When your surviving XCOM 2 soldiers are returning to base, the loading screen can last a reeeeeaaaaaallly long time. Turns out you can greatly speed it up by pressing... caps lock.
I SAW THIS TRICK LAST NIGHT ON oh damn, sorry, I still had caps lock on. Let’s try that again.
I saw this trick last night on NeoGAF’s XCOM 2 PC performance thread and was skeptical, because it sounds ridiculous. I’d recently had my game hang at the mission-ending loading screen for minutes on end, and while the length of the loading time did seem a bit odd, I couldn’t imagine a simple button press making things better. Then I tried it out in the game and… bam. The green “click to continue” button appeared more or less immediately. It didn’t speed up the load, it more or less bypassed it.
As with most things related to PC gaming, your mileage may vary. Luke Plunkett and I have both been able to get it to work every time we’ve tried it, as have a lot of people in various forum threads, so there’s a pretty good chance it’ll work for you.
XCOM 2 is a fantastic game, but it sure does seem to be having performance issues for a lot of people. I’m running it on a PC that greatly exceeds its recommended specs and even with AA off and shadows turned down, my game regularly sits in the 40fps zone. It dips and hangs during combat and even struggles in my peaceful base. GPU usage fluctuates a great deal, rarely going above 80%, which makes me think the game could definitely be running more smoothly than it does. Oddly, the retail version I’m playing this week feels more erratic than the pre-release build I played last week, when the opposite is usually true. It’s not enough to greatly detract from the game for me, but I do wish it ran more smoothly and would imagine it’s a bigger problem for people running close to or slightly below the recommended specs.
We’ve asked 2K for some specifics on when we might expect a patch; hopefully the answer turns out to be sooner rather than later. For now, the usual best practices apply: Turn down AA, turn down AO, turn down shadows, and so on. And don’t forget to USE YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY.
Update: A 2K rep got back to me about the game’s performance issues: “We are aware some players have experienced performance issues while playing XCOM 2, and we are looking into them and gathering more information from users. We want everyone to have the best experience possible, and will continue supporting the title with upcoming patches.”
To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com.