7. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
While the previous games on this list are static images, Black Ops 4 is a slight evolution of that concept as the load screens for the multiplayer show you various angles of each map, giving you an idea of the overall layout and concept of each particular map. This is perfect for noobs to get an idea of the lanes that funnel into more open areas, and where they can camp and hide, while veterans will notice details they may not have before because Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has a lot of environmental storytelling due to the lack of a campaign. Some of these story aspects are hidden in plain site if you look hard enough and Call of Duty fans were actively dissecting each frame when Black Ops 4 was the new hot COD title. Some of my favorite Call of Duty: Black Ops load screens are Hacienda, Seaside (especially Sunset Seaside), Grind, Summit, and Remnant. While I’m already missing these load screens with Modern Warfare and Black Ops: Cold War fighting for my FPS attention, Call of Duty games get less support the more they age and these load screens will certainly be a thing of the past with the SSDs and far fewer people playing.
6). Death Stranding
Typically, a static load screen requires a significant amount of hidden details to discover to keep me interested, but Death Stranding takes a different approach. The beautiful picturesque landscapes from the game cycle between highly detailed character profiles alongside philosophical quotes from the twisted mind of Hideo Kojima. Although it’s a fictional game Death Stranding’s landscape invokes memories of the local Canadian landscape mixed with that of Scotland or Wales. Several of the characters in the game are played by renowned actors such as Norman Reedus, Guillermo del Toro, Mads Mikkelson, Tommie Earl Jenkins, and Léa Seydoux, but even the obscure characters from the narrative are still jaw-droppingly hyper-realistic to the point where I swear that I’ve met some of these people. And if you showed me a landscape of Death Stranding as a child, or a screenshot of one of the characters, I would’ve told you they were real because imaging a game of such graphical fidelity was beyond that of the 16-bit era. The visuals of Death Stranding are worth getting lost in.
5. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim/Fallout 4
On the last generation of consoles, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a simplistic frame above a load status bar that slowly colored in before the game loaded, but The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim stepped it up in 2011 with a smoky and dark screen that offered a 3D image that gamers could rotate to observe attentively as the game loads. Faster load times in the game strictly include the boring smoky screen, but anything that includes a rotatable object has always kept me interested enough to not put the controller down as it loaded. My personal favorite objects to rotate in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are the ferocious dragon that initially gave me too much anxiety to play Skyrim, the dopey-eyed Dragon Priest mask, and the Vampire Lord. During this generation of consoles, Fallout 4 released with the same concept. Just like gamers could do in their Pipboy, they could look closely at an issue of Grognak the Barbarian, observe a completely docile Deathclaw or stare longingly at a bottle of Nuka Cola.
4. Rocket League
The static images that act as Rocket League’s load screens into an official match aren’t particularly interesting beyond showing you what map you’re playing on, but something else might become a thing of the past with the release of the Xbox Series X/S and PS5. There’s a staging area between matches that fans of the Soccar game have become accustomed to. People can play out an unofficial 1v1 match, crash repeatedly into each other or sit patiently and wait for the upcoming match. This area is similar to staging areas in battle royale games, only it’ll take far less time to put together enough people for a match of Rocket League (depending on the game mode) and the loading capability of the new consoles means more people will be getting into the games, making this staging area more of a blink and you’ll miss it screen than a place to mess around.
Click through to Page 3 for our final 3 load screens we’re going to miss with the newest gen…