Starfield’s art direction is painfully boring. I’ve ben watching friends play. It looks like a totally soulless, characterless distillation of every forgettable science fiction movie in the last 30 years. It sure does look NASA, and NASA doesn’t have an artistic vision, they just slap shit together in whatever way won’t explode. The menus, the costumes, the weapons, even the planets, just look painfully generic. Like congrats, Todd, you successfully executed the NASA part alright. There’s no way you could have made more intensely bland, vague, inoffensive rendition of space. There’s no “punk” anywhere to be seen, though.
: p
I can’t believe they made this shit instead of TES Six. It’s like every 2010s space show that got cancelled half way through the first season.
I want to point out that you can totally do space race aesthetics, and all the rich 1960s culture associated with it, and make it look awesome. Arkane did it with Prey in 2017 and made it interesting by layering slick corporate facades over clunky 1960s space station guts and then slathering on the lore nice and thick with a trowel. They even made the rocket and retro-future tech in Deathloop look way more interesting than Bethesda’s done here.
Yesterday a friend was streaming the game in our discord.
Dear lord, it felt so dull. We came to the conclusion that the ambiance and art direction, that made the mid Skyrim so awesome, wasn’t there.
The Nasa style is just so boring. Is like an hospital, where everything is clean, white and monotonous. There is a word for it, but I don’t remember it.
Is just Capitalist Realism in space.
Is not for me, but I’am glad other comrades are enjoying it. Also, I liked the customization.
clean, white and monotonous
sterile and/or cracker
Sterile, that’s it!
Thank you, Greb!
Is just Capitalist Realism in space.
I used to really, really like space sci-fi, but the decades of “what if truckers in space” “what if mercantilism in space” “what if manifest destiny in space” “what if corporate police state in space” capitalist realism have made it both a bleak thing I rarely look forward to in games/fiction and it also normalized the idea of “space exploration is about doing a capitalism” for way too many people.
it also normalized the idea of “space exploration is about doing a capitalism” for way too many people.
Which is hilarious, because exploring space is probably one of the worst ROI things that there is, next to trying to economically exploit the lowest depths of the ocean floor.
It’s usually “ASTEROID MINING IS GORILLIONS OF EXTRA RESOURCES THAT WOULD SOLVE EVERYTHING” takes, ones that never ask or even think about where all that extra pollution would go, or whether those extra resources would really solve anything or if they’d be hoarded like DeBeers diamonds.
Same
That’s one of the reasons why I like classic Trek. As a kid, watching a tv series that showed a better world, was really cool. Now “there is no escape” of the bleak capitalist future in media. Well, at least in the mainstream.
It’s one of the things I really like about Eclipse Phase. There’s a bleak hyper-capitalist future happening inside the orbit of the asteroid belt, but beyond the belt are countless small, loosely aligned pro-social socialist and anarchist habitats and communities. One of hte big setting conflicts is the post-capitalist hypercorps trying to use IP and DRM to prevent people from taking full advantage of the nanofabricators that can just build anything if you have schematics, while hackers and anarchists and information wants to be free people are trying to break the DRM to give people the ability to make whatever they need whenever they need it. It says "Yeah, a better future is possible, but you’re going to have to fight for it.
This was the first time I heard of Eclipse Phase. Very interesting setting.
Shared it with my friends and we will play it, probably, in our next game session.
Thanks for the recommendation!
The Expanse was a non-starter for me for the same reason Bezos loved it so much that he subsidized it
The “Jeff Bezos the saved Expanse” narrative was a corporate advertisement that was subsequently peddled endlessly on reddit. The fact is that there was a very passionate and dedicated “Save the Expanse” fan campaign behind it including pitching it to Amazon Studios, who then made a business decision to finance the show’s continuation. The studio representative did make a off-handed comment that “Bezos likes the books” to the press but at the end of the day, it was a business decision based on profit.
Besides, how much do you think Bezos love the books when Amazon didn’t even bother to finance the TV adaptation of the last three books? They got a 3-season deal and didn’t get renewed (Season 6 was barely advertised at all compared to other shows like The Boys), and now Amazon owns the show’s airing rights (but not the IP, which remains in the hands of the producer Alcon) so they have to wait until it expires at some point.
I don’t know. I only have a vague passing knowledge of the whole franchise, which I find to be a blessing compared to the forced-to-learn-lore-from-sheer-cultural-saturation that Game of Thrones was.
