Add together all the minutes of my life I've spent in loading screens and you could, well, send me into quite a grim depressive spiral, probably. And since I'm someone with several hundred hours invested across various Bethesda games, how many of those minutes were spent twiddling Daedric artifacts in Skyrim's load screens or looking at cool Netch concept art in Morrowind?
More than I'd care to count, most likely, given that Bethesda loves hitting you with a loading screen before you transition to an interior. Here's the kicker: it doesn't sound like anything's going to change in The Elder Scrolls 6 or after, either. Former Bethesda dev and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith recently spoke to VideoGamer to tell you that, sorry friend, you're gonna be loading for a long time yet.
"It’s not that anybody at Bethesda ever wanted to do it. We just didn’t have a choice, really," said Nesmith. "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," but he explains that the fact of the matter is that "Bethesda games are so detailed and so graphics intensive… you just can't have both present at the same time."
Specifically, it's really hard to keep track of all those weird physics and the precise spot you left your cheesewheels across Bethesda's enormous open worlds if you aren't giving the game a breather every so often, and trying to make 'seamless' loading screens apparently—says Nesmith—caused unacceptable performance woes.
"I can’t have the interiors of all these places loaded at the same time as the exteriors," said Nesmith, "that's just not an option.All the fancy tricks for streaming and loading and all that, you end up with hitching. So you’re actually better off stopping the game briefly, doing a loading screen and then continuing on."
The alternative is to make games with "less going on," but then that would hardly be a Bethesda game, would it? "So it's just one of those necessary evils… if the game was going to have the experience we wanted it to have."
I see Nesmith's point, and it certainly makes me think about Starfield's immersion-breaking spaceflight loads in a new light, but I have to admit: the ability to pick up every item on a shelf has never really done much for me in Bethesda games. It can lead to some fun outcomes—like the famous Skyrim trick of robbing shops by putting a bucket on the owner's head—but it usually just feels a bit purposeless. If the choice is between that kind of complexity and fewer loading screens? I'd take fewer loading screens. Bethesda would have to lean a lot more into the systemic weirdness it's spent a lot of games stamping down on to make that complexity something I care to preserve.
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