Bethesda Responds to Criticism of Starfield Start Screen

Pete Hines, Bethesda’s Head of Publishing, has fired back at Mark Kern, the designer of World of Warcraft, after Kern commented on the start screen of Starfield, suggesting that it indicates a rushed development process or a lack of care from the team.

“The physiognomy of start screens. The start screen of a game can reveal a lot about how rushed the team was and how much pride they took in their work,” Kern tweeted.

“Starfield’s start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn’t care.

“Start screens are often done at the very end of development,” they added in a follow-up tweet. “Teams are too busy making the core game. It’s quite common for the start screen to completely change once the game is shipping or on patch 0.

“Teams that take pride want to put a good face forward and will often redo these just prior to the game going live,” Kern concluded.

After being alerted to Kern’s tweets, Hines responded, defending the team’s design choices: “Or [the development team] designed what they wanted and that’s been our menu for years and was one of the first things we settled on.

“Having an opinion is one thing. Questioning a developer’s ‘care’ because you would have done it differently is highly unprofessional coming from another ‘dev’.”

Kern retaliated with a snide comment about Fallout 76 and Redfall.

While the Starfield developers remain tight-lipped about the highly-anticipated action RPG, Bethesda Game Studio’s studio design director revealed that Bethesda boss Todd Howard is the only authorized person to share unreleased game information.

However, what we do know is that the sci-fi game recently went gold, and players can now preload Starfield on Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam players will need to wait until August 30) if they have pre-ordered the game or are planning to download it through Xbox Game Pass.

Before doing so, players may need to free up storage space as Starfield will require 100.19GB on Xbox Series X|S for Standard Edition players and 117.07GB for those with the Premium Edition. PC and Steam users will need a whopping 139.84GB.

Want to go all-in on Starfield hardware for your Xbox before the game launches? Here’s where you can buy the Starfield Xbox Wireless Controller, as well as where to buy the Starfield Xbox Wireless Headset.