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.
Removed by mod
its partner developed a crush on the sick looking rocket plane. nothing easier to understand than that.
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
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
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?
Thicc
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.
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
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.
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.
Further Slander - It’s the Corporate Memphis of Space Operas.
I can already hear the ukulele strumming
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
clean, white and monotonous
sterile and/or cracker
Sterile, that’s it!
Thank you, Greb!
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.
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 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:
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.
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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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The only thing stopping you is insufficient skooma.
Despite my height and hirsute appearance I am, regrettably, not actually a Pahmer-Raht.
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They could always do the ESO thing and have the Graht-oaks conveniently vanish during the events of the game.
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Tbh vanishing the Graht-oaks and making Eldenroot plant itself wasn’t the worst ESO did to Valenwood’s lore, I’m still a little sad that Silvenar is nothing like in A Dance In Fire.
relevant paragraph
If Falinesti was a tree, then Silvenar was a flower. A magnificent pile of faded shades of green, red, blue, and white, shining with crystalline residue. Mallon had mentioned off-hand, when not otherwise explaining Aldmeri prosody, that Silvenar had once been a blossoming glade in the forest, but owing to some spell or natural cause, the trees’ sap began flowing with translucent liqueur. The process of the sap flowing and hardening over the colorful trees had formed the web of the city.
Vs how it appeared in ESO
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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.
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 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.
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).The writing is way better in outer worlds, but there’s way less of it.
idk, kinda deluding yourself there. i just took a hammer to any character that was capitalist in ow cause i found them extremely annoying. and i gotta be frank i remember none of the characters in outer worlds (and tbh the only characters i remember in skyrim are dagon, azura, and serana… so maybe im weird). so far i kinda like andreja in starfield but a lot of the characters here also feel like paper. it just feels like fallout 4 but with uninteresting lore and ambiance. so its like… cookie cutter bethesda game. which if you like bethesda mechanics youll have stuff to do but otherwise its just meh. also, i gotta say i hate how i basically cant kill anyone in bethesda games, it bothers me a lot, esp when you attack them and they are immortal and shooting you.
I hate Sarah so much. Barrets the only good one I think. I like the quark character but pretty much only because quark is the voice.
which character is that?
Quark is the voice of the old venture capitalist man that finances the operation or whatever. My enjoyment is purely from nostalgia of ds9.
In addition to Armin Shimerman, Nana Visitor (Kira) and Tim Russ (Tuvok) voice your mom and dad characters.
I agree that the writing was better in Outer Worlds but it was completely ruined for me by the borderlands-tier humor they’d mix into it.
Like someone made an incredibly delicious cake but they mixed little shards of broken glass into it. By comparison, Starfield is a bland but consistent sponge cake.
That is true.
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.
