So @grumpy-jediโ and I were discussing the true miniboss of Pillars of Eternity, and so many other games: the Loading Screen. Will your computer TPK this time and crash to desktop before the area finishes loading? Will you alt-tab to do something else in the ten minutes that zone near the end of the game requires to load, only to remember three hours later that you even had the game open?
What the loading screen really needs is some sort of minigame built into it, to keep us entertained while we take our time moving through doorways or disembarking from our ship! Examples that could be implemented for PoE/Deadfire:
Eoran variations on a tetris clone, pong clone, etc. – something nice and familiar but in the exotic Pillars setting. (Adra tetris?)
Remember that animated pipe of Edรฉrโs that used to be part of the loading screens in beta, later replaced with Eothasโ symbol? Make a minigame where you shape pictures from the pipe smoke, Gandalf-style. Click and drag, account for breezes and dissipation, etc. to get nice puffs and heart-shapes and DRAGONS!
Aloth dressup doll. ;-D This would appeal to the widest consumer base, but maybe loading screens could cycle through various companions too.
Character Creator, the Minigame. While you wait on the next area, you revisit the CC and put together a random NPC. This NPC will show up in the game later! Not that they have quests or dialogue or anything that could get weird depending on what look you gave them: theyโre just background townsfolk types, but what they look like will be determined by whatever changes you can make in the Loading Screen CC before suddenly youโre thrown back into the minigame. Itโs a race to get that NPC just right – or just to mess around with options you overlooked when building your Watcher. And then, oops, the game loaded sooner than you expected and your poor NPC is left bald because you hadnโt finished scrolling through the hairstyles yet! ๐