There's a attitude, arguably backed by sales, that load times don't really matter. All of the Source games (HL2, Portal, Alyx, etc...) have arguably bad load t

There's a attitude, arguably backed by sales, that load times don't really matter. All of the Source games (HL2, Portal, Alyx, etc...) have arguably bad load times. They all sold great! GTA sold great even with it's previous load times. It's just not a priority for most teams. In Rockstar's case it happened to be easy to fix but in most cases it's not so easy because the engineering team didn't want to deal with it. AFAIK, Source, and maybe Unreal/Unity are built in such a way that by default, if you need to start the level over you have to re-load it entirely. They have mutable state spread all over the place and have no way to mark what's important (needs to be saved, what's not (can be zeroed), and/or they haven't bother to put all mutable state in a single places so either it can be restored from memory or loaded by just loading a tiny bit. There's zero reason HL:Alyx should take 15-30 seconds to restart a level you're already in when clearly less than 1k of state has changed since you started the level. But, fixing that would require a major re-design of the Source engine. Slow load times don't affect sales. So almost no one does it. Easy just to let each gameplay programmer do whatever they want and to restart just reload the level. I put up with it for some games (the ones mentioned above for example). But I've also quit a few recently. Games where you die a lot and to add to the frustration it takes 1-2 minutes to load again only to get killed in 5-20 seconds. That frustration means trial and erroring to figure out what to do gets a punch in the face and so I stop playing what might have been a good game otherwise.