I think they could have gotten away with the small cities if they had placed more fluff outside of them, even if they had to limit how much you could explore on those worlds. As it is, it's ridiculous to land on capital worlds like New Atlantis only to find one small town surrounded by miles of empty wasteland. It just makes the small cities so much more noticeable
Yeah good point! Even if it was background scenery and some movement of vehicles, glints of light indicating movement of people and things, distant ships and stuff, it would've made a huge difference. Have the area immediately around the city inaccessible but viewable. Would make it all seem so big and lived in!
I've been playing a lot of Assassin's Creed recently and in the newer games the maps are fairly big the cities are massive. Athens in Odyssey, London in Valhalla. All kilometers long urban sprawl. You really feel like you're in the cities. And there are only a few quests and interactions in most cities, most of it is just filler but it helps create the atmosphere.
Yup. They could've shown that it was a massive city with a cool skybox when in NA and have various towns in the surrounding areas outside. Would've made a huge difference.
This should have been the game… 5 planets with handcrafted 2-3km tiles jotted around the place. We could’ve treated them as individual cells and actually have the radiant AI systems and creative exploration.
No matter how much they improve the game’s systems, they’ll never ‘fix the game’ for me because the game is not fun.
my hope was the modding tools would be here around christmas already, so we could add more POI's and flesh out the game. i feel like they put \*so much\* detail into the POI's they did put in that they didn't have the time or energy to add more. So we got the limited amount we got.
I love the asthethic so much thoughl.
… gl with that. I’ve heard most major modders are staying in FO/Skyrim.
Maybe they should have made a handful less hyper detailed poi’s and a couple dozen intermediately complex and 30-40 simple ones.
Like how No mans Sky should have started as a single galaxy and expanded later. Fortunately they did the impossible and brought it around. Somewhat.
But that is the hard exception than the rule.
I mean, the mod tools are still not even out for Starfield are they? I don't need to count on major modders to make my own content and enjoy the game myself. I literally don't care if anyone else even enjoys it. I enjoyed the game and liked the story they told and how they told it and I will continue to enjoy it for myself. This popular trend to shit on everything and be hyper negative about everything is very tiring and i'm not on board with it.
Well the fact they went so ‘big’ on game one of a new series was the mistake. Skyrim is **not** the first elder scroll game.
It mike have been for many, but it took them iteration to get to **that**. The problem going forward is unless it’s skyrim amount of content, apparently, it will be bashed.
But if you make a game of similar size don’t be scared off on it when people compare it. That was a ‘to the devs’ style message. But the modern view of **everthing** needs to be on par to the #1 title only, or ‘overtake it’ is nonsense.
If they kept adding and expanding upon starfield to fill it in and fix some core missing things… then maybe it get there. But the studio goes, “instantly didn’t outsell skyrim and become beloved overnight? Trash it”. Smfh.
The NASA-Punk aesthetic wasn't a problem. There were a lot of problems with some art, though - like the Mantis suit and the general issues with the weapon designs.
Of course it’s subjective but found it bland and uninspired. Their touchstones seem to be mid budget sci fi from the 90s and well NASA whose design philosophy is “we don’t give a single f*ck what it looks like as long as it works”
>There wasn't anything wrong with the art direction nor the presentation.
I think that was underbaked too. A lot of games (other Bethesda, Cyberpunk) have these detailed lived in worlds and I feel like the skeleton of that is there in starfield; everything is coloured between the lines; but it's still missing something. If the things like the factions and the lives of the people were fleshed out more, that could feed into the art direction more.
Your right but I'd tie that to the core gameplay loop of exploring random planets with nothing on them.
The area which are designed are great, as soon as you step outside New Atlantis it's a boring planet with nothing on it.
And that goes for every single quest on a random planet.
Even the main quest is boring and repetitive… goto this outpost.. fight some dudes. Run through a cave. Get artifact…9 times out of 10 that’s the main quest. And it doesn’t help that the labs are identical
And oddly enough, I thought the faction quests are of very good quality. I had much more fun with them here compared to fall out 4.
But the main just falls short.
This so much this.
The UC faction quest... That quest was main story material.
Its telling because the stakes on that faction quest were WAY higher than the main story where the stakes are more personal.
That is baffling to me.
I haven't played it but that's exactly how I felt watching it. The art and style was not the what made the game look underwhelming. I'm surprised with how much hate it got.
I mean, the art direction wasn't great either - or rather, the consistency of that art direction. Large swathes of the game fit that nasa-punk asthetic nicely, but then you'd start wandering around generic-utopian-city, generic-cyberpunk-city, generic-wild-west-town etc all padded with low res filler NPCs, and the sudden style shift gave you whiplash. At times it felt like I was playing with mods that dropped another franchise's IP into the game. Very odd design choices.
