10 GENIUS Ways Video Games Hide Load Times

Though free updates have improved it tenfold, No Man's Sky is still a game that falls short of the insane promises it made in 2016. To the developers' credit, they said they'd give us a whole universe, and they did...even if it's a whole universe of practically identical barren wastelands.

And while the game's load times aren't the shortest you'll find (quite the opposite, generally speaking), Hello Games do make the effort to incorporate ways of hiding them.

Firstly, the pretty star map that appears when you boot up the game is not just a stock video, but a real-time rendering of the game's eighteen-quintillion planets. You're not likely to visit many of these, but the experience still gives you that feeling of physically travelling across the galaxy to your starting destination.

Then, there's the game's procedural wizardry, which creates environments and planets literally as and when you first see them. Flying into a planet's atmosphere from outer space requires no loading whatsoever - the compromise being that the terrain beneath sometimes pops in entirely too late.

Taking the portal from a space station to your home base is also a way the game disguises its loading times. Although, given how long it takes, it'd be a bit of stretch to count that.