If you read my previous blog, one of my chief complaints about Fable II was the length of the load times.  With the new XBox 360 experience on the way, one of the new features is the ability to install a game to the hard drive, which should help with the very problem that I encountered with Fable, namely load times.  Take a look at the load times as reported by Eurogamer in the image below.

(Fable II Load Time image from Eurogamer)

Now by looking at the load times, you might think they aren't all that bad.  What's 30 seconds of your life right?  Truth be told, these load times might be acceptable if the areas were more robust and they took more time to traverse.  In several cases, such as when you are in towns, there's almost enough to do to warrant the load time.  However, you typically have no reason to spend a large amount of time in any one area, and after your initial explore, are usually only in a given area for a very short duration, maybe a couple of minutes.  Thus you find yourself in a reptitious couple minutes of play time, load screen, couple minutes of play time, load screen, which due to the length of the load screens results in a lot of unnecessary waiting on the part of the player.

The fact that developers were unable to solve the load time issues for an open world is more than a little discouarging, especially since so many games before it have done so, or in the very least, minimize the amount of load screens to a suitable level.