Loading Screens

I would much rather have a lot of in-engine elevator sequences that mask loadings like in ME1 with occasional variying banter or radio messages than I would look at the same repeat load screens that were in ME2 and ME3.

I also am a big fan of games that are somewhat well paced and manage that without breaking up the timeline with cinematic skips and fade to blacks, and in my opinion ME1 was well paced enough in the way it was so I would like that ideally or have something like it but improve upon it.

I think there is one particular scene in ME1 that had a really bad time-jump that should not exist in a video-game and DA:I had an alarming number of lazy time-skips that sometimes even skipped over what felt like should've been entire gameplay sequences just going from one end of the partiuclar suplot to the next. I'm of course talking about launching the Geth Consensus mission in ME3 and in DA:I we're talking In Your Heart Shall Burn, Siege of Adamant, Doom Upon All The World and probably even more.

ME1 was fucking tight. You land on the Citadel and see the Normandy docking. You go back to gameplay and exit the ship manually. You wanna drop on a planet or do Virmire or Ilos and you see the Normandy fly in after the FTL traveling as it drops the Mako and bam, right into gameplay with no cheap time-skips. It's very crucial they don't skip over sequences that include combat or traversing a unique environment IMO. In the Geth Consensus you land with the Shuttle but then when it fades to black and back in they're holding up guns and Shepard reloads in what looks like a Geth Dreadnought like level and it implies they just played through an entire combat segment off-screen and that's not right. In the In Your Heart Shall Burn quest the entire start is about going up the mountain to the giant world-swallowing rift that spits out demons all the time and what happens? We get a fucking time-skip and we just get straight to the top of the mountain and close it like it's no sweat. Bad pacing and bad use of transitions.

Loading screens are fine when you take transports or between being on a ship and landing but it's even better if the loading screens or the in-game actions that act instead of loadings create proper transitions. As long as that's in place it's fine, but I'll have to say again that i think the elevators in ME1 are superior to the repeat loading screens in ME2 and ME3 but that said I liked ME2's load screens ok and same with ME3 except on PC it always cuts out right as the camera cuts to a new location that you never get to see on the Citadel.

The reason I really don't like the actual loadings in 2 and 3 is because I think on 1080p or more those pixelated 720p pre-renders look absolutely terrible not to mention their 30fps frame cap. It also goes further when certain sequnces like the Reaper fight on Tuchanka is half pre-rendered but only 720p30fps matched with 1080p60fps in-game cinematics on pc, but that's a tangent for another topic.