Your technology needs help... lots of help... lots and LOTS of help. :(

Former game developer here. (No gigs with Lucas, BioWare, or the other companies associated with this... although I did contract for someone who did help with the marketing push lulz]) I left the industry because too many non-gamers were entering it. Some thing about the dream of accruing abusive amounts of money from a single title seems to attract the parasites, the wolves, and the incompetent.

I like your game. I really do. The focus on the single-player aspect is amazing. The voice acting is from top notch talent (I personally know many of the voice actors in the game, actually) and it is delivered as well as it can be given the -extreme- amount of disconnected copy that had to be read. My kudos to your producers. I'm sure many, many long hours were spent on that aspect of the game alone.

Let's move on to the problem. Notice I said “problem” and not “problems”. You only suffer from one problem and all of these ailments stem from it.

The Client

I haven't researched your tech at all. I'm assuming you purchased licenses for the 3D engine and that the lead devs on the project had a solid streak of 3D game programming on their resumes.. but only a few of them them had any experience with the engine itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, as there are many, many 3D engines on the market and having one dev knowing them all would price that dev right out of the market entirely. The logic behind my guess is that if the entire dev team was deeply intimate with the engine, then they would have been able to successfully push back against the art and marketing department's insistence on using high poly count models everywhere.

Yes, the creativity of these departments are paramount because it's the pretty pixels us consumers froth over. However, if this factor is the foundation of developing a game (It often is the most frequent goto by artists, marketers, and MBAs alike) then it will become obvious in the final product. That being said, your leadership has long crossed over the “golden ratio” between pretty pixels and performance. It is obvious BioWare's entire objective regarding client development is to wage a holy crusade against GPUs everywhere and crush them. It's one thing to write Crysis. It's another to write something that blows up a GPU like Crysis and have absolutely none of the visual effects.

I'm sure the politics in your company, the silverback chest-thumping, and the e-peen flopfests all take turns stifling any attempt to rebalance this pixel-vs-performance ratio. (SSDD) When the flaws of your product are broadcasted to the world that the devs are not included in any actual decision making regarding priority or direction, it's time to fire your CTO for being spineless and probably all of his reports.

The Servers

Your networking infrastructure, however, is not as easily purchasable as an out-of-the-box 3D engine that you just drop in and start hacking away at. It is woefully taxed. I have nothing but pity on your back-end and IT department for one reason: your asset loading strategy is completely untenable in relation to your resource demand.

These loading screens between “zones” (See: MQ channels/rooms/subscriptions) are reminiscent to installing an operating system from a pack of floppy drives. You do know that when broadcasting client data to other clients, that shouldn't issue a blocking resource pull from the HD -every- -single- -time-, right?

Right?

I mean, I like the little pause when on a PvP server because it lets me know that I'm about to be ganked. But I know why that pause is happening. And I know that when you tested it on your local machines that were well-tuned for this sort of testing, and on staging server setups that didn't have even 1% of the load of a live environment, this issue never cropped up.

It happens to everyone.

Don't fire off blocking calls as a response to time-sensitive events that are pushed down from the server. Your client will fall apart because those events are random. Have a default placeholder asset primed in memory and ready to instantiate until the rest of the local resources (model, textures, etc) are pulled asynchronously.. Spinning plates, man. Spinning plates.

This blocking call is only part of the problem. I am almost positive the vast majority of these load screens are caused by the servers trying to poll live information regarding other connections... and that you've made this a blocking call as well. Network I/O is, literally, the most expensive time operation you could perform and you've made a mass polling operation a blocking call. Going from a planet to a warzone to planet is an experience similar to participating in hurdling... except each hurdle is a two hundred foot tall stone wall. This is because you've relied on blocking calls and no one caught it.

And no one's going to fix it. It's very easy to undo and yet... it will never be fixed. Why...?

...and back to your organizational problems we go.

Somewhere, an investor is having ******s (I can say "******s", right? American's aren't still squeamish about that word, are they? Does that put me on a terrorist list or something?) about the revenue and ROI. Yay, capitalism! All is well... except your growth is in jeopardy and both you and I know it. Anyone watching this pure marketing-driven priority of pushing out pointless doodads and trinkets instead of solving fundamental performance problems can spot it a mile away. You have too many non-devs leading the effort.

You will not survive your own success because your leadership will not take the ten minutes required to have someone explain to them that people won't play a game where 30% of the time is spent at loading screens due to a failure to prioritize and solve an extremely common problem in an industry-standard fashion. What they will listen to is some non-tech failed actress say that little cute tauntauns will solve these problems. B*tches love little cute tauntauns. (The * is for 'o')

Say it with me, BioWare:

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

Say that in your next stand-up, loud and proud. E-mail it every fifteen minutes to the CEO. You can fix these problems. It's solvable. You just have to spill some blood and not be afraid of it.

