One day, I was exploring Northern New Vegas and stumbled upon one of the little single-story houses so common in the game. I walked up to the door and pooped my pants out of joy. Why?
The door opened without any loading screen to the interior of the house. It was a very special moment in my life, but it got me thinking: is this the vision of the future? I know gamebryo can't take such levels of sophistication, but maybe in Skyrim and Fo4... just venting happy steam here.
Any thoughts on this?

"It would help if I knew *what* Genesis was, beyond the Biblical reference, of course." - Spock

When I played GTA: San Andreas back in the day, I thought by the next decade we would be able to enter ANY building without load times and freely walk around as we pleased....enter Fallout 3 and NV and I'm still waiting....I still love open world games the best though. :whistling:

Generally speaking you'll never see the like as long as the games are going to be on Consoles too. Also games aren't going to aim for the top of the line computers only. As those would be the only ones to even have close to the power needed to have so much loaded at a time.

What was inside? (Bare walls or shelves full of clutter?)

Are you referring to the house where you can walk in to from the collapsed side of it?

If so, think of it as a glorified prospector shack. It's actually not doing anything different. 3 walls and a roof.

Risen has no loading screens for any building at all.
All it loads for are teleportation stones and chapter changing.

What house is this......
My favourite house is the one with all the plants growing inside..... now only if they were a diffrent kind of plant

Odd. . .Can you safely store your belongings in there, and what house is it?

To answer a few questions
It had a moderate amount of clutter, about the same as most others. It was almost complete, just one corner was missing some wall (not enough to jump through). GTA 4 does have connected houses, but the graphics aren't too great, so i'm happy with the trade-off. It's pretty far off from being a prospector's shack, other than the fact that it was built following a legally-binding set of building codes. It's about due north of Miguel's Pawn shop.

In GTA 4 there aren't loading screens from the front door to the building, but in some places there are some loading screens, like the elavators in the player homes on the second island.