I want SSD options for my PS4! I want load times that rival my PC!
Next generation will hopefully be better, granted at this point I do most of my gaming on PC.

Don't have the space to film the process (I need to clear out old clips, I guess), but here are my numbers for the critical spots in your Xbox video:

0:00 at Dashboard
0:16 to Press A to Start
1:03 to choose character
1:13 to Director
2:59 Loaded into Tower

I have a 4-year-old Xbox One - according to Amazon, I bought it in October 2014. The only thing I DO have that you don't is an external SSD (OS is on the internal, games are on the external).

It's always been fast -but since Forsaken has come out, it's totally paid for itself in blood pressure medication savings.

I didn't actually measure times, but I just got that 1TB Samsung SSD that got linked last time this stuff came up today. My load times are half of what they used to be, if not even faster than that.

Menus feel faster, too, but that always seemed really inconsistent, so I don't know if that's actually true or not.

If you need to be rewarded to keep visiting planets and characters, then you've not got much intrinsic fun.

I see what you’re getting at, but I disagree. I like everything I can do in Destiny right now. Literally the most fun I’ve ever had with either iteration of the game. Including just going to the Destinations and screwing around in patrols.

The problem (if you can call it that) comes from the fact that there’s so much to do. The grindy stuff isn’t just for shits and giggles. It serves to get players moving around and doing other things.

The exotic quests mostly have you jumping through different activities, which moves people around. The challenges obviously do the same. I used to get frustrated at the inventory cap for certain items (10 Ghost Fragments, seriously?), but I’ve even come to understand that. Sure, it can be annoying to go buy a Wanted bounty only to realize that you only have 2 fragments. But it makes you get out in the Tangled Shore and do some stuff. If it wasn’t capped, I’d probably be sitting on hundreds of those things, and it would be a long time before I had to actually go into the Tangled Shore for anything. I think it’s a smart way to keep the player population moving around and doing a little bit of every activity. And, at the end of the day, they’re not forcing anything. There’s so much stuff to do, there’s always another option available.

Cody, sometimes it feels like you play this game out of stubbornness. You complain about the grind and intrinsic fun, but you never want to acknowledge that for lots of us, the game is intrinsically fun and enjoyable in nearly every way, and the the grind that you hate so much just gives us a little more direction, a goal to chase. There’s so much to do that I probably wouldn’t choose to go just hang out on Mars very often. But the Flashpoint is enough to point me there, and I enjoy my time there when I go.

I agree with a lot of stuff you’ve said. Forsaken is far from perfect, and I’m still not a fan of the soft cap system (although I’d be completely fine with if it I wasn’t rushing to a blind raid, which I still don’t think I’m going to do again). You call all those things frictions, made to slow down the player. You’re not wrong, but I’m not convinced it’s a bad thing. Destiny players need to be slowed down sometimes, and the realities of making a live game like Destiny means that they need to encourage players to move around, they need to keep everything populated, and those frictions serve that goal. We can argue all day about whether Destiny would be better as a traditional single player game rather than an MMO, but it’s not a discussion worth having—that ship sailed a long time ago.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Punch in my gamer tag D_P_Roberts into a time tracking utility and compare now to the past. I am pretty much always the lowest level person in a group of DBOers.

Precisely because I’m not doing that shit anymore.

::sigh::

He wasn't suggesting that you haven't made a choice to play less. He was suggesting that your conclusion was flawed.

I swear the post said "You keep doing IT Cody". But yeah. It's hollow in my opinion. The worst thing about Forsaken is while they added a lot of awesome stuff, they added even more stuff that is pointless and hollow which you can't avoid. It would easily be the best expansion they've ever done had they not turned all this grindy investment shit up a few notches.

If you need to be rewarded to keep visiting planets and characters, then you've not got much intrinsic fun.

Matter is going to blow, I'm calling it now.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Punch in my gamer tag D_P_Roberts into a time tracking utility and compare now to the past. I am pretty much always the lowest level person in a group of DBOers.

Precisely because I’m not doing that shit anymore.

::sigh::

He wasn't suggesting that you haven't made a choice to play less. He was suggesting that your conclusion was flawed.

