Ahead of Starfield’s release, there’s been criticism of the Bethesda RPG’s splash screen. Bethesda’s Pete Hines has a thin-skinned reaction.
The next heavyweight will be launched at the end of next week: Bethesda’s sci-fi role-playing game was in development for many years and is finally on the home straight after the gold announcement. This leads to discussions about apparently small details.
Heated discussions about home screen
The starting point of the discussion is Tweet by Mark Kern, former Blizzard employee for well-known brands such as Starcraft, Diablo and Warcraft. For him, a home screen is not just a wallpaper. A game’s splash screen “can reveal a lot about how rushed the team was and how proud they are of their work,” Kern said. In the case of Starfield, he saw “either rushed deadlines by a passionate, overworked team or a team that didn’t care.”
He also writes that splash screens are often created at the very end of development and teams are often “still too busy designing the core game”. It’s common for the home screen to “change completely once the game ships or hits patch 0.” Teams that are proud “want to present a good image and will often redesign it just before the game’s release”. Arguably the craziest example, according to Kern, would be “the installer screen for the original Command & Conquer game: It’s never been surpassed”.
This start screen causes heated discussions (2)
Source: Bethesda
The tweet ended up in a roundabout way with Pete Hines, who works as Head of Publishing at Bethesda and recently attracted attention with a snappy remark when he advised a Twitter user to “take a deep breath”. Hines obviously holds very little from Mark Kern’s opinion or relevant questions about the supposedly loveless start screen. He writes that the team designed the home screen the same way and that this has been the menu for years – it was actually one of the first decisions ever. He continues: “Having an opinion is one thing. To question a developer’s ‘carefulness’ just because you would have done it differently is extremely unprofessional from the perspective of another ‘developer'”.
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