Most of the hardcore Bethesda RPG fans who’ve invested thousands of hours into Skyrim and Fallout 4 can't wait for the release of Starfield.
Some have been passing the time until September by getting ready to make some mods for it, getting way too invested in the philosophies of its factions, or dissecting the details revealed by the recent developer Q&A session.
Meanwhile, others have been wading into a controversy around the game’s main menu screen, an image of which circulated on social media last week. The screen has since become the subject of an intense debate between developers regarding what it could imply about the state of the game and the process of making it.
What do you think of the controversy around Starfield’s main menu screen?
This discourse was kicked off by former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, who shared an image of the menu and suggested that, in their opinion, it “either shows hasty shipping deadlines [being met] by a passionate team [that are] overworked, or [is the product of] a team that didn't care.”
Bethesda’s Head of Publishing, Pete Hines, responded to Kern’s tweet, saying:
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 differently is highly unprofessional coming from another ‘dev’.
Now, a Starfield fan has found some evidence that seems to back up Hines’ assertion that the menu design has been in place since early on in the game’s development, rather than being added or finalised late in the process, as Kern suggested is often the case.
Over on the Starfield subreddit, user BlackChamber007 has shared a screengrab from ‘Into the Starfield: The Journey Begins’, one of the earliest YouTube videos Bethesda put out about the game, back in 2021.
At around the 45 second mark of the video, there’s a shot of some Bethesda employees looking at a cinema screen, which is displaying a menu screen that looks to bear a strong resemblance to the one shared recently.
Feel free to compare the two for yourself via the posts I’ve embedded, but they certainly seem pretty similar to me.
Regardless of whether you’re hoping that the discourse around Starfield will soon move on to something slightly less silly than this, make sure to follow us for lots of guides to its world and mechanics, as its release creeps ever closer.
You can also check out our latest mods of the month for some impressive works for other Bethesda games that might help tide you over until it arrives.