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'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.