loading screen usage

In unity, most scenes can load fairly quickly, but when do you need to add a loading screen? Is the loading screen just something to look at when the game needs to think, or is there a lot more behind the loading screen that goes on?

I know that you can just add a UI image over the screen while the game thinks, but does it really do anything besides look interesting?

Thanks

I suppose a loading screen is most important when the machine needs some time to load assets from your hard drive, and pre-compute anything you wish(e.g Setting up Cinematic, Events and Enemy AI). This was especially important on older consoles and PC games as the CD-ROMs required more time to load things.

games that require alot of assets to be loaded/unloaded (ElderScrolls Series for example) tend to have loading loading screens. Although when changing scenes its a good idea to make a fade-in Fade-out effect or something that smooths the transfer processes., It really doesn’t feel right snapping into the next scene, and sometimes the scenes is still loading (you notice far away objects will start to appear a few moment after entering which from what I can tell has no repercussion other than looking unpolished and buggy.

improper use of Loading Screens can Break Game immersion, so if your Scenes are small enough to load instantly, and you have no complex initialising to do, a simple fade-out-fade-in effect will do the trick. In short loading screens serve buy the machine time and virtually nothing else.

Hope it helps

Sources:

Detailed Unity3D Actual Loading Screen Tutorial (With free C# Script and Demo project)
http://techscenarios.com/2019/01/unity3d-add-loading-screen-to-your-game/

Or watch it on Youtube