I've often wondered why, when loading onto a new planet, I usually have time to get up, make a sandwich, and watch a season of Breaking Bad.

Former game developer here. (No gigs with Lucas, BioWare, or the other companies associated with this... although I did contract for someone who did help with the marketing push lulz) I left the industry because too many non-gamers were entering it. Some thing about the dream of accruing abusive amounts of money from a single title seems to attract the parasites, the wolves, and the incompetent.

I like your game. I really do. The focus on the single-player aspect is amazing. The voice acting is from top notch talent (I personally know many of the voice actors in the game, actually) and it is delivered as well as it can be given the -extreme- amount of disconnected copy that had to be read. My kudos to your producers. I'm sure many, many long hours were spent on that aspect of the game alone.

Let's move on to the problem. Notice I said “problem” and not “problems”. You only suffer from one problem and all of these ailments stem from it.

The Client

I haven't researched your tech at all. I'm assuming you purchased licenses for the 3D engine and that the lead devs on the project had a solid streak of 3D game programming on their resumes.. but only a few of them them had any experience with the engine itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, as there are many, many 3D engines on the market and having one dev knowing them all would price that dev right out of the market entirely. The logic behind my guess is that if the entire dev team was deeply intimate with the engine, then they would have been able to successfully push back against the art and marketing department's insistence on using high poly count models everywhere.

Yes, the creativity of these departments are paramount because it's the pretty pixels us consumers froth over. However, if this factor is the foundation of developing a game (It often is the most frequent goto by artists, marketers, and MBAs alike) then it will become obvious in the final product. That being said, your leadership has long crossed over the “golden ratio” between pretty pixels and performance. It is obvious BioWare's entire objective regarding client development is to wage a holy crusade against GPUs everywhere and crush them. It's one thing to write Crysis. It's another to write something that blows up a GPU like Crysis and have absolutely none of the visual effects.

I'm sure the politics in your company, the silverback chest-thumping, and the e-peen flopfests all take turns stifling any attempt to rebalance this pixel-vs-performance ratio. (SSDD) When the flaws of your product are broadcasted to the world that the devs are not included in any actual decision making regarding priority or direction, it's time to fire your CTO for being spineless and probably all of his reports.

The Servers

Your networking infrastructure, however, is not as easily purchasable as an out-of-the-box 3D engine that you just drop in and start hacking away at. It is woefully taxed. I have nothing but pity on your back-end and IT department for one reason: your asset loading strategy is completely untenable in relation to your resource demand.

These loading screens between “zones” (See: MQ channels/rooms/subscriptions) are reminiscent to installing an operating system from a pack of floppy drives. You do know that when broadcasting client data to other clients, that shouldn't issue a blocking resource pull from the HD -every- -single- -time-, right?

Right?

I mean, I like the little pause when on a PvP server because it lets me know that I'm about to be ganked. But I know why that pause is happening. And I know that when you tested it on your local machines that were well-tuned for this sort of testing, and on staging server setups that didn't have even 1% of the load of a live environment, this issue never cropped up.

It happens to everyone.

Don't fire off blocking calls as a response to time-sensitive events that are pushed down from the server. Your client will fall apart because those events are random. Have a default placeholder asset primed in memory and ready to instantiate until the rest of the local resources (model, textures, etc) are pulled asynchronously.. Spinning plates, man. Spinning plates.

This blocking call is only part of the problem. I am almost positive the vast majority of these load screens are caused by the servers trying to poll live information regarding other connections... and that you've made this a blocking call as well. Network I/O is, literally, the most expensive time operation you could perform and you've made a mass polling operation a blocking call. Going from a planet to a warzone to planet is an experience similar to participating in hurdling... except each hurdle is a two hundred foot tall stone wall. This is because you've relied on blocking calls and no one caught it.

And no one's going to fix it. It's very easy to undo and yet... it will never be fixed. Why...?

...and back to your organizational problems we go.

Somewhere, an investor is having ******s (I can say "******s", right? American's aren't still squeamish about that word, are they? Does that put me on a terrorist list or something?) about the revenue and ROI. Yay, capitalism! All is well... except your growth is in jeopardy and both you and I know it. Anyone watching this pure marketing-driven priority of pushing out pointless doodads and trinkets instead of solving fundamental performance problems can spot it a mile away. You have too many non-devs leading the effort.

You will not survive your own success because your leadership will not take the ten minutes required to have someone explain to them that people won't play a game where 30% of the time is spent at loading screens due to a failure to prioritize and solve an extremely common problem in an industry-standard fashion. What they will listen to is some non-tech failed actress say that little cute tauntauns will solve these problems. B*tches love little cute tauntauns. (The * is for 'o')

Say it with me, BioWare:

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.
YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

Say that in your next stand-up, loud and proud. E-mail it every fifteen minutes to the CEO. You can fix these problems. It's solvable. You just have to spill some blood and not be afraid of it.

I haven't researched your tech at all.