Former Skyrim lead defends Bethesda’s loading screens – “[they’re] a necessary bane of the existence of Bethesda since time immemorial

43 Comments

  1. Big-Afternoon-3422

    Ah yes. This must be so to ensure proper physics. Because we all know that’s Bethesda’s strongest suit

  2. hovsep56

    alot of the physics and physics placements we enjoy rely on loading screen to work sadly. you know, the thing everybody was harrasing avowed for.

    he also mentions that while they can remove loading screens by using streaming techniques, it will create worse performance and stutters.

  3. WillLOTR

    These loads are so much quicker than they used to be in the original version. This is a marked improvement. They are less than 5 seconds long on my PS5. This is a strange complaint.

  4. MisterB78

    Skyrim is 14 years old… loading screens were to be expected then.

    Starfield is the one that shouldn’t have had all those loading screens

  5. Heuwender

    The loading takes like 3 seconds max for me. Besides some buildings having way too many compartments, I have no issue with them. Why does a single house feel like the new Vegas strip? I never played the original I might add.

  6. GloatingSwine

    The core of the engine Bethesda uses is still the same as it was at least in Oblivion. In fact the remaster is literally just that engine crawled up the ass of UE5 and puppeting it from the inside.

    The reason for this is their creation kit works with that engine, and they’re not leaving their creation kit.

    The reality is that you pretty much can’t make a Bethesda game without that creation kit. Nobody else has a toolset for building environments where you can take literally every single cabbage in the entire game world and drop them one by one in a room and have the game remember where every single one of those cabbages landed the next time you go there.

  7. zeldaink

    I love how the comment section still hasn’t mentioned Fallout 4 and how fast the game loads is directly tied to the framerate, which is in stark contrast how Skyrim loads faster with *lower* framerate. Both use identical engines.

    And, yes it’s just better to have loading screens and buttery smooth gameplay over stuttery streamed mess. And their physics issues are again tied to the framerate. At least in Skyrim, props jump slightly due to the frame limiter kicking in too late. Almost all physics issues come from framerate above 60FPS. It’s easily solvable by a simple mod, so wtf are BGS doing? How they keep everything tied directly to the framerate is probably the source of 25% of their bugs. The other 25% is unhandled exceptions and null pointers/variables. The remaining 50% is just random people complaining instead of moving on.

  8. Snotnarok

    Resident Evil’s door loading screens were a necessary bane of masking loading times and building tension.

    Funny that in the remake you can seamlessly run through the entire game world with no loading screens because they didn’t feel the need to cling to an archaic tech limitation. Heck, even ports of the OG let you skip the door animations.

    Making games is hard, not going to take anything away from that. But for God sakes, there’s using loading screens? And then abusing them. Starfield has so many of them it makes Sonic 06 look sensible with how often you got dumped to a loading screen in that PoS of a game

  9. Jhawk163

    And yet games like Cyberpunk exist, where outside of fast travelling, I don’t think there is a single direct loading screen in the game, with the exception elevators technically being load screens.

  10. Evans423

    Loading screens, even very short ones break immersion heavily. Just look at cyberpunk 2077 and how they hide loading screens behind gameplay to ensure there’s no breaks to suspend disbelief. That’s why that game felt so real whereas in starfield it felt so janky and hard to get immersed in.

  11. southpaw85

    This is what the complaint is? Oblivion remake still has the rolling wall of light every time you exit a building but the 3s Skyrim load is the issue?

  12. Kotanan

    Keep blaming the consumer Bethesda, I’m sure you’ll get better ones for TES VI.

  13. Juantsu2552

    I am sure the people of r/gaming will surely appreciate and understand why Bethesda games in particular need them instead of trying to shoehorn in a flawed narrative by comparing it to other games that don’t do anything remotely similar to what Bethesda games try to do…

  14. Agentnewbie

    Skill issue. The tech to immersively mask them existed even before Skyrim, so you can have separate zones without loading screens.

  15. jimschocolateorange

    Oh fucking hell… look, it’s how Bethesda does things; It’s how their engine works. They work on a cell system and for them to achieve what they want, they require loading screens.

    The issue here is that Starfield was a poorly designed game.

    They could add a cutscene instead of a loading screen, but you’ll never remove them entirely. It just won’t happen.

  16. Loading screen is fine until Fallout 4. It’s just never ends and it seems it didn’t do anything. No storage access, no CPU usage. Then, somebody discovered forceful high FPS finish the loading quicker.

    I can’t play Fallout 4 right now because the loading screen take more than half of my playtime.

  17. lincolnmarch_

    I’m fine with loading screens, but it depends on how often I’m interacting with them. In Starfield it was too much and it did not live up to the potential of being able to fly a spaceship bc it was bogged down by too many loading screens.

  18. Underkiing

    It’s fine in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 because you spend so much time in the overworld that you don’t mind a loading screen to transition between interiors/exteriors.

    Starfield is where it became overwhelming. Sure, the loading screens are really short but you still have to go through multiple in a short sequence when doing almost anything. It becomes monotonous.

