Bethesda loves a loading screen. You may be getting reacquainted with that if you’re playing Oblivion Remastered, but they’ve been in heaps of the studio’s previous games – Starfield, Skyrim, you name it. While other developers have cracked more seamless experiences in their open-world RPGs, though, one former developer says the House of Todd is unlikely to follow as loading screens are “a necessary bane of the existing of Bethesda since time immemorial.”
Bruce Nesmith – who has worked on everything at Bethesda from Fallout 3 to Starfield – says segmented areas and loading screens are essential to how Bethesda makes RPGs as it allows for the tracking of things like item placement in an area and other details that remain long after you tootle off.
“Everybody who complains about them assumes that it’s done because we’re lazy or we don’t want to follow the modern thinking on stuff,” Nesmith tells VideoGamer. “The reality is the Bethesda games are so detailed and so graphics intensive… you just can’t have both present at the same time.”
It’s not for a lack of trying, though. Nesmith shares that Bethesda has tried to make its RPGs more seamless, but, well, it hasn’t worked. The studio faces various issues that ultimately make each game worse to play.
“I can’t have the interiors of all these places loaded at the same time as the exteriors. That’s just not an option,” he says. “And all the fancy tricks for streaming and loading and all that, you end up with hitching. So you’re actually better off stopping the game briefly, doing a loading screen, and then continuing on.
“If you make a game that has less going on, it’s a tighter experience and not a [true] open-world experience. So it’s just one of those necessary evils, as it were, it’s not that anybody at Bethesda ever wanted to do it. We just didn’t have a choice, really, if the game was going to have the experience we wanted it to have.”
So there you have it – loading screens are one of ’em Bethesda quirks you may have to live with a while longer. Thankfully, at least when it comes to Oblivion Remastered, players don’t mind the odd quirk.