If it makes you feel better, the politics in the Expanse aren’t dogshit. It does engage in some "all-sides"ism but the oppressed outer planets militia are depicted pretty reasonably.
That’s nice.
Plucky communists creating a new life far from capitalism when
That’s why I like the Hyperion Cantos, which is much more what if the EU made an interstellar civilization and it sucked and had to be destroyed
Arguably even more offensively boring, it’s rainbow-washed capitalist realism in space. No need to think about any of those icky social effects capitalism perpetuates.
kerbal space program is true nasapunk
The aesthetic works for me in certain places. I like lots of bits and bobs that look like they’re serving some function.
Some of the environmental design is pretty wack though. The procgen planet stuff is stale and the pois are just kind of sprinkled around artlessly.
I found a funny bit in the Mars place where you’re heading toward the bar and there are these two massive fans spinning while set against a solid wall. Not sure what airflow they’re managing there.
I found a funny bit in the Mars place where you’re heading toward the bar and there are these two massive fans spinning while set against a solid wall.
I think I once walked into a sports bar and saw two fans of the human variety doing exactly what you described.
But yeah, Bethesda has never been the best at designing plausible mechanical things that work. Doesn’t matter so much in fantasy games, but a lot of the Fallout stuff just doesn’t make any sense. There’s a series on YouTube where a museum curator from the Royal Armouries reviews video game guns and I remember him being extremely confused at some Fallout weapons.
The fallout IV weapons were horrid. The pipe guns just look ridiculous. The world is full of hand-crafted firearms and even the very worst of them, literal pipes with crude wooden handles attached by wire, look more artfully designed than the pipe guns. The other weapons are just perplexing. The “assault rifle” is far and away the worst offender, being a collection of bits from machine guns thrown together with little thought or design, resulting in a bulky mess of parts.
Beth going in hard on the Radiant system and procedural generation to absolve themselves of having to pay writers and level designers has been a complaint of mine for a long time.
Would you consider the art direction of Prey to be NASApunk?
The design of Prey was like an alternate reality where art-deco never stopped and consumed midcentury modernism and then Richard Danne became the most important living artist.
The game has a weirdly retrofuturistic vibe to it, like it takes as much inspiration from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as it does NASA’s 1970s designs. Also before anyone mentions Bioshock also being art-deco, a lot of it is, but they also threw in a lot of Art Nouveau design elements. Bioshock is kind of a mishmash of styles popular from 1900 to 1940, which does make sense in the narrative.
The design of Prey was like an alternate reality
That’s because it is! If you read the magazines laying around, you’ll see that the cold war never happened in the world of Prey. America and Russia reached for the stars together, and the Vietnam war never happened.
Oh right, yeah. I remember there’s a portrait in the starting area of an elderly JFK too, so he didn’t get assassinated.
This. It wasn’t sterile and corporate by accident, or aspirationally the way Starfield seems to be. The corporate environment was part of the story and intended to heighten the player’s sense of unreality and highlight that they’re in a different world. It looked corporate because it was corporate, and the whole story was about the corporation doing horrible unethical things.
I feel like at some point Prey may have been going for NASA punk then they noticed that the aesthetic is too limited for a full station and added the art Deco element in. Might be the other way around, or just going for the most extreme contrast of Deco and utilitarian.
The space station in Prey looked like an NYC sky scraper. Starfield has that off white all over the UI that makes it look like its constructed from ablative shielding. Thing is the station in Prey was intended to look corporate and soulless
I was a fan of the 1930s style architecture elements clashing against the post modern office building vibe
It’s funny because everything I hear about Starfield makes me want to play it less and less
Like even the enthusiastic people are making it sound absolutely boring and tedious
If the best your fucking hype-man can say is “The game gets really good fifty hours in when you beat the main quest”, you either need to reconsider your design ethos or hire a new hype-man
looks at own game library
Yeah… yeah :(
I find it absolutely awesome, the game has the same “just one more quick adventure… oops 5 hours have passed” effect as TES games, but in space. I think I’ve also spent 3-4h in the ship editor at this point.
I’m probably a very boring person
I’m enjoying it a ton too. It’s what I wanted no man’s sky to be. Feels good to finally have a space sandbox to play in.
Have you checked back in on NMS lately?