Getting rid of the explicit pickup sequence means you won't miss out on getting credit for something you've actually done because you didn't pick up the bounty for it. But it also means that you might not look at them at all before entering a play space, and therefore might not know that you could have gotten a reward if you'd only gone somewhere else and done some other activity.

Bounties are a dumb solution to that problem. People just asked to be able to see what the challenges on any given destination and activity were. Bungie’s response was to get rid of the challenge system and give us bounties instead. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s completely asinine, and it doesn’t even fix the actual problem, because now I still have to load into a separate space to pick up bounties and see what they are. It’s literally the dumbest response they could have implemented to address the complaints with the old challenge system.

I guess I’m making a huge assumption that bounties are even a response to those complaints and not just Bungie making dumb decisions of their own accord for whatever asinine reasons they can come up with.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Punch in my gamer tag D_P_Roberts into a time tracking utility and compare now to the past. I am pretty much always the lowest level person in a group of DBOers.

Precisely because I’m not doing that shit anymore.

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

I dunno, but it was definitely not as big of a problem in D1. I wish you could at least interact with the unloaded tiles the same way you can interact with the Director before it loads. I know where my Raiden Flux is. Let me equip it without waiting for the images to load!

EXACTLY! It is very irritating. Also whats bad is when you are stuck in loading screens, thats the time to play with inventory/shaders. That is also when its the SLOWEST. I will try and preview a shader and it may take until its done loading into the planet/tower to render. I know its not my connection, its blazing fast.

But why are the tiles not cached? These are tiny images. Oh no, we can’t set aside 1.8MB of RAM to cache the inventory screen. Nope not enough of that 8GB remains. A crisp responsive user interface is super important.

but that makes the play space activities less engaging and immersive, as there's no longer any reason to visit characters like Petra or Spider.

And thus the hollow nature of Destiny’s loops is exposed.

I mean... nahhhhhh. But you keep doin you cody.

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

I dunno, but it was definitely not as big of a problem in D1. I wish you could at least interact with the unloaded tiles the same way you can interact with the Director before it loads. I know where my Raiden Flux is. Let me equip it without waiting for the images to load!

EXACTLY! It is very irritating. Also whats bad is when you are stuck in loading screens, thats the time to play with inventory/shaders. That is also when its the SLOWEST. I will try and preview a shader and it may take until its done loading into the planet/tower to render. I know its not my connection, its blazing fast.

Not sure if I hate loading in times, or the dreadful inventory load times more.

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

I dunno, but it was definitely not as big of a problem in D1. I wish you could at least interact with the unloaded tiles the same way you can interact with the Director before it loads. I know where my Raiden Flux is. Let me equip it without waiting for the images to load!

Once you are at a Destination, changing a weapon still takes time because you are waiting on your inventory tiles to load up. Usually this is not that big of a deal.

This really bothers me in Competitive however. You get into a match, and realize your loadout doesn't fit the map or enemy loadouts. So you go into your menus AS SOON AS YOU DIE and are waiting on the tiles to load. By the time you have changed weapons, you have already respawned. Now you have NO special ammo and sometimes only 1 clip in the primary.

I have watched some streamers on twitch and it looks near instantaneous on PC.

Is this a lack of hardware power on my PS4 pro? OR just the game?

Xbox (from Dashboard:
2:14 before I can pick a character.
2:44 before I can use the director.
5:51 to load into the Tower to start the process of picking up the day's bounties.

Last night I timed these on my One X:

1:47 to get to character selection screen
0:15 to get to orbit
:57 to get to the tower

I have had days when it's been worse, but never more than 5 minutes total. I agree they need to look at loading issues, especially for the older hardware.

Someone was watching me play in the dreaming city, and I crossed a loading zone into the area with the oracle.

"Holy cow" he said. "There was NO loading? I'm on Xbox, and it freezes for like 10 seconds".

I've never had it stop other than a slight faction of a second hiccup. On the PS4 Pro with a 7200rpm drive. I would just in general be weary of anything external on USB. USB is not a good protocol, as it utilizes the CPU and is not Isochronous, unlike Firewire or Thunderbolt.

Regardless, SSD over USB 3 is damn fast and has improved my load times drastically

https://xboxdvr.com/gamer/kornymunky/video/62142762

I forgot to download the Orbit DLC. I thought Bungie went with Activision, not EA...