Bethesda Game Studios has long been both celebrated and criticized for its massive open-world RPGs—games like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and most recently Starfield. While fans often praise the freedom and depth these worlds offer, there’s one recurring frustration players can’t seem to shake: loading screens.
In 2025, when lightning-fast SSDs and seamless transitions are fast becoming industry norms, Bethesda’s reliance on frequent loading screens stands out. Why, in a post-Spider-Man 2 gaming era where entire cities stream in real time, are Bethesda games still pausing between doors, buildings, and even fast travel?
Bruce Nesmith, a veteran designer who worked on several iconic Bethesda titles from Oblivion to Starfield, recently shed light on the issue. Speaking to VideoGamer, Nesmith explained that loading screens are less a design flaw and more a byproduct of how Bethesda builds its games.
“People assume it’s laziness,” Nesmith said. “But the reality is the games we make are so detailed, so simulation-heavy, that it’s not feasible to keep everything loaded at once.”
Bethesda’s titles aren’t just about graphics—they’re about systems. Items stay where you drop them. Enemies you defeat remain on the ground hours later. And every building, dungeon, and cave is its own carefully tracked micro-world. This level of persistence, according to Nesmith, requires segmenting the game world into zones, each with its own loading screen.
“I can’t have the interiors of all these places loaded at the same time as the exteriors,” he explained. “You’re actually better off stopping the game briefly, doing a loading screen, and then continuing on.”
This “necessary evil,” as he called it, becomes especially clear when you consider what would happen without the segmentation: bugs, memory overload, crashes, and immersion-breaking glitches. For Bethesda, the trade-off is clear—immersion takes a small hit to preserve the complex state of its world.
But not everyone at Bethesda was fully on board with how Starfield handled this. Nate Purkeypile, another former developer who left the studio in 2021, expressed surprise at the sheer number of loading screens in the final version—especially in areas like the city of Neon, which breaks the experience with short, frequent loads between tightly packed zones.
“Some of those [loading zones] weren’t there when I was working on it,” Purkeypile said. “It could have existed without those.”
So why were they added? The answer circles back to performance and the limitations of the Creation Engine. Despite hardware advancements, Bethesda’s game engine still struggles with real-time streaming of highly detailed environments. Loading screens offer a reliable way to manage system memory and frame rate stability, especially on console hardware like the Xbox Series X|S.
In fact, performance concerns were so central that Bethesda chose to lock Starfield at 30 frames per second on consoles at launch—a decision game director Todd Howard defended as necessary to maintain a consistent experience.
“We don’t ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games feel really, really special,” Howard said.
That philosophy may explain why Bethesda has held onto loading screens while other developers phase them out. Rather than trim features or limit scale, they use those brief pauses to keep the simulation stable.
Still, improvements are slowly arriving. Updates have since added a 60fps performance mode for Starfield, and modders continue pushing the limits by reducing or removing some loading barriers altogether. Fans are now eagerly watching to see how The Elder Scrolls VI evolves this balance between immersion and technical compromise.
Until then, loading screens remain a part of the Bethesda identity—a necessary trade-off in service of the sprawling, reactive worlds that define its games.
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