Bethesda Has Responded To Criticism Of Starfield’s Title Screen

Because we can’t have one weekend without somebody stirring up Gamer™ discourse on social media, Starfield has found itself at the centre of arguments around… title screens?

It started thanks to a series of X posts from former Blizzard developer and self-outed haver of bad opinions, Mark Kern, who shared a screenshot of the main frontend menu of Starfield, criticising its design and suggesting it must be the result of “…hasty shipping deadlines by a passion team overworked, or a team that didn’t care.”

Kern, whose X handle is @Grummz, followed up by saying “Start screen are often done at the very end of development. 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 game going live.”

Start screen are often done at the very end of development.

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…

— Grummz (@Grummz) August 19, 2023

Naturally, Bethesda has taken umbrage with Kern’s comments, with Head of Publishing Pete Hines responding to some of the comments under the original post, confirming that Bethesda Game Studios had settled on the title screen in question very early on, and calling out the criticisms and claims of a lack of care as highly unprofessional coming from a fellow developer.

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”

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 20, 2023

For what it’s worth, the menu displayed in the screenshots looks perfectly fine, and actually does a good job of alluding to players the interstellar journey they’re about to embark on and the unknown adventures just over the horizon. Sure, it’s not The Last of Us’ iconic window or Super Mario 64’s pre-game invitation to finger Mario’s face, but it’s an incredibly bizarre thing to get hung up on.

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