This week Mass Effect 2 launched worldwide, and I've had to leave on hold my Dragon Age gaming until I finish it (I'm around 16 hours of ME2 playtime).
While I will leave my judgement of the game, it's RPG softening for the masses, it's incredible narrative (being simple doesn't means it can't have deep transcripts) and a small screenshots gallery I'm taking as I play for a later post, today I wanted to comment something that happened to me and I've finally fixed (thanks to the ME2 community, but I can't find the exact post).
If you have a Dual-Core or Quad-Core CPU, there seems to be an Unreal Engine 3 bug that causes some incredibly long loading times in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age (I suffered it only on ME2, but I will try in Dragon Age to see if speed improves too). A 5 seconds loading screen in an affected computer takes easily 20 to 30 seconds!
The solution is easy but a bit boring because each time you launch the game you have to repeat it:
- When the game is running, ALT+TAB from it or minimize and open the Windows Task Manager
- Go to the Processes tab, right click on masseffect2.exe and select Set Affinity.
- Uncheck all CPUs and check only the first one (CPU 0).
- Close Task Manager and get back to the game again.
Loading times should be much much faster!