How can a game like Red Dead Redemption load quickly, while remastered old games like CTR needs loading screens that take a fair bit of time?
In: Technology
It depends. There’s a number of considerations that go into loading. If a game loads more assets when you start a game, it can cut down on loading screens in game. Similarly, if a game keeps more assets in RAM (and you have a machine with enough RAM) then the game doesn’t need to reload assets that were removed for whatever reason. Efficient design choices: loading an asset once, then creating multiple instances of it after the load screen can cut down on load times if your machine can keep up with the instancing. Loading screens can be hidden in cut scenes: while the cuts cent is playing the game secretly loads the next stuff it needs. Similarly, games can dynamically load and unload things as they go. Skyrim is a good example, where the world is broken into cells, and the game just loads in cells based on how close your character is to it so that you don’t have to stop traversing the world to load a huge chunk all at once. Hardware also plays a role, as faster drives let you load faster.
Load times are a combination of this stuff and other optimization tricks that I’ve likely forgotten.
Optimization. Newer games use newer engines while remastered still uses the old engines.
ELI5 – think of liquids in pipes. New games are like water where older games are like a sludgey oil.
Older game engines may not have the concept of multithreading, or using multiple CPU cores at once. Games that can utilize multiple cores will often load faster and run faster than games that can only use one, because they can execute code faster. As far as I’m aware, multithreading didn’t work its way into most video game engines until 2010, or a little before.
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