Ex-Bethesda Dev 'Surprised' At The Amount Of Load Screens In Starfield

Starfield may provide Xbox players with a big old world to explore across multiple planets and zones, but it still contains a bunch of loading screens as players move through different areas of the game world - something that "surprised" ex-Starfield developer Nate Purkeypile.

The Bethesda vet — who worked at the company from 2007 through to 2021 — says that a lot of these loading zones "were not there when I had been working on it [Starfield]", adding that their frequent appearance "was a surprise to me" when the final product shipped in 2023.

"It could have existed without those [loading 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 was as many as there were."

The developer went on to say that a big reason for load screens in Starfield (and other Bethesda Game Studios titles) is down to "gating stuff off for performance", but the sheer amount of them still seemed to surprise the ex-Starfield developer given how the game was looking earlier on in development.

If you're thinking of jumping back into Bethesda's sci-fi RPG sometime soon, the team recently released a chunky Starfield update that reintroduces the game's uncapped frame rate option on Xbox Series X - alongside a bunch of other fixes and changes to the Game Pass title.