It is the bane of gamers ever since the CD-ROM revolution took over for cartridge gaming.  Load times and load screens.  They suck, plain and simple.  Early on though, they were much worse because the technology was so new.  Developers just did not understand how to work CD-ROM’s the way they can with today’s hardware.  Sega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi has gone on the record and said we can kiss load screens goodbye with Yakuza 6 for the Playstation 4 console.

“We’ve worked hard to make this game completely seamless,” Toshihiro Nagoshi said to IGN “You can engage in the central adventure, get into battles, watch drama scenes, and go back to the adventure, all without any loading screens. Go into any building or any room or any floor without loading.”

He went on to elaborate on his point – “Loading is problematic for lots of reasons, including its effect on the realism of the story — let’s say you have a 60-second countdown to reach a location and stop an explosion, but when loading screens come in, how do we account for those seconds? How do we keep the pressure on? So we really pushed to make it seamless this time. That’s where a lot of the budget went, and it’s also the reason we did not make a version for PS3. The effect is that the player has the freedom to solve problems as they like, and the sub-quests themselves are presented in a seamless way.”

This is rather ambitious for an open world game but with the power of a newer console such as the Playstation 4 behind it, you would think load times would not be an issue.  Yakuza 6 is, at this time, a Japanese exclusive for the Sony Playstation 4.  That is surely to change as we get closer to the December 2016 release date.