Load times are a regular bane of gamers, even if they are running their system with tons of high-speed memory and a high-end solid state drive. Not so with Street Fighter V modders though, as a new mod which unlocks the frame rate of the character-select screens has almost erased loading times altogether.
Street Fighter V is a popular beat ’em up with a solid fan base and a bustling competitive scene, but it does suffer from a few irritating elements, loading screens being one of them. Perhaps the most aggravating is the one that takes place immediately following the character selection. ToolAssisted’s mod, however, does away with that problem entirely.
Having discovered a way to unlock the user interface frame rate for Street Fighter V, ToolAssisted was able to increase it from 60 to 255, which as you can see from the video in the header, makes a huge difference to how fast the next round actually loads.
While this is great news for anyone looking to get more games in with their limited play time, it does raise the question of why the loading experience is so slow if it’s just a matter of frame rate? If nothing in particular is being loaded, why take all of that time?
Backing up this query is a self-proclaimed “computer engineer” on Reddit who claims that the VS screen is just for show and that the loading actually takes place during the white flash, so why is the transition so slow?
One suggestion put forward is that it was to make the game have a unified experience across all platforms. Street Fighter V is playable on both PS4 and PC, so perhaps Capcom wished to avoid having PC gamers with fast SSDs from loading faster than their console counterparts (thanks Eurogamer).
The more cynical out there suggested it was just a way for Capcom to pad the game’s content.
You can download ToolAssisted’s Mod from their GitHub page, though bear in mind this mod is unofficial and could impact your game’s performance in unknown ways.
In other news, Street Fighter V is getting a new character on February 28. Are you excited?
