It’s common knowledge that Starfield experiences a few loading screen issues. Gamers will inevitably encounter loading screens during fast travel, but they will also face them when boarding or disembarking their ship, entering or exiting buildings, and moving in and out of specific areas within certain buildings, and the list continues. However, players may be quite surprised to discover that these loading screens were not introduced until well into the game’s development.
“Some of those [loading screens] were not present when I had been working on it, so I was surprised to see how many there turned out to be,” former Starfield developer Nate Purkeypile shares in an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast.
Purkeypile departed Bethesda in 2021 after spending 14 years with the company, and he expressed astonishment at the sheer number of loading screens in the final version of the game. He noted that the amount of loading zones in the self-contained cyberpunk city of Neon was particularly striking, partly due to the fact that there were so few present before the game’s lighting engine was completed.
“It could have existed without those [loading screens].”