It is very likely that the game is carrying elements in the background while we do something else without realizing it. Or to load and download the textures in real time depending on the distance and our position.

Image | Xataka, VECTEZY

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