10 Mind-Blowing Gaming Features Everybody Takes For Granted

There’s quite literally nothing worse than heading out to the store and purchasing a physical copy of a game only to return home and realize that there’s a thirty-gigabyte patch standing between the would-be player and the game. In fact, the slower internet speeds and less-equipt consoles of the last generation frequently meant that players simply had to go to bed and wait for everything to install overnight.

Fortunately, pre-loading has mostly made that a thing of the past, though it does come with one major caveat. Purchasers can now download their games hours or even days before they officially release to ensure that they're ready to go once they finally launch. That said, this almost always requires a pre-purchased copy of the game, which is a major taboo in the eyes of some.

Still, it’s a great way to get around the awful grind of downloading and waiting with which we have become so familiar. In the future, internet speeds may be fast enough to circumvent this issue entirely, but, as it stands, this is an underappreciated method of getting around that inevitable day-one install period.