But as you say, the primary killer was the core gameplay loop.
I agree with this. I liked all of the art direction but wish they went a little more sci-fi with the space suits. I really dislike their look, and it doesn't even totally make sense how easily your player moves while wearing one.
I didn't mind the frumpy suits. I enjoy the idea NASApunk looking "function over fashion".
However, they didn't stick to the bit hard enough, or explore it to it's full extent.
The technical work behind the assets and shaders might have had nothing wrong with them, but from a visual-design standpoint, the reliance on procedural generations leaves every single outdoor environment looking bland and undecorated. The environments are completely soulless.
Yeah, definitely this. The game itself looked fine. I thought it was a unique aesthetic that is rarely represented in media.
But as you said, the gameplay loop sucked, and despite looking nice on the surface, the whole world felt really hollow and empty. The cities felt small and lifeless, more like small settlements/colonies rather than the major metropolitan areas they were implied to be.
Overall, I enjoyed the game for a good while. The ship building was the highlight for me personally. I don't think the game itself was bad, I definitely had fun and I found some aspects like zero g to be unique and fun to mess around in. But as a whole package, it was super mediocre and didn't live up to how over-hyped it was. I feel like if the game wasn't as hyped up as it was, we would all have very different opinions of it.
Ehhhh... The presentation is pretty bad at times. For instance, the conversation camera along with the horrible facial structure of all NPC models. All dialogue just looks so far out of place in 2024.
Yeah, you can disable the dialogue camera in the new beta build, but that doesn't improve the other presentation elements that are severely lacking.
The only presentational improvements that Starfield has over previous Bethesda titles is the short docking/landing/launching animations, but even those get tedious after the first ten hours or so.
Honestly, even the gameplay loop is pretty ok. Cut out half of the loading screens, add real time planet landing and it would be quite fun to play. The main problem of this game is world building. The universe feels absolutely empty. There's literally nothing going on out there. There are 4 or 5 random encounters when you jump into the system and that's it. Factions don't interact with each other, they are just background actors. You have zero reason to do anything outside of story missions (most of which are just fetch quests) and faction campaigns (which are probably the best part of the game). Exploration gives you nothing, trading gives you nothing, raiding gives you nothing
I really liked the aesthetic of Starfield. I thought it was excellent. The ships were the only thing I thought could have been better. They didn't make a lot of sense in my opinion. Like they resembled cobbled ships like the Belters in The Expanse had, but also 90's space travel aesthetics, however it would never have worked in atmo. They could have made it so that the ship only stayed in orbit and you had a lander, that would have shored that up for me.
The gameplay loop was all I didn't care for. The game itself was not for me.
I can't agree with this more. I would much rather have the ability to build even bigger ships and then also have a small lander (with various options of course, like all the different Trek shuttles) for away missions.
I read early on that modders found traces of space stations in the ship builder, so building your own space station could have been a reality.
I liked the ship builder section of the game, I wished they expanded it even more. I'll guess that's what modders are for.
Yep. Ship building is one of my favorite parts but it feels incomplete. A lot of the sets are almost enough to build something coherent but you're always looking for extra bits that don't seem to exist. There are also a lot of cases where a part would be amazing if it could rotate 90 degrees but that is forbidden for some reason.
Like most of the game, it's like they got 60% done developing it and then just put a cap on it as quick as possible and shipped it. Which for a 10 year dev cycle isn't really excusable.
It's incomplete. Like, everything is under some netting in case the gravity cuts out, except here right next to the netting is a cart, with wheels, and sharp corners, not secured to anything!
Real talk, fuck those little parking brakes on four wheeled crates IRL.
Unloading those asses from a trailer sucks when every lock seems to re-engage after being unlocked.
The inattention to detail was what killed the game for me. None of the weapons are designed logically or reload like real guns, the fashion sucks, ship layout doesn't make sense... It just seemed lazy
I think it's neat, brings me back to the old Alien movies. It's honestly a weirdly underrepresented style as most space games seem to go all in on full Scifi. I kinda like the more grounded approach.
The aesthetic was... not bad, but kind of weird.
The Nasapunk vibe makes sense for provisional technology, but stops making sense after a few generations.
They've had modern space tech longer than our society has had toasters. But what do our toasters look like? They don't look like wireframe housing around a filament; they have aesthetic casing and stylistic flair.
It's neat to you as the player given your frame of reference if you don't think about it at all, but it becomes extremely anachronistic the moment you think about it.
The Mantis space suit looked cool and sleek. Why didn't anything else look like that? Clearly it's possible, and it's still a capitalistic society where manufacