Why does it take 10 minutes to start the game?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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First play of the day is misery in Darktide.
Takes a minute or two to reach the intro screens, another few minutes to reach the character selection, a good 5-6 minutes to reach the hub… where you’re usually just a head with legs without textures… and then, if you dare talk to a vendor, you’ll have to wait another 2-3 minutes for the damn shop and it’s selection to load in…

…not to mention that the first mission you play takes forever to load and it’s usually laggy as hell.
And I don’t even recall if the game loaded faster back when I stopped playing in January.

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I don’t mean to be that guy, but I don’t have this problem. I go from pressing “play” to loading into the mourningstar in about 1 miute total.

Slow loading of assets is often an issue with the host PC not being able to bring them into a usable state fast enough. It sounds like some kind of hardware issue, whether it’s a fault or limitation. Do you have the game installed on an SSD? What graphics card are you running? Do you have plenty of free memory?

Has the game ever performed well on your rig?

It could also be that the game doesn’t like some piece of your computer, like the recent issues people had with certain video cards.

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It’s only on the first time of the day. Or after I’ve restarted my computer.
If I play, go and do chores, come back and play some more… the game will boot up fast and work as I’d expect the game to do.

But to answer your question, I get a good 80+ fps on medium-high settings without issues… when everything’s working. And unlike how it was back in January, I don’t crash 3-5 times every mission either. Glad Fatshark fixed that issue.

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Ngl this sounds like “old harddrive” syndrome…

I started out with having DT on a harddrive and that took 5min from clicking play to being able to move in the hub.

Then eventually I put it on a SSD and eventually M.2 and now that same timeframe is about 1min in length.

With the “Skip intro” mod/tool that is even shorter now.

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I do have a SSD but it isn’t large enough for me to comfortable install DT on it.
Got it installed on a large HDD instead.

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That explains it.

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I experience this completely randomly, sometimes the game loads in seconds, sometimes it takes 10 minutes.
I’ve just chalked it up to server load or the dedicated servers having difficulties routing people with strict NATs together.
At any rate it doesn’t seem to be on my end since it’s always different, day to day, and it’s the same for my friends.
Sometimes it loads fast, sometimes it takes forever, that’s DT.
For people who have never experienced this: maybe you have an open NAT and the problem only applies to people with medium/strict protocols?

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That might be it. Especially if it’s an old HDD that might be starting to wear out, or if it’s one of the slow ones that’s designed for long life over performance.

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Wouldn’t be able to tell. Only Darktide got this issue. Vermintide 2, for example, starts up fast and easy, in the keep in less than a minute easy.

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Don’t have to get NVMe SSD. Simply a SATA SSD is big step up from mechanical HDD.

In many online games, even if you have NVMe SSD you still have to wait until everyone to load to start at the same time anyway.

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I have the exact same problem. The issue is the first time it loads the Mourningstar everyday, after the first launch the game works just fine.

People, stop telling that this is a hard drive problem, because DT is the only game I have that does this dumb thing.

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This sounds like the game is caching on first load, for it to use that cache to have faster subsequent loads.

If don’t have this problem on other games similar to high system requirements of Darktide, then can safely say it’s not the RAM or Drive.

Maybe clean shader cache.

image

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Tried this, it went from around 6 minutes to 3. Unfortunately I still have to wait for the textures to load properly and the vendors to work like 2 minutes more, but hey, it’s a little improvement.

The second time it loaded was 34 seconds.

WTH is wrong with this game?

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a lot is wrong. even on top end pc it runs like patato

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I had crashes on just the launcher part.

I saw on reddit about deleting FatShark folder in Appdata and it worked. It also reset my graphic settings.

Over the years doing changes here and there to windows to get games to run has probably turned my machine into the most insecure windows in the world.

Problem is I did so many changes at the same time instead of one by one. I don’t know which change it was that mattered! I just wanted to rule everything out.

The things I’ve done and not recommended. Most insecure windows ever.

  • UAC off
  • Exclude Steam games folder from Windows Defender
  • Disabled Controlled folder access
  • Disabled Smart App Control
  • Disabled everything in Reputation-based protection
  • Disabled everything in Exploit Protection
  • Disabled Core isolation (Funnily enough Microsoft say can impact gaming. See below link)
  • Turn off Virtual Machine Platform (Same again Microsoft said same thing here)
  • Disable game mode
  • Disabled Xbox game bar

Options to Optimize Gaming Performance in Windows 11 - Microsoft Support

Just as last resort I wonder what happens if I reinstall windows clean from USB drive. What if that does not work, just wasted my time. So I just take an image of my drive, just so I know I can re-image back on if reinstalling clean windows was in vain.

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i have a high end system, still takes long time to load.

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Precisely! As long as you don’t restart your computer, Darktide remains fairly fast to restart after that first initial time.

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