Loading screens have always been an annoyance in Bethesda games. Even their last game, Skyrim, forced players to endure a loading screen when entering and exiting buildings and new locations.
Fallout 4 appears to offer a lot more open environments for players to simply be able to walk into. Speaking to DigitalSpy, Fallout 4 director Todd Howard explained that there will not be a load to enter the city of Boston, and that a lot of buildings will be open.
Loading screens are among the list of things we don't want to see in the upcoming game.
Answering a question about the size of the game's map, Howard replied, "I avoid answering that, and I'll tell you why. If you look at our previous stuff, it's kind of like that. We don't actually measure it like that.
"Because Skyrim is one size, but the mountains take up a lot of space. That's not really a game place, it's in your way, you have to go around it, so we're not really doing that."
"In the city, it's very dense, but there is no load – like in Fallout 3, there's a load – for areas of the city, we don't do that. So it's very dense, the buildings are tall, and a lot of them are open, so you can just walk in and around, so… it's big. I wouldn't say, you know, if you played Skyrim, I couldn't tell you it's X bigger, so we're just saying it's about the same size."
This probably means that some areas will require loading screens to enter, but that the vast majority of them will be seamless.