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games @hexbear.net Frank [he/him, he/him] @hexbear.net

Starfield Slander - "Nasapunk" is offensively boring

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.

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  • 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:

    • 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.

    • 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:

    • 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! very-intelligent

      • screm-a aaaaa

        The 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.

    • 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.

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