Bethesda Game Studios has long been the butt of many jokes concerning loading screens. For coming on two decades, Bethesda’s open-world RPG games (Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Starfield, etc) have featured countless loading screens. If you transition into a building, fast travel somewhere, or even switch rooms in some cases, you’ll get a loading screen.
Even the company’s most advanced and modern RPGs, like Starfield, suffer from countless loading screens, even ones that are tactfully hidden. However, a former lead designer who helped pave the way for Skyrim explained that they’re a necessary evil at Bethesda, even if nobody ever wanted them.
They Must Exist
In a recent interview with VideoGamer.com, Bruce Nesmith, a former lead designer at Bethesda Game Studios, took a deep dive into Oblivion Remastered. He parted ways with Bethesda while Starfield was being pieced together, but he’d worked there for so long that he covered the original Oblivion release.
He also touched on something a little less positive than Oblivion Remastered, which has secured stellar results since dropping late last month.
Nesmith took a few minutes to address the plentiful loading screens that permeate every Bethesda Game Studios RPG, explaining that they’re absolutely necessary because of the kinds of RPG titles Bethesda makes.
Everybody who complains about them assumes that it’s done because we’re lazy or we don’t want to follow the modern thinking on stuff. The reality is the Bethesda games are so detailed and so graphics intensive… you just cant have both present at the same time.
If you make a game that has less going on, it’s a tighter experience and not a true open-world experience. It’s just one of those necessary evils, as it were, it’s not that anybody at Bethesda ever wanted to do it. We just didn’t have a choice, really, if the game was going to have the experience we wanted it to have.
Games are often praised when they manage to hit the market without loading screens, but some are just so cleverly hidden that you don’t necessarily notice they’re there. It’s a huge ask to take such immersive, detailed worlds and strip them of any loading screens, but perhaps the technology will one day be ready to achieve that.
Have you ever been irritated by loading screens in Bethesda games? Let me know in the comments, or jump onto the Insider Gaming forum.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that a Battlefield 6 weapons list has been leaked
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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