It’s no secret that Starfield has a bit of a loading screen problem. Players will naturally experience loading screens when fast traveling, but will also be met with them when entering or exiting their ship, entering or exiting buildings, entering or exiting areas within certain buildings, and the list doesn’t stop there. But players may be surprised to learn that these loading screens actually weren’t implemented until quite late in the game’s development.
“Some of those [loading screens] 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,” ex-Starfield developer Nate Purkeypile explains in an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast.
Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021 after 14 years with the company, and says he was shocked by the amount of loading screens in the final version of the game. He says the number of loading zones in the self-contained cyberpunk city of Neon was especially surprising, in part because there were so few of them there before the game’s lighting engine was finished.
“It could have existed without those [loading screens],” Purkeypile said. “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.”
Purkeypile did note that some of the problem was “inherent to the Creation Engine and the way it works,” referencing Bethesda’s decision to stick with an engine some have argued was outdated and ill-suited to the task of holding together a galaxy-sized game.
