What are bioware going to do about load screens & feeling of disconnect?

There's actually a BioWare sanctioned program out called SWTOR Unleashed that does exactly what you're suggesting. You can find a full write up on it by doing a search for it in these forums. I'm using it myself, and it has sped things up a bit. Not as much as I'd hoped, but a lot of my ability lag and fps stutter is gone or greatly diminished.

I could care less about the loading screen. As long as it only drags out the first time I enter a new planet that's fine. I assume its loading all the textures, files, procedures, etc, that are needed for that zone. It's never bad after the first load. Now if bioware keeps making smaller areas with MORE load screens, then I'd be upset.

I'm not sure how "immersed" you can be when sitting at a desk. I can handle a few load screens.

so i'm getting some flak for this, i'm told i'm new to gaming -- others say i'm a whiner, lots of excuses about being a poor investment of time to brush up little details like this some saying not worth it.

here is how i feel. i admittedly haven't played that many games, buti'm really getting into this one, i'm sure i'm not the only realitviely new to video games generation, i'm not that old afterall, and I'm sure at least htere are a few others like me, new to this genre-ish, discovering it.. i can only tell you what i really like and what annoys.

it may seem trivilal to some of the hardcores, but that 10s lcinematic that shows your ship take off, is SOOO cool. Stuff like the convos, and some of the story scenes are by far the coolest non-gameplay related things about this game. i played wow, so i'm not 100% green to games, and the reason i subscribe to this and not that game is largely due to those really cool scenes. seeing my ship take off or pull into the fleet hanger never gets old for me.

but i have noticed, that staring at a picture as often as it happens b/c of load screens is annoying, especially when the majority of the journeys i take in between areas are never shown. this gives the feeling of disconnect, and i think especially the ones between worlds need filler cinematics showing the journey. AFterall. Look at it this way.. they are all fixed journey.. you only have x amount of planets, far less than you do missions. so showing or building a cinematic that shows the journey happen is not that much work compared to all the work they did for all the missions that made up the 50 levels for 8 classes and 14 worlds.

and it will make a huge difference, it may seem small to some people, but seeing your spaceship fly out of the atmosphere into space then jump to light speed, will make the game feel a lot more spacey too, something that you dont' get much off since you only see space in the short exit clip of loading your ship from your fleet hangar bay. and more importantly show the all important how you got there, linking one planet to another as you can't move through space yourself. really need to see the full between journey - you always see these in the ovies.

it may seem small a thing, but it isn't.i love that for entering Eternity vault, you actually see yourself in the pod breaking through the planet atmosphere, yeah, they can do landing scenes, what woudl have been cooler is if in Star WArs new Hope style, you saw space view of the pod ejecting then flying into the planet and then through the atmosphere, rather than screen goes black, and then pod is in the atmosphere already.. which cuts out some of the transition.

if a game has to have loading screens and is not built like wow is, i.e. with a continuous huge land mass, then it must achieve continuity through other means, in the case of this game, it should able achieved by cinematics that show the transition from one area to another and they should occur during the loading. If they can't occur during the loading screen for technical reasons, the transition should STILL be shown b/c without it you just feel disconnected between point A and point B.

e.g. Drummond Kass, Agent class quest: ***spoiler*** you have to go to a cargo hold loading dock in the city, you enter, and click the elevator button, black screen and you'r ein a cargo bay loading area.. but where is this section in the building? are you up? or down below? a shuttle is taking off from there supposedly, where's it connected too?

this is my biggest gripe in cities like Coruscant and Nar Shadda, very quickly lose sense of where i am when taking those riides..dunno how to solve that one though maybe a quick zoom out with the camera rising to the level of the building the elevator is suppose to be at before showing your character in ithe new room? not sure about the best way to solve the elvator connects, faction fleet is a typical example, going from main deck to missions deck no idea where missions deck is?up down?

that may be harder to tackle, what can at least be done is show transisiton between worlds during or preceding loading screens

So my proposal is:

Show the full length journey for the following:

1. ALL class ship trips to and from any planet
2. Show from a space view point and not inside ship only, jumping to light speed and coming out of it, before switching back to inside ship view.
3. Always have a clip for entering an orbital station, as they all look like your fleet's main base, and a clip for that already exists, show it.
4. ALL mission shuttles on each world that fly to mission deck on your fleet. - as all of those shuttle s fly to mission deck, that part of the journey is always the same, as is the shuttle, the only thing that is different is each of the planets and the ozne on those planets that shuttle is at. you will have to show the shuttle taking off from that spot. Not that hard, but vitally important to show, otherwise it just looks like a drawing since you never see it take off.
5. ALl shuttle trips inbetween level 50 daily zones, - a cinematic trip for these need to be shown. as in the original post, Section X to blackhole, gotta see the shuttle take off, move into space, go to light speed, come out of light speed over coreilla, land in the blackhole section of coreilla before you appear.


What you can skip cinematics for:
Given the above 5 have clips for, it won't really nbe necessary to have cineamtics for:
1. Using emergency fleet pass = altho one would be cool. what does that ship look like?
2. Using Legacy transports to homeworld/blackhole/fleet etc.

........ From what i read of this (First post only Basically) He's Asking for ME style loading Screens that Show SOMETHING while its loading rather then just a Blank Picture.
The Problem i'd see from making it a Full/Proper cut scene rather then an ME Style loading screen, is that most people would want to Skip it being as impatient that some people are/can be.

That said SOMETHING happening on the Loading screen would be nice.... Maybe an Asteroids Mini-game on the Really long loads?

Cinematics wont fix this issue.

But i also hate the amount of loading screens........ESPECIALLY for an MMO. Its stupid how many load screens there are.

SWTOR Unleashed is a great program. I would highly recommend it for anyone with at least 4 GB of RAM.
I noticed a pretty significant smoothing of frame rates and a decrease of about 1/3 of load times, and that is with a SSD.

This is where I'm at on it as well.

I'm use to a long load screen and I don't have any issue with how log anything takes to load in this game but it's the shear number of loading screens that are annoying me. No cut-scene is going to solve that, it still breaks the flow of the game to me.

I can't tell you how how many days I decided play time is over just because I needed to travel and knowing all the senseless steps it takes to do so. May sound like a trivial issue and I've tried to convince myself of that but I get this sense of dread every time and it's gotten to the point of me thinking "meh, think I'm done for the day".

I appreciate these little pauses. They remind me to close my eyes and/or to look far away, to get the much needed break. We all forget to blink when we play. So I use these pauses as reminders for my eye health.

i use a lot of conversations to take breaks, or if i need a break i just close down for a while, or go to desktop, i won't say that i should confine ppl to a picture while loading to force them to take a break.