If anyone has any productive suggestions, I would really be very grateful. The level still takes several minutes to load. I have tried directly accessing the sound device without pulseaudio, same result. I'm aware of it's flaws, and of the typical symptoms related to it, but this situation is different, at least as far as my findings go. I am not interested in pulseaudio bashing. I am of the belief that this problem is not related to pulseaudio, and would like some help in tracking down the source of the problem. I first tried this game several years back, I believe before pulseaudio, with similar results. I may be experiencing something similar, as un-muting the control for Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo in Pulseaudio seemed to reduce the loading time.

It may or may not be similar to an issue encountered under windows with this game, where un-muting the stereo mixer volume in the audio control panel for their particular sound device caused battlefront 2 loading times to be significantly reduced. My issue seems to stem from something not as simple as pulseaudio being a pain. You answered your own question - get rid of pulseaudio - it plain doesn't work. Thorin wrote:It does seem to speed up the loading time from about five minutes to just a couple of minutes.

Star wars battlefront load times