Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris – How to speed up loading times

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris has a few hiccups due to long loading times. There’s a “fix” for it, one that you might not be okay with if you’re someone who loves higher framerates. If you’re interested in boosting your framerates, you could check out a quick fix to increase your FPS.

Note: For more information, check out our Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris guides and features hub.

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris – Long load times and the quick fix

Regarding the long loading times for Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris on PCs, I first noticed this while doing a technical review of the game. I figured that it won’t be too demanding, and there’d be some optimization and whatnot. It turns out, the game was chugging along at a measly 20-25 FPS.

Even worse, there were numerous loading screens as I continued to play. The way these were structured and presented left a sour taste in my mouth since you’re taken away from the action momentarily.

Examples include:

• Loading a save, obviously, led to a loading screen which usually lasts over a minute or so. Halfway through, you’ll even get a notification telling you that you failed to connect to the network (seen below), and that’s followed by the same loading screen.
• Entering new towns or locations =  30 seconds.
• Before and after a cutscene, dialogue, or cinematic = 20 seconds.
• A short exposition with Kirito telling players what he thinks = 20 seconds.

Oh, and I should mention that I have the game installed on an SSD.

Fortunately, I fiddled a bit with the game’s smattering of graphics options and found something that did the trick: “30 FPS mode.” You’ll find this in the game’s main menu -> Graphics settings.

Assuming you’re playing at 4K resolution and your rig is well above the recommended specs (probably getting 40+ FPS), then locking down Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris to 30 FPS might be a necessary sacrifice. Doing so would speed up loading times significantly. For instance, loading a save would only take, at most, 10 seconds.

In my case, the game’s performance and framerates were already subpar (20-25 FPS). Enabling the 30 FPS lock didn’t magically boost my framerates, but it did manage to speed up those annoying loading screens.

Note 1: This is only for PCs, and I’m not sure if those playing on consoles would experience the same issues.

Note 2: If you’re willing to do a bit of downsampling from 4K to 1080p resolution, then that’d also speed up the loading times (even without enabling the 30 FPS lock). You’ll likely see an increase in your framerates as well. Keep in mind that you should stick to fullscreen mode (though alt-tabbing will often cause freezes and crashes). Switching to borderless windowed mode will negatively impact load times and framerates (at least in my experience).

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is available on Steam. For more information, check out our guides and features hub.