It's no secret that Starfield has a bit of a loading screen problem. Players will naturally experience loading screens when fast traveling, but will also be met with them when entering or exiting their ship, entering or exiting buildings, entering or exiting areas within certain buildings, and the list doesn't stop there. But players may be surprised to learn that these loading screens actually weren't implemented until quite late in the game's development.

"Some of those [loading screens] 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," ex-Starfield developer Nate Purkeypile explains in an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast.

Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021 after 14 years with the company, and says he was shocked by the amount of loading screens in the final version of the game. He says the number of loading zones in the self-contained cyberpunk city of Neon was especially surprising, in part because there were so few of them there before the game's lighting engine was finished.