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 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.
Same
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.
The Expanse was a non-starter for me for the same reason Bezos loved it so much that he subsidized it
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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.
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.
That’s nice.
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.
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!
Plucky communists creating a new life far from capitalism when
That’s why I like the Hyperion Cantos, which is much more what if the EU made an interstellar civilization and it sucked and had to be destroyed
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.
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.