Is anyone else completely over this tedious shite?
I understand the cases where it’s used to hide the fact that the game is loading in the next section of the level, but surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.
Regardless, it’s almost never the case that these shimmy squeezes have anything to do with slowing the player down for under-the-hood reasons (think of games like Sekiro, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed or Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order). They’re apparently there to provide the player with ‘gameplay’, I guess because they’re free gamey gameplay shit that you can just pepper into a level randomly to embloaten the experience a little.
It’s like a dog bowl with lots of nooks and crannies in it, designed to make the dog eat slower, but is presented as “enrichment”. I’m not a colicky dog and the rest of the game is providing ample enrichment, thanks. It would be even more enriching if you’d stop interrupting me to make me walk sideways through a fucking bookcase.
#CancelShimmySqueezes
Consoles tend to be backwards compatible to an extend and often even come with an inbuilt emulator for older games. You can play the first Zelda on the Switch.
Bloodborne had load times up to a minute on vanilla PS4, around 25 sec on PS4 Pro and around 15 sec on PS5.
Imagine they had you squeeze through a gap for 60 seconds to hide that load. Even a 30 second squeeze would have handicapped both Pro and PS5.
Hah well luckily I’ve never seen anything close to a 60 gap squeeze. But if the game is half decent, then there is story being conveyed during that time, not just the shimmy. TLOU has a few sections where you’re squeezing through a cramped wall that most certainly hides loading, but at the same time your character is hiding from an enemy, or some emotion other than bordom is trying to be conveyed.
Obviously I’m not arguing in favor of slow shimmies, I just think the better, well funded devs with the resources often come up with much more immersive excuses for hiding the loading. So at the end of the day, we’re just asking the overworked, under funded, possibly less skilled devs, who are often already crunching for a due date, to also think about how their game will run on hypothetical bandwidths of future hypothetical hardware. That’d be nice, but if they had that time, then they’d just spend it making the experience less boring on current hardware.
Agreed