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.
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.