Bethesda’s Pete Hines Calls Out Former Blizzard WoW Team Lead Over ‘Rushed’ Starfield Start Screen Comments

wccftech.com:

Bethesda's Pete Hines has taken to Twitter to comment on a recent tweet about Starfield's start screen from former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern.

Yesterday, Kern posted a tweet about Starfield's start screen, stating that start screens can reveal a lot about the game's development and how the development team feels about their work on a particular game. According to the former Blizzard employee, the start screen of Bethesda's highly-anticipated title shows either hurried deadlines or a lack of interest. "The physiognomy of start screens", Kern wrote on Twitter yesterday. "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. Starfield's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care."

In his follow-up tweet, he wrote, "Start screens are often done at the very end of development". He then said that "Teams that take pride want to put a good face forward and will often redo these just prior to the 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

Apparently, these comments from Kern didn't sit well with Bethesda's Head of Publishing, Pete Hines. According to Hines, Starfield's start screen has been the same for years and was actually one of the first things that the development team settled on. In addition, Hines said that Kern's comments are quite unprofessional coming from another developer.

"Or they designed what they