A common theme between the devs discussing why loading bars don’t move at a consistent crawl - we’ve all had loading bars that jump forward seemingly at random, or zoom to 99% before sitting there for an unfold amount of time - revealed that it isn’t because of the way games load (which loading bars don’t follow anyway), but because we as players simply wouldn’t believe them if they did.

“Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it,”….