"Why Did I Wait So Long To Play This?!"

[GrahfsLament]

axumblade said:
The Last of Us (simply put, my PS3 didn't want to play it) and Bioshock (my bf at the time beat the game while I was watching so I held off on playing). I was also a wimp up until recently when it came go games with jump scares.

You know, I ran into something similar. When I was playing this on my PS3, it took 20 minutes or more the first time it loaded. And then the second time I played it, it took about 20 minutes or more to load my save along with early cut-scenes having some real bad pop-in/clipping, etc. As I progressed, the cut-scenes evened out (so only one of the most compelling cut-scenes in the beginning was ruined...hurray!), but the initial load time got slightly longer and longer (timed it to verify). So, despite this extremely frustrating circumstance, I persisted in playing through the game.

Fast forward, I finally beat it and was talking to a friend who said that they experienced none of these issues. I then talked to another friend who said the same thing. So, I tried one of these friend's disc, and this ridiculous initial load time persisted. Of course, I started to wonder if it was just my system. However, all diagnostics on the HDD showed all sectors were good and absolutely no other game was giving me any issues.

Turns out, it was self inflicted: as I understand it, the initial interminable loading was due to the game putting its required files into the HDD's cache. Every time I played a different game (and I did cycle games a lot, especially because I had 3 or so at the time which were part of weekly online gaming sessions with friends), I was causing that cache to be replaced. Given that I was only able to play TLoU once a week for a couple of hours, I was basically forcing myself to sit through the initial set up each and every time.

Live and learn ¯_(ツ)_/¯