Hello, friends. It’s your Elsword old man.

What I’m showing you guys today is the loading screen.

In most games where you bounce back and forth between town and dungeons, loading screens are basically mandatory while the game pulls data from the server, and in the game I play, Elsword, those loading screens come in a whole bunch of different flavors.

This is the very first loading screen you see when you start the game, and the background here is our old pal “El Tree,” who’s been with us ever since Elsword first launched. Kind of overflowing with old-school pedigree right from the very first loading screen, huh?

Now sure, if this were the only loading screen in the game, you guys would probably go, “Aw, come on, this is just nostalgia bait,” or “What, El Tree one-trick only? tsk tsk,” but this one only shows up when you’re “starting the game,” and the in-game loading screens are way more varied and colorful than that.

First up, the most basic default loading screen is the one that gives you the boss and dungeon info for wherever you’re about to enter. Unlike the actual in-game visuals, which are built in 3D, these let you see the boss in full 2D illustration form, and the fantasy-game-style dungeon flavor text is honestly fun to read on its own.

But game companies are businesses in the end, and businesses chase profit, so of course they didn’t stop at making only nice, player-friendly loading screens like that. What they also rolled out, naturally, were loading screens that advertise limited-time items sold in the cash shop.

Of course, just because a company makes promo loading screens for profit doesn’t mean players are going to see them and go, “Oh wow, amazing!” and instantly buy the thing. Players’ standards are higher than you might think. So the strategy they landed on was, basically, “make the promo loading screens pretty.”

This is one of the newly released loading screens for promoting a cash item, and they’re not just shoving the item in your face and calling it a day, they show you what it actually looks like, and to make sure it looks good they pick a character who can really sell it and draw that character wearing the heater avatar in an illustration, and honestly, they’re good at choosing the characters and the illustrators are seriously talented too, so there’s a real charm to just sitting there and looking at these.

KOG really leans into one of Elsword’s biggest strengths, which is how ridiculously charming its characters are, and since they do it without crossing too far into “okay, this is annoying now” territory for players, we get to enjoy these high-quality illustrations too, so it’s one of those everybody-wins situations, good for them, good for us, caught the crayfish and whatever else while we’re at it.

Other games probably use loading screens this way too, but I still wanted to show off Elsword’s a little, because they take those boring little wait times and make them more fun by putting the game’s charming characters, worldbuilding, and the illustrators’ skill right up front.

Everybody, be proud of your own game, of course, but if you’ve got a little room to spare, come check out our Elsword once in a while too.

-Participating in the Nexon PEAK Post Challenge-