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.
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.