They should have added a computer on your ship for quests/turn-ins. Loading screens suck but making you go through eight of them in a row is inexcusable.

I don’t want to dox myself, but I know what happened here. Performance was unacceptable on Series S, and it was unknown how effective optimization would be. BGS management is extremely risk averse, so they decided to add more loading areas. For example, making Neon multiple cells. Later the optimization team came through and it turns out that wasn’t necessary but CK workflow is way too manual and bug prone to undo the changes that close to release. I don’t remember if Purkey left before the buyout but Series S became the performance target and that made everyone freak out.

I don’t think the loading screens are the failure, the fast travel system is. Depending on where you are and where you’re going, you have different fast travel options. Sometimes you can pick your end destination directly (sort of). Other times you have to pick your planet (loading screen), land (loading screen), either run to your destination or pick a fast travel location on the local map (loading screen), enter a building (loading screen), take an elevator (loading screen) and now you’ve arrived. This is about the worst case I can think of with 5 loading screens.

Even in a best case scenario, like having the option to directly travel back to the lodge, you still have travel to the outside of the lodge (loading screen) and enter the lodge (loading screen). So, in most cases you’ll have between 2 and 5 loading screens unless you’re just traveling between outdoor locations on the same planet.

Which I guess takes us a step further and suggests that the pointless spaceflight feature of the game (or the pointless smuggling) is the real culprit. If you didn’t need to scan ships for contraband, they could have built a more robust map system that allowed better point to point fast travel. You’d still run into issues of indoor/outdoor, or indoors with multiple areas, but it would have been much better.

They planned to place ads there?

I really feel like Starfield got a lot of unwarranted criticism. I paid $100 or whatever it cost for early access, I have about 200 hours into the game, and I feel like I got my money’s worth. It’s a fun game with an interesting story, New Game+ is still worth playing, and the graphics are fantastic.

Sure, it has its flaws, but given “hours of fun per dollar,” the only game I’ve played recently that comes close is Cyberpunk.