  19. I feel like people care too much about this issue. It is what it is. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough that I played a lot of games with loading screens but I just cannot bring myself to give a shit when there’s lots of more important issues to worry about, in gaming and outside of gaming. If I can have fun, loading screens or not, I don’t care.

  20. Parallax-Jack

    I personally don’t mind them. Maybe I’m just used to old games, but there are frequent loading screens in a lot of games. Everything doesn’t need to be seamless and there IS a reason for them. Some games would probably break without them but for bethesda it’s due to how the interiors are setup. They don’t match the size of the exterior cells (and a lot are elsewhere in the world no where close to where they “actually are”)

  21. Dudesonthedude

    I dont mind the loading screens, they’re pretty quick and it means people still get to see the tips and stuff

    I just wish they’d have made it so the imperial city loads as one because I’m constantly in and out of load screened areas

  22. PM_ME_CALF_PICS

    ITT: People who have never modded a Bethesda game, or don’t understand the upsides of the gamebyro/creation engines, tell us their uneducated opinions.

    Every engine has its upsides and downsides. Bethesda’s is what makes their games special and unique. If you want the modularity, interactivity and easy modding then you have to take the good with the bad.

    Think you can do better? Then program it yourself or stfu. We don’t need anymore soulless unreal games.

  23. NothingWrong1234

    Skyrim Loading screens are like less than a second on series x lol.. I can live with that

  24. zatchrey

    My series S loads everything in like 3-5 seconds, I don’t see what the problem is

  25. pewell1

    who the fuck cares about loading screens

  26. Doppelkammertoaster

    I rather have them than a stuttering mess. Separating a game into well hidden cells also makes it possible to make these separated cells more complex without loosing more performance.

    So, no. I don’t mind them.

  27. lqstuart

    They’re a necessary bane of using an engine from 2011

  28. Zeidrich-X25

    The Skyrim mod that makes transition to towns have no loading screens is dope. I guess that’s not possible?

  29. Trickybuz93

    They feel like they’re an integral part of a Bethesda game

  30. Super_flywhiteguy

    People arnt gonna be so forgiving for elder scrolls 6.

  31. Mylilneedle

    I don’t mind load screens if they are brief

  32. Games like Monster hunter wilds taught me that loading screens were good actually.

  33. Mr_IsLand

    I liked og oblivions loading screens more than skyrims but I do really like the new sketch ones in Oblivion remaster

  34. SaintIgnis

    I think my biggest complaint is how many and how often. With today’s technology we should be able to load into a city and everything load with it.

    Having to load into a city and then load into the shop and then load into the shops basement. It’s just too much and it makes the world feel disconnected.

    Edit: I’ve been playing games almost 40 years. I know how annoying long the load times were back in the day. I just expect a more seamless experience nowadays

  35. JefferyTheQuaxly

    hes right because of how the creation engine is designed and works. the creation engine is designed so that it feels like a real world, in that if you use a shout in an inn, everything is going to blow all over the place. the constant tracking of basically every object in a worldspace requires a lot of processing power and the game can start crashing if you start adding to many items that it needs to keep track of in one world space, like the people that would try to crash skyrim by spawning in 100,000 sweetrolls or something. getting rid of the walls around the city for example means suddenly skyrim now needs to keep track of hundreds of new NPC’s walking around and thousands of new items and there physics, and things can start running slow or crashing.

  36. Lexifer452

    Eh. Falls a little flat. My load screens in the remaster haven’t taken longer than 2 seconds. Like any of them. Surprised the hell outta me tbh. But 35 hours later that’s still the case.

  37. kawaiinessa

    load screens have become managable with ssd’s becoming the norm however were past the era of gaming where load screens are nessicary look at witcher 3 that released a decade ago and the only load screens there are on fast travel

  38. Deliriousious

    But with modern performance, even with the lowest spec of current gen, fully open worlds and interiors is not difficult.

    Hell, it’s been proven that open cities IS completely possible, with it being one of the most downloaded mods for both Oblivion and Skyrim.

    But honestly, the issue is actually the objects. Since they all have physics, lag will be immense. So loading screens and separate instances remedy that.

    The issue people have with loading screens (Especially Starfield), is that they just add wasted time, with lower end computers having screens of upwards of 30 seconds.

  39. Useful_Respect3339

    Their design is just extremely outdated.

    The loading screens are only part of it.

    Who made the decision to have the player physically travel to a location, get quest from and NPC, travel to another planet, talk more, and travel back?

    Like it’s fine in the Elder Scrolls, but in a fucking space game? 

  40. Flare_Starchild

    There was a mod on Nexus that allowed almost no loading between the inside and outside of cities. Walking into a city with no load zone was WEIRD but it totally worked and has nearly zero performance impact for me. It’s only a matter of time for the Remaster to get the same thing.

  41. The fact that going back to Oblivion with the remaster, it’s a better playing experience than Starfield by a lot. One quick loading screen between doors and cities versus like 5 loading screens trying to get from one planet surface to another just makes me want to shut the game off.

  42. Diavalo88

    Let me choose inside or outside when I fast travel.

    I hate having a loading screen, only to walk 5 steps and have another loading screen.

    To get from indoors in Raven Rock to inside Breezehome takes FIVE loading screens.

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