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Starfield is just a few weeks away, and various leaks related to Bethesda Game Studios’ sci-fi RPG have started to trickle onto social media. One such leak, a picture of the game’s start menu, set off a firestorm of opinions, causing Bethesda’s head of publishing, Pete Hines, to step in to defend Bethesda Game Studios’ work.
The “controversy,” as silly as it is, started with an August 19 tweet including the leaked menu and comments on what it allegedly told users about the game itself. Starfield’s start menu is extremely straightforward. It features a simple menu with options for New Game, Load, Settings, Photo Gallery, Crew, and Quit amidst a backdrop of Starfield’s logo and a sun poking around the horizon of a planet.
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The tweet came from Mark Kern, who previously worked at Blizzard as the team lead for the original World of Warcraft before leaving to form his own game studio (from which he was forcibly removed in 2013). He stated “start screens can reveal a lot about how rushed the team was and how much pride they took in their work.” He continued, “Starfield’s start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn’t care.” Kern said “start screens are often done at the very end of development.” Teams that “take pride” in their work, Kern said, will often redo a start screen just prior to a game shipping in order to “put a good face forward.”
Users were quick to call out Kern. Fans pointed out that all of Bethesda’s most-recent games, including mega-hits like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3, featured similar start screens. Other users stated that it’s impossible to know how “passionate” a team is based just on a start screen and criticized Kern’s logic.
Hines, a longtime Bethesda employee, joined the discussion to state, “Or they 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 out a developer’s ‘care’ because you would have done it different is highly unprofessional coming from another ‘dev.'”
Starfield reviews will go live on August 31, one day ahead of the game’s early launch for those who purchased its Constellation edition or a $35 premium upgrade. Everyone else will be able to explore the stars when the standard edition of Starfield releases on September 6. Starfield is currently available for preloading and clocks in at 140GB on PC and 126GB on Xbox.
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