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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Further Slander - It’s the Corporate Memphis of Space Operas.
I can already hear the ukulele strumming
give me sovietwave or im just going to be a pirate that kills everyone
It’s objectively the correct choice. Reject all capitalist futures. The real end-game is bombarding New Atlantis from orbit and installing a revolutionary government.
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 :(
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.
Plucky communists creating a new life far from capitalism when
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.
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
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!
shhh shhh we don’t need them ruining Hammerfell and the only cool untouched parts of TES lore quite yet
I wanna go to Elsywehr and climb a ladder of cats to the moon to converse with the Mane.
Look folks I’m just waiting for the inevitable TARDIS mod. I need my confusing as hell ship that didn’t hit right in Skyrim, and only worked in F4 due to a 30 year old Easter egg.
The real question is: how does Starfield compare to Outer Worlds? I wasn’t too impressed by that but I also didn’t really hear it being accused of being bland (plus you could
in the capital).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
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.
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.
