It's been 5 years. The same people who can make a 3D world look so amazing, can't make different loading screens for different monitor aspect ratios. They apparently think showing us distorted images every single time we see a loading screen doesn't matter much to us.
Well it does matter. The stretched screens are... just ugly. And they ruin the beauty of this game.
There's already 14GB downloaded into my Lotro folder. Will a bunch of undistorted HiRes loading screens add much more to that?
Please save our weary eyes the pain of having to look at stretched low-resolution images! I don't even mind seeing black bars or black borders, but stop the stretching, please!
Also I believe there is a custom UI/plugin that allows you to change the loading screens to anything you want (I don't remember the name of it). You could try that.
"I have my fears, but they do not have me." ... "And the monster I was so afraid of, lies curled up on the floor."
-Peter Gabriel- "Darkness"
Ignorance is bestowed on us at birth, but we don't have to keep it.
-Lorin Fast- "Random ramblings"
I don't care much about loading screens, because I rarely look at them - especially if they have Store ads on them. What I'd like is a way to define my own loading screens, then have the launcher leave them alone since I'm a VIP. Stop overwriting them with those obnoxious ads!
The map is another matter - I'd definitely like to have that behave itself at any aspect ratio.
The latest version of the Streamlined skin seems to have an elegant solution to the map stretching.
It just overlays the map on top of your screen and doesn't stretch it in any way. You can still see your character and the world, the map is just in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
I'll try and get a screenshot of it to post but I'm at work right now. It really surprised me when I updated the skin last night. I wasn't expecting it Very nice surprise.
I see no reason to spend time and resources on something as trivial as a loading screen.
You mean like, when the guy who's making the loading screen picture and usually decides to save it as a 23.6x18.5 pixel image, decides to save it in a more realistic resolution and the standard wide screen aspect ratios, he'll be spending hours... nay, weeks, doing that. Poor turbine employees.
Turbine should render the loading screens in the few standard aspect ratios: 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 (don't know if any others are in use today), and only at the highest resolution required. These HiRes pictures are uploaded to the client when they change, and the client, depending on the resolution you have chosen can take 2.35 sec to resize the image to the correct size for you, once and for all (and whenever you modify lotro's resolution which people hardly ever do on a regular basis). Or even resize it on the fly. No big deal. Big relief for our eyes.
What effect does loading screens have on Game Play?
Although it doesn't affect the game play itself, it instantly tells the player how poorly the game is handled in general.
It's a rather important issue to my sense.