Q: Why is my character still attacked while at a loading screen?
A: As mentioned in the Technical Alpha Learnings blog, characters will no longer spawn in a hostile place until the game is fully loaded, preventing characters from getting attacked or harmed during a loading screen. This fix is not in the build for the Early Access and Open Beta, but it will be in the game for launch. We didn’t want to delay the timing of the upcoming tests for this issue.
Can I actually clarify please, does this mean Blizzard intend to release Diablo II: R with loading screens? Surely not…
assuming they need loading screens to have the new 3D assets not popin oddly. So yeah, its going to be a thing.
Hopefully with optimization and SSDs, they can get it down to loading screen is barely a thing.
Well I use a performance Nvme so I don’t have to worry about all that.
Your system must load the data somehow, so yes there will be loading screens. Those who have played the original game recently don’t see them because computers have gotten so fast over the past 21 years, the loading screen is barely visible if visible at all. The hooded figure at the opening door…
What they are ensuring is that your character doesn’t appear until the loading is completed on your end. No one wants to click Duriels entrance… Loading… Loading… Loading… and then see “Your deeds will be remembered.”.
As time goes on, computers will continue to get faster and the loading screen will once again fade away.
3 Likes
I understand the change is to safeguard the player from death but I’m very shocked that loading screens are required in this day and age. I haven’t seen loading screens during game play for years.
Going from sprite based graphics to full 3D graphics is a quantum-leap in the amount of data your system must load. Loading gigabytes of data takes time, even for todays systems. The game data stored on your system contains compressed graphics data. In order to throw that graphic data on your screen, the data must first be decompressed and loaded into your graphics frame buffer. Processing power, disk accessing, RAM usage, graphics card buffer flushing/loading… It all adds up.
2 Likes
Hrm? Original D2 has loading screens, too! That door is a loading screen… even its less then 1 second. But in this “time” duriel for example was able to attack you.
2 Likes
Not only is the game going from sprite to 3D models, they’re 4k models and nobody will have a rig capable of loading 4k textures and models instantly for a while to come.
2 Likes
5-10 years I’d guess… Pending we get out of this pandemic/chip crisis soon. 
1 Like
I think people with faster systems will have 0 loading screen, just like what we’re used to in D2 right now. There are some videos on Youtube of people who made some changes to the alpha and completely got rid of loading screens without any downsides. This only goes for when you use TP and WP. It doesn’t stop loading screens from when you first enter a game.
But because it’s possible already in Alpha I suspect it will be just fine either at launch or sometime later when they optimize
Well, it’s not the end of the world.
It is not like in Diablo 3 that when entering a new area you lose charges, stacks or buffs of different talents and abilities.
Dont forget, when entering a boss room in multiplayer game, its informs you, you are entering a boss room and would you like to wait for everyone to warp there?
dear lord…
What happened to the days of the butcher, “Oh, what’s behind this door(says 8 year old me) opens door FRESH MEAT!” and I never ran so fast or panicked so hard.
4 Likes
Play classic graphics and problem solved
So, basically, in the original game, if you load it up on a HDD (or a slow Bnet connection) it’s especially noticeable, but, if you came through a portal with hostile enemies around, they could hit you before you could see them because your screen hadn’t finished loading.
This problem is likely made worse by, as others have posted, having to load ‘super fancy awesome graphics of visual delight’, so, to counter the issue, you would either have a brief invulnerability period, or simply wouldn’t actually pop through the portal until you finished loading (i.e. they changed up the order in the programming… before your character would come through at an earlier stage in the loading process… now it’s delayed until loading assets finishes).
What they are referring to is a “bug” from the alpha where characters would die while the area they were zoning into was still being loaded on their screen. This was most notable in duriels chamber, but there were also other possible scenarios for it.
There is no difference to the original diablo, because it also had load times between each zone. It even had load screens between acts, for zones they just went with the black screen because they were loaded so fast.
In D2R this fast loading takes considerably longer (we will need to see during beta how long the improved load times will take), in some cases long enough for your character, who was already created on the not-yet-visible map to be killed by monsters.
To fix this issue, Blizzard/VV needed to come up with a way to load the map, but not place the character on the map yet. This is the fix they are talking about.
It might be a bit harder, because the original game might not have a concept of “loading a map without a character being on it”.
Load screens are not new, but more noticable. And unfortunately we will have to live with them. Let’s just hope, they optimized the hell out of them.
In Vanilla D2 LoD, there is a very short loading screen, when you teleport between WPs in different acts. There is no loading screen at all whatsoever, if you go between WPs in the same act or if you use TPs.
The latter one now having loading screens is a bit concerning imo. If you TP back to town, when in the middle of 10 mobs and go back, you want to open a new TP asap. If you have a loading screen with inconsistent duration, that can be really hard to do reliantly.
It’s a problem though, because of what I wrote before: taking actions (like opening a TP) right after going through a TP.
Do you know that for sure? That could be a good workaround in difficult situations, but I am not even sure if it works.
I don’t think so. D2R has both graphics options going at one time and you can’t turn it off. You can switch in real time instantly by hitting the “G” key. That would not work if the game had to load those - they are already ready to go.
Same reason you can’t set the game to low graphics and play it on old PCs.
4 Likes
I am excited to see if my Xbox Series X will still have a lag on loading screens. Will know in 3 days I guess
I poped less than 5 secs with my SSD last alpha, so it can only be better.
There is. It depends on your computer and your network connection, but there is.
It is black.
That is why you will not take damage while on the load screen after the fix.
During beta however you will find some instances of this load screen of death.
You had the same effect before. Just with a different range. The loadscreens in D2 were somewhere below 1 second (sometimes longer).
In D2R they might be slightly longer (decreasing as your computer (and the game optimization) improves). But it will most likely always show the same effect:
- first time entering a place - long load time
- revisiting it after a short trip (e.g. to town) - short load time
- revisiting it again after a long trip (e.g. staying afk in town for an hour, walking through an entire act without opening a new tp) - long load time
So it is reliable, if you know what is happening.