Hypothetical Situation: You are playing a video game (I know, big surprise.). You need to get somewhere (this is an open world). Would you rather:
A: You pull up the map, choose a location, it goes to a loading screen, taking away control, and you appear there when it’s done loading.
or
B: You pull up the map, choose a location, it starts loading while a plane thingy picks you up, then drops you in a pod once it loads, all while you retain control of the character.
provided it doesn’t take WoW amounts of time for this then I’d go with the plane any day, as Yahtzee said in the Oblivion review that breaks immersion.
That plane better have some damn interesting stuff on it if I’m going to see it every time I want to fly to the next town. Otherwise it just gets annoying after the tenth time, much less the 425,834,192.4 times after that.
The .4 is when you realize you play that game WAY too friggin’ much and throw the disk out the window midflight after the pilot says “Look out, we’re in for some chop!” for the 425,834,203rd time.
In short, please make it more interesting than an ever-repeating reference to Starcraft’s reference to a movie.
Add in the lines “Set a course,” “Take it slow,” and “Make it happen,” and I think I could deal with it.
And yes, it probably would take longer than a loading screen, but, assuming you keep control of the player throughout the whole game, it wouldn’t break immersion.
And there would be some stuff on the plane.
Timeline for it:
0 seconds: Call it in
10 seconds: Plane arrives
11 seconds: You enter the plane
15 seconds: It takes off again
30 seconds minimum/after load finishes: You are dropped in a pod to your destination
I would prefer checking in my luggage and getting my boarding pass, walking twenty minutes to the security line, recombobulating a few minutes later, walking ten minutes to the gate, standing in line at a Burger King for five minutes to get a cheeseburger and a medium soft drink, eating slowly for twenty minutes while reading a book or something, boarding the airplane, waiting ten minutes for the plane to start moving, waiting two hours when the airport closes down due to weather conditions, waiting an hour for the airplane to be refueled, waiting three and a half hours in the air while my legs freeze and it’s too noisy to sleep, circling the airport until there’s a landing path available, landing and waiting ten minutes for the gate to open, getting off and waiting twenty minutes for my luggage, calling a taxi and waiting five minutes for it to arrive, spending ten minutes trying to explain to driver how to get where I want to go, waiting fifteen minutes looking out the window at the buildings going by, stepping out of the taxi, and finally switching to the wave beam and leveling up from beating a bunch of giant lizards.
Actually, if it’s going to take at least 30 seconds in a videogame, that plane had better be taking you a pretty long distance. >_>