I have, about a year or so ago. Did the capital ship stuff. I played it at release too for a while. I’ve been to who knows how many planets, over 50 for sure. Made some bases. Everything looks like butt and I just don’t really feel like I’m exploring anything. It’s just not for me.
Hey, I’m glad you’re enjoying it. If you’re having fun with the game that’s awesome. My objections are purely my own. Post some pictures of your ship, show off your ride!
Behold, the result of 4 hours of careful ship design: https://imgur.com/a/ZbfD8tN
Thicc
I love it! I like the squared off design and off-center cockpit. Industrial millenium falcon! It’s cool to see space ships that don’t feel constrained by the need to look aerodymanic.
What kind of jobs are you focusing on? Cargo? research?
Hexbears will like it once the Soviet mod comes out.
It’ll happen. There have always been a ton of Commie and Anarchist mods for Beth games.
I’m honestly suprised there is no overt cosmonaut art present in the game or even a “evil” russian faction or whatever, just a weird cult so far and “scavengers” (i.e. disenfranchised people scavenging on the remnants of corporate space to survive capitalist space hell
)The Spacer faction really doesn’t sit well with me. In lore (minor spoilers I guess) they’re supposed to be generic unaffiliated scrappers who sometimes engage in piracy. The game treats them as a universally hostile faction like the Crimson Fleet.
How do I know I’m only shooting Somali pirates and not just gunning down random Somali families?
Based on what I’ve seen it’s almost essential that modders make an entire Spacer alternate main quest where you learn about the horrors of the stepford smiler corporate disneyland factions, find out where all of space capitalism’s bodies are buried, and then lead a revolutionary uprising that culminates in giving New Atlantis an ultimatum to surrender or be bombarded by orbit.
My buddy was playing a quest where, no shit, you go in and rescue a bunch of literal military marines from random spacers. And the spacers are just utterly inept. Can’t shoot straight, terrible reaction speed, a lot of them just fled in terror from the player. It didn’t look like bad-ass space pirates who could take on trained and equipped space marines and win. It looked like a bunch of random normal people getting their asses kicked. It just reeked of terrible politics. Like any half decent person would have made the random scrappy untrained militias the good guys, or at least wouldn’t have made the space army in to the innocent victims who need to be rescued.
But then Beth did the same thing with Fallout. They stripped all the complexity out of the Super-Mutants and just made them orcs that killed people for no reason. The raiders in FO I and II were tribes of people who engaged in raiding to make a living. In FOII the NCR has suppressed many of the larger raider factions and it’s a plot point in a few quests. In the Beth FO games the raiders are just random orcs, living in filth and squalor and decorating their bases with human body parts for no clear reason.
it’s just plain bad storytelling. They don’t even try to make the “bad guys” people, they’re just empty loot pinatas.
Can’t wait for that tbh
weird, i got to the “how to control ship” tutorial and turned it off because i couldn’t make myself care.
I’m seeing a lot of people saying that it gets better 10-12 hours in once you get an understanding of some of the systems and learn how the game works, but that’s a lot of time investment to figure out if you actually enjoy something.
yeah it’s hard to push through not giving a shit about the plot or the mass effect-ass plot hook it starts with. had a similar problem with fallout 4 as well but at least you could wander off instead of i guess having to fast-travel between areas like the first witcher
Agreed, though I do admit that it was at least trying something slightly different than the usual “cover a quasi-medieval backdrop with blood, ash, and/or grime” or “have cyberpunk with a lot more cyber and boobah and a lot less punk” AAA cliches. It’s bland but at least it’s a newer bland.
Further Slander - It’s the Corporate Memphis of Space Operas.
I just can’t get over how bland it looks. There’s nothing you could take a screenshot of that would be recognizable as Starfield. The rovers, the landscapes, the space suits? They could be from Interstellar, they could be from 2001, they could be from dozens of low budget space simulators or tv-shows or tech demos. And space is just bland, too.
TES and Fallout were janky messes, but at least they looked like something.
TES and Fallout were janky messes, but at least they looked like something
Most of the settlements in Oblivion and Skyrim look like generic medieval European town/city #8491 and any of the leather/iron/steel armor sets also look pretty generic.
I thin Bethesda just hasn’t really gone anything super interesting since Morowind.
