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.

  • Bakzik [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Bakzik [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Same deeper-sadness

        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.

          • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Bakzik [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            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!

      • 1nt3rd1m3nt10n4l [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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.