I love this game as much or more than any other game I have played. (I play it on a PS3) I also hate this game more than any other because of the amount of load screens and the time it takes to load. For example, fairly early in the game the only house I had was in Whiterun and I had saved up enough crafting materials to cap blacksmithing and enchanting so I spent a ton of time doing exactly that. It drove me freaking nuts because I had to constantly run in and out of the house back and forth to the Blacksmith area then in and out and back and forth to the nearest enchanting table, I spent 45 minutes out of an hour waiting for loading screens. Or traveling from Solstheim to the mainland, you load out of whatever building you are in, click on the mainland icon, load to there, click on whatever town or location you want to go to, load, enter a building, load, enter another room in that building, load... load load load load load freaking load. Then to top it off all the loading started to crash my PS3 more and more often to the point where it got so bad I had to wipe the entire hard drive of my PS3 and start over. That didn't shorten loading time however and soon my PS3 started to crash again (no other games or on-line activities cause crashes) Then there's the many glitched quests that won't reset. Even though I loved most of the things about the game such as graphics, storyline, combat and more I finally had to say screw it and quit playing altogether.

Bethesda needs to make this game a lot more "open world" or in other words decrease the load screens by about 90%. Skyrim is like a b'zillion tiny areas pasted together like a patchwork quilt. Like some of the keeps have several rooms that have their own load screen, I think that once in a building there should be NO load screens, the whole building should be one unit. Ideally for me once in a town the WHOLE town should be an open area with no load screens no matter which house or building you enter.

Like I said before, I think this is a great game but I have to rate it as an epic FAIL because of all the loading, glitching and crashing.

Question: does the online version have as many load screens as the console versions? Maybe I'll give that a try.

Load screens exist mostly because of hardware limitations.
And be sure you have the latest patch installed, to help with bugs.

There is no online version of Skyrim. If you mean PC, there are still the same load screens, but depending on your computer specs they will be faster.

Potentially a lot faster, if you have a decent PC. I played for a couple years on PS3. I even installed an SSD on my PS3 to make it load quicker, but it still often took several minutes to get through a loading screen in Skyrim. My PC is about a year old, but it runs circles around my PS3 like a Tasmanian devil.

Now that I have a PC with an SSD, the game loads so fast I cannot even read the loading screen messages. I can maybe read the first part of the first sentence and the game is loaded. It's no exaggeration to say that my PC loads about 25 times faster than my PS3.

It often took several minutes for my PS3 to load when entering or exiting a building or when riding a cart. My PC handles such things in about five seconds. A long loading screen may take up to 10 seconds.

I played Skyrim on the Xbox 360. The load times were kinda annoying, but they never crashed the game. I did hear that the PS3 version had a great deal more bugs and glitches that other versions. Playing it on PC would be the fastest way. There's a mod that puts the cities as part of the main world as well. From the fact that you had a PS3 i'm gonna infer that you have a PS4, but the newly born Xbox One backwards compatibility might speed the game up a bit. If you don't have either of the new consoles, thats fine, there are more ways to play the game(Don't worry, I don't have either of them, either)