I was just looking at the New Atlantis “skyline” being like “This looks like dogshit
I just looked that up for myself.
Fucking theme parks in real life look less stilted and artificial than that.
It does look like a theme park, especially from people who figured out how to leave the city boundaries. It’s seven sky scrapers in the middle of a proceedurally generated forest. It really does look like a disney theme park in the middle of a Florida swamp.
Further Slander - It’s the Corporate Memphis of Space Operas.
I can already hear the ukulele strumming
it seems like the kinda shit i’d like if my rig was up to snuff
i am the weirdo who installs a shitload of immersion mods then rp walks around skyrim though
I’m right there with you on cramming mods in to the game until it breaks, but I also waited over a year to play Skyrim and Fallout IV specifically because the mod community has to fix Bethesda’s broken ass games every time. I’m sure once the community tunes up the combat so the bad guys aren’t punching bags with way too many hitpoints and figures out how to spit in Todd’s eye and make the spaceships do interesting things and hacks in FO4s power armor and a dozen other things it’ll be fun, but it won’t be the “vision” that Beth shipped.
I agree with you on the aesthetic, and I’ve made my position pretty clear on the performance.
However, the more I’ve played the game the more I’ve realised that it’s probably the strongest base game that Bethesda have ever released. It has a lot of extremely strong points going for it that modders are going to like:
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Planets are all procedural generation. The game seems to generate land and points of interest (POIs) as you go. This benefits the mod scene because they can just churn out POIs and people can add them to their game. Over time POIs can expand and expand and expand, making future play throughs more and more unique and varied the more you add. There will never be any conflict over “did another modder use this same spot for their building/cave?” because everything is placed as you go along.
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The real world future setting has benefits to modding by making everything “real”. This means modders can just add real world items and clothing to the game and none of it will be out of place. This is easier for amateur modding than being creative by inventing new armour etc, they have reference material to work from.
The politics seems like trash so far. I don’t understand how there’s no patriarchy, no bigotry, no racism etc in a corporate capitalist universe. If it’s there I haven’t seen it so far. It makes absolutely no sense for these things to be eliminated in the universe because capitalism has a profit-incentive to never fully solve marginalised people on account of marginalised people being easier to exploit. I’m waiting to see whether that remains to be true the deeper I go though.
There’s no “punk” anywhere to be seen, though.
I’ve seen some graffiti that implies it exists in-universe but other than that have not come across anything in person. Example:
My friend actually encountered the “punk”. It’s the spacers, the generic bad-guys you can murder with impunity who have no clear motives, goals, beliefs, or culture! They’re literally called “spacer punk” and you can gun down hordes of them. They don’t look much like punks, though, because they all wear the same generic beige space suit.
Hmm the Spacers? The Pirates and the Spacers are different factions and the Pirates are VERY lazily “anarchist”. Aesthetics only pretty much, they rob and pillage pretty much everyone, they’re as good as bandits, they basically are. They do carry guns around on them with “no gods no masters” and anarchy symbols on them, there’s also some orders you can pick up from their leader that have extremely nominal “they think they own it all but they don’t, it’s ours” types of motivations. Paper thin nod to anarchism. Mostly dogshit.
I do genuinely think modding can fix much of this though. And there’s a huge giant void begging for communists to be added, potentially space soviets. You could do an alt-timeline where the USSR still existed and they had an anticapitalist space war that ruined the galaxy instead. This would have been a better backstory for most of the lore tbh.
It makes absolutely no sense for these things to be eliminated in the universe
What do you mean? The World Economic Forum said the workplace gender gap will be closed by 2220! And Starfield takes place 90 years after that!
aaaaaThe gender gap isn’t closing because the corporations are nice it’s closing because states are actively promoting and forcing corporations into it.
If you go to space and reduce the state’s involvement and corporations will seize on each and every single thing they can to save money and exploit people more. The marginalised will be the hyper-exploited the further into the periphery you get. The central core planets might be better off.
Given that the explanation for the scattering of human facilities on all the planets in the game seems to be that humanity had some huge “colony war” and a lot was lost, I think that crime and all kinds of other stuff would have gone through the roof in that time.
What I’m seeing in game so far is a girl-boss neoliberal vision of what they pretend these problems will become here on earth, not a materialist interpretation of what these problems would be in space. Cowboy Bebop presents a much more realistic vision of capitalism in space.
