The Average Gamer

The Crew: The Days Of A Loading Screen Are All Gone

The Crew - Aircraft And Off RoadOne of the features of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation of games has been the prolonged loading or initial install times. Games like Heavy Rain, The Last of Us and most recently GTA V. At Eurogamer Expo 2013 I asked Serkan Hassan, lead designer of The Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC open world racer about the amount of game loading the player can expect.

He said that “When you first pop the disc in, if we are talking about the consoles, we basically will have a brief introduction, a playable kinda of prologue to the game before the game starts properly. We are planning on a installation so the game will be installing while you play. There’s no waiting for the installation to occur so you are playing from the beginning.”

Hassan went onto say “For that moment onwards there is effectively no, I would say no loading, no meaningful loading. By that what I mean is that even if you wanted to do something extreme like say you’re using our fast travel system and you want to get from New York to Miami because one of your friends is there.

In order to do that we have a fully playable transition where we go from an overhead view of the car, out to a satellite view, pan across and then back in again. That’s effectively the only bit of downtime which is no more than five seconds where we are kinda going zoom out, over to the east coast, zoom in and then you’re back in [your car].”

Hassan concluded with “From my perspective, I’d say there is a good as no loading because the days of a loading screen and a please wait or a loading bar, they are all gone.”

Look out for our full video interview with Hassan coming soon.

The Crew is coming to PS4, PC and Xbox One in Q1 2014