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.
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 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.