Mods are gonna rock for this though. The political problems in the game can be solved.
The political problems in the game can be solved.
From what I’ve read just turning off the essential flag on the main cast and then mercilessly shoving all their lib asses out the nearest airlock will drastically improve the political situation.
Lmao what did they do to Yshtola and why is she so god damned annoying in this aaaaaaaaa shut up shut up shut up. I really like her voice actress in FFXIV but in this I really want to launch her into space.
If you go to space and reduce the state’s involvement and corporations will seize on each and every single thing they can to save money and exploit people more. The marginalised will be the hyper-exploited the further into the periphery you get. The central core planets might be better off.
New MandaloreGaming review has a game that touches on this idea a lot.
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Tangentially, I consider NASA to be an integral part of the US Military Industrial Complex and I find the English-speaking left’s somewhat uncritical embrace of it to be strange.
I mean, I get it. NASA is civilian and much of its work is exploratory and non-military, but let’s not pretend against all evidence that all of its discoveries are being fed directly into missile development or dual use shit like GPS.
I think we should be at least as critical of NASA as Boston Robotics or any of the other MIC adjacent companies who do civilian work but with extremely obvious military applications.
NASA’s public image is so cool and wholesome. Pictures of entire rooms of engineers erupting in cheers when their ship successfully soft-lands on a distant world and it’s telemetry comes back green across the board. Smiling astronauts in their iconic space suits fussing with robot arms and deploying satellites. As long as you never think about how the space shuttle’s entire design was dictated by demands that it be able to deploy nuclear weapons it seems like a great institution.
NASA is just as bad as any other US institution. The reason it’s funding has been cut so drastically is that it isn’t needed for PR against the Soviets anymore, and because weaponizing space is mostly handled by other agencies.
Tangentially, I consider NASA to be an integral part of the US Military Industrial Complex and I find the English-speaking left’s somewhat uncritical embrace of it to be strange.
My answer is: People like Star Trek, and want a thing like that IRL.
Except if it’s Americans exploring the stars, every colony will be established by biowarfare against the natives and then populated by involuntary transfer of slaves and indentured servants so… yeah…
do any of the bulky spacesuits have a hard outer layer of armor like a deep sea diving suit, or are they all generic vaguely baggy jumpsuits covered in doodads? i’ve recently become obsessed with power armor like in maschinen krieger or Special Armored Battalion Dorvack. i already know starfield has mechs in its lore and as ruins in the world that the player can’t ever use so my interest has probably already been killed. is there at least a ledge climb or is it all jump jets?
Idk, but i am eager to see if people find almost functional code for the mechs in the game, or manage to port the code for Fallout’s power armor over. I’m really surprised they put all the work in to making power armor work in Fallout 4 and then just scrapped it for their space game where having a big power armor suit would make complete sense.
They’re probably saving mechs and vehicles for paid DLC.
One of the main complaints so far is how fucking long it takes just to walk to a POI so I’m sure Bethesda will find a way to monify the solution.
It’s such a bizarre decision. Like the lack of functionality from the space ships is downright weird. You can’t actually fly them except in the space combat minigame. You can’t fly them at all on planets. No shuttles, no bikes, no trikes, no rovers.
Elite Dangerous, bless it’s liberal heart, manage to have janky rovers and janky atmospheric flight and let you land wherever, all using proceedurally generated planets that have the same handful of points of interest drawn from a small pool. You can fly too and from orbit, you can land, you can call your ship to you when you need it, you can even have your buddies provide fire-support, though that’s been nerfed heavily because you’re not allowed to have fun in grind-based games.
I get that Beth can’t do any of this because they refuse to abandon their decades old frankenstein abomination of a game engine, but that’s not really an excuse so much as a personal failing. They made a game about doing space adventure stuff but then just left out so many basic things you’d expect in a space adventure game. like landing.
It reminds me of the Saints Row reboot in the way that it advertises infinite possibility but isn’t really “about” anything. It is a sandbox in a much purer sense than most games in how thoroughly pointless and artless it is.
Also, digipicks?
I HAVE A GUN. IT IS A UNIVERSAL LOCKPICK. Like ffs I know Beth only has three tricks but have they ever heard of a crow bar, or god forbid a hydraulic jack, or C4, or thermite lock cutters, or the fact that you have a giant mining laser you carry around all the time?
