Former Bethesda game designer Bruce Nesmith defended annoying loading screens — they are a necessary evil.
In his opinion, without them, it is simply impossible to create the same experience that players appreciate in series like The Elder Scrolls or Starfield. That is why Nesmith called loading screens «the necessary curse of Bethesda’s existence since time immemorial». By the way, this game designer defended the game engine of the studio’s games, because it is perfectly customized.
Nesmith said that the division of the world into segments and loading zones — is not a relic of the past, but a conscious choice. This approach allows the game to keep track of what is happening in the world: where things are, what objects interact, what the player changes, and save it for a long time. This is the main difference between Bethesda games, and it is the one that requires pauses in the form of loading.
«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. The reality is the Bethesda games are so detailed and so graphics intensive… you just cant have both present at the same time.
According to him, the studio tried to introduce real-time streaming and loading — without screens. But this caused delays, FPS drops, and generally made the game less stable. Therefore, they had to choose between technical reliability and the illusion of «seamlessness».
«I can’t have the interiors of all these places loaded at the same time as the exteriors. That’s just not an option. 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», — he explained.
He also added that no one at Bethesda set out to make a lot of loading screens. On the contrary, the studio seems to have chosen them only in places where the game does not work otherwise. In Starfield, the number of loading screens in the city of Neon increased compared to the original plan, but it was a forced decision.
«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», — he summarizes.
Since leaving Bethesda, Nesmith has been working as an independent consultant and has returned to writing. He previously created Dungeons and Dragons games and now writes a series of books — LitRPG series «Glory Seeker» and fantasy novels «The Rogue».
Source: Video Gamer
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