One of my pet peeves on games has to do with how long it takes to get the game loading.
For Elemental Beta 1A (tomorrow) I’m working on adding /fastload as one of the command line parameters. This skips things like DirectX detection (only for people whose systems are already perfect with Elemental as it doesn’t print out the user’s hardware info in debug.err).
It’s amazing how much “stuff” we have to load. That’s because even though we’re not displaying the “full game” during the beta, the engine is still all there under the covers, it’s just disabled.