Devs casually expose far-reaching loading bar conspiracy: 'People just don’t trust one that’s too quick'

pcgamer.com:

Bad news, friends: We've been had. Deceived. Led up the garden path and comprehensively bamboozled. It turns out that, for all these years, our loading screens have been lying to us. 

Spotted by GamesRadar, a jovial tweet about loading bars not being smooth enough—from comedian Alasdair Beckett-King—has prompted countless game devs to fess up to a conspiracy that goes to the heart of our hobby: Many loading bars in our favourite games bear zero relation to the actual progress of a load at all. Devs have just been putting them in for the psychological effect they have on players.

«Fun thing,» tweeted Thomas Was Alone and John Wick Hex creator Mike Bithell in response to Beckett-King's tweet, «players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it».

(Alasdair’s cool and this is a joke)Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it.Game design: often starts before the game does. https://t.co/r8pbsEOm6JJune 28, 2023

Quelle horreur, I hear you cry in French for some reason. How could Bithell so blithely cop to a deception of this magnitude? Does he mean to suggest that the loading bars in his own games were fakes? Well, some of them at least. A reply to his tweet recounted the tale of a Fallout: New Vegas mod that put in loading screens it didn't even need because they somehow made the project seem more «professional». In response, Bithell said «hehe, I can neither confirm nor deny that Thomas Was Alone does the same thing».

Apparently, it's all to do with player psychology. Not having a loading bar, or watching