Ex-Starfield Dev Was Surprised to See Many Loading Screens Added Later

There are a few things that players complain about Starfield, and one of them is the constant loading screen during fast travel, which many have criticized for breaking the immersion —  Bethesda had defended it as justifiable due to the substantial data needed for the procedurally generated and expansive gameplay. It turned out that those excessive loading screens didn’t exist in the beginning but were added to the game during the late development period.

Nate Purkeypile, the former Lead Artist at Bethesda who was working on Starfield before he left Bethesda in 2021, recently stated that he was surprised to see how many loading screens were in the space exploration game:

"It could have existed without those [loading zones]. Like, some of those were not there when I had been working on it and so it was a surprise to me that there was as many as there were," he told VideoGamer in an upcoming episode of the podcast. 

Then why did the developer make the decision to add them later? It’s more related to the engine that supports the game. Starfield has been developed with Creation Engine 2, which Purkeypile believes could be a reason behind the "heavy segmentation," as that’s how it works to improve performance. "A lot of it is gating stuff off for performance in Neon. For New Atlantis, I think it’s just to make it so you don’t have to sit there for the entire train ride," he added. 

Bethesda created the Creation Engine and used it to develop titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. While other giant companies opted for Epic’s Unreal Engine, Skyrim's lead designer, Bruce Nesmith, believes Bethesda is unlikely to follow. 

Nate Purkeypile had been working on Skyrim and Fallout other than Starfield while working at Bethesda. He decided to go indie and founded Just Purkey Games, which released its debut title, The Axis Unseen, back in October.

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