Whole game freezes for a good 15+ seconds for each cutscene-to-gameplay transition

[onomonopoet]

The title pretty much says it. I'm playing the game through Steam on OS X Lion. My machine exceeds all system requirements. I've verified the game cache and defragmented with Steam. The game plays smooth as butter overall, but whenever there's a cutscene and it ends and control is given back to me to play, the screen freezes for 15+ seconds before gameplay resumes. It's really irritating, especially since sound continues to play fine in the background.

I've found no reference to this either here or over at the Telltale forums. I figure I can't be the only one with this problem. Anything I can do?

[Bad_Motha]

Could be GPU driver related. Perhaps game doesn't get along with your GPU and/or it's drivers.

[onomonopoet]

Originally Posted by Bad_Motha

Could be GPU driver related. Perhaps game doesn't get along with your GPU and/or it's drivers.

Could be, but if that's the reason, I don't see why it would run butter-smoothly everywhere else. During cutscenes and gameplay, it works flawlessly. It's just that transition that's screwed up. Hm. I haven't had a chance to test again... perhaps a simple reboot will do the trick. I'll report back.

[onomonopoet]

Ok, figured it out. Turns out it kept trying to cloud-save to Steam and my internet connection at my dorm blows chunks. It had nothing to do with graphics or performance in general... it was the saving. Trying to connect and retrying for 15 to 20 seconds every single time it went from, well, not even a cutscene... but after making any move that involved an animation. Made it extremely annoying. I ended up using my iPhone's internet tethering option and then it ran just as intended.

I hope this helps someone!

[ninjafoodstuff]

I've noticed the same issues on 10.7.3, there's also periodic frame drop, graphics corruption, and it has CTD on me once.

[onomonopoet]

Originally Posted by ninjafoodstuff

I've noticed the same issues on 10.7.3, there's also periodic frame drop, graphics corruption, and it has CTD on me once.

I remember frame drops occurring very rarely. Graphics corruption I saw none of, frankly. Only thing that never looked right were the shadows. They were made up of black boxes that always seemed too big. It's crashed once or twice... I don't remember the circumstances. It was never game-interrupting for me, somehow. I just remember seeing the "OK, Report, Reopen" dialog a few times over the course of my time with the game.

[ninjafoodstuff]

I've found that setting the graphics quality to low helped in my case.

Originally Posted by onomonopoet

Ok, figured it out. Turns out it kept trying to cloud-save to Steam and my internet connection at my dorm blows chunks.

This doesn't use Steam cloud.

[onomonopoet]

Originally Posted by ninjafoodstuff

I've found that setting the graphics quality to low helped in my case.



This doesn't use Steam cloud.

No? Hm. Perhaps it's not cloud-save from Steam but when starting the game with a properly functioning internet connection, there's a "connecting..." graphic somewhere in the UI. The game is connecting to SOMEWHERE to do SOMETHING. And whatever that is, it was a game-changer for me (pardon the pun).

[gamingafter40]

There are Steam achievements awarded after each chapter of the episode, my guess is that it's trying to connect in order to register those (though I'm only familiar with the PC version.)