Loading screens are a fact of gaming life. When you exit the Capital Wasteland and walk into Megaton in Fallout 3, there’s a loading screen. When you go to see the Jarl in Whiterun, loading screen. From the mightiest open-world games to the smallest indies – from Grand Theft Auto to Half-Life to Dead Cells – loading goes with the gaming territory. Starfield, Bethesda’s somewhat struggling sci-fi epic from 2023, naturally features loading screens, too. But according to one former developer from the Elder Scrolls and Fallout 76 studio, there are sections of Starfield that “could have existed” without so much segmentation.
It’s not just the transitions between exteriors and interiors, or hub worlds and settlements, that prompt loading screens in open-world games. Neon City, for example, is such a big location in Starfield that it’s divided into pseudo boroughs, each of which is gated by loading screen. According to Nate Purkeypile, however, a former Bethesda developer whose credits include Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 76, and Starfield itself, Neon City wasn’t always like this.
Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021, but had previously worked intensively on building Neon City. Speaking to VideoGamer, the developer, who recently launched their debut indie game The Axis Unseen, says they were surprised by how many loading screens were present in the final version.
“A lot of it is gating stuff off for performance in Neon,” Purkeypile says, explaining that segmenting the city in this way is “inherent” to the design of Bethesda’s Creation Engine. “Some of those [loading zones] were not there when I had been working on it and so it was a surprise to me that there were as many as there were. It could have existed without those.”
Starfield mods have tried to combat the large amount of loading times in the biggest and busiest cities – released in November, ‘Seamless City Interiors’ plays a trick on Starfield’s code base, giving interior locations the same designation as exteriors, so that players can move between them without the game stopping to load.
You might want to try some of the best games like Starfield, or maybe the best sandbox games if you want more of the grand exploration that defines Bethesda’s opus.
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