When your surviving XCOM 2 soldiers are returning to base, the loading screen can last a reeeeeaaaaaallly long time. Turns out you can greatly speed it up by pressing… caps lock.
I SAW THIS TRICK LAST NIGHT ON oh damn, sorry, I still had caps lock on. Let’s try that again.
I saw this trick last night on NeoGAF’s XCOM 2 PC performance thread and was sceptical, because it sounds ridiculous. I’d recently had my game hang at the mission-ending loading screen for minutes on end, and while the length of the loading time did seem a bit odd, I couldn’t imagine a simple button press making things better. Then I tried it out in the game and… bam. The green “click to continue” button appeared more or less immediately. It didn’t speed up the load, it more or less bypassed it.
Lt. Solovyova breathes a sigh of relief, makes ready to dash for the head
As with most things related to PC gaming, your mileage may vary. Luke Plunkett and I have both been able to get it to work every time we’ve tried it, as have a lot of people in various forum threads, so there’s a pretty good chance it will work for you.
XCOM 2 is a fantastic game, but it sure does seem to be having performance issues for a lot of people. I’m running it on a PC that greatly exceeds its recommended specs and even with AA off and shadows turned down, my game regularly sits in the 40fps zone. It dips and hangs during combat and even struggles in my peaceful base. GPU usage fluctuates a great deal, rarely going above 80 per cent, which makes me think the game could definitely be running more smoothly than it does. Oddly, the retail version I’m playing this week feels more erratic than the pre-release build I played last week, when the opposite is usually true. It’s not enough to greatly detract from the game for me, but I do wish it ran more smoothly and would imagine it’s a bigger problem for people running close to or slightly below the recommended specs.
We’ve asked 2K for some specifics on when we might expect a patch; hopefully the answer turns out to be sooner rather than later. For now, the usual best practices apply: Turn down AA, turn down AO, turn down shadows and so on. And don’t forget to USE YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY.
Comments
17 responses to “An Unlikely Fix For XCOM 2’s Long-Arse Back To Base Load Times”
this makers no sense whatsoever.
The team shouts the debrief so they get heard the first time so it saves time in them having to repeat things.
Either that or nobody wants to get in the way of the heavily armed, injured team when they are shouting
oh. that’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
It would be unfortunate if pressing caps lock broke concealment.
Makes some sense if you know a bit about game dev! I can see a few scenarios that could explain this behavior.
1) low level keyboard interrupt is pulling the hanging gameloop out of a dead end
2) high level key press is triggering a UI refresh that could be missed in loading (maybe a race condition)
I know squat about game dev.
interesting possibilities though. either one implies load times will be getting better with an upcoming patch.
I’d forecast the patch basically being as good as the capslock fix, but automatic. 🙂
The only time I get noticeable stutter is when the mission is loading or end of mission when they’re all in the back of the skyranger and the camera is very close to the highly detailed soldiers. Everywhere else is fine.. it may not be 60fps but this isn’t a shooter. It plays without stutter in all other places, no hangs, freezes or other weird stuff.
I had a pretty bad framerate… until I turned off Vsync. Framerate more than doubled, completely fine now and runs exactly how you’d expect this kind of game to run on a 780TI. I noticed some tearing though, so I used the nVidia control panel to force on adaptive vsync.
In short, if you’re having much worse performance than you’d expect on your rig, try that. It worked for me. Perhaps it can also work for you!
It’s amazing, vsync still causes so many issues
Try forcing triple buffering in nvidia control panel instead of adaptive vsync, should fix your tearing issues.
Adaptive vsync is already fixing the tearing issues. But yes possibly using triple buffering and the default vsync would also fix the framerate issues with vsync on. Didn’t try that since I prefer adaptive vsync in most cases (if I have to use vsync) and I was needing to go into the nVidia control panel anyway.
Ahh alright cool, thought you were getting tearing with adaptive when it disables vsync.
The game crashes constantly for me. One of the reasons apart from my Pc veing being kinda crap that i prefer to stick to consoles.
Some pauses are actually coded in with modifiable values.
There are literally mods on the Steam workshop which you can install which remove the multi-second pauses after several types of action.
They added their own lag.
The only pause i get is when one of my squad moves far enough to trigger a new pod of enemies. There will be a slight pause in their stride as they reach the point in their movement the aliens come into view, then the enemies reveal scene will play after they reach their destination.
This caps lock button seems to work on XCOM as well.