Starfield is a truly massive RPG, but according to one Bethesda veteran, it didn't need to be stuffed with as many loading screens as it ended up with.
“It could have existed without those [loading screens],” Axis Unseen developer Nate Purkeypile tells VideoGamer on the subject of Starfield's wealth of momentum-breaking buffer 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 were as many as there were.” Specifically, he's talking about the city of Neon, an area Purkeypile had worked on early in Starfield's development stages before leaving Bethesda to create a heavy metal horror game that's about as far from a futuristic sci-fi romp as one can possibly get.
"A lot of it is gating stuff off for performance in Neon,” Purkeypile explains of the many, many idling zones that players run into while exploring the city on foot. Neon isn't the only culprit when it comes to leaving players twiddling their thumbs, though, but Purkeypile says there could be other, more logical explanations. “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 suggests jokingly.
Tedious and overtly obvious as these instances may be for the seasoned player, games as big as Starfield are bound to need a little extra buffer time here and there. Creative workarounds to cover loading or asset streaming are a must, from the cinematics of Helldivers 2 to those more lengthy elevator trips in Cyberpunk 2077. Starfield is just one of hundreds of sprawling RPGs simply trying to make waiting times cool (or less boring) again. Whether it's succeeding, though, is a question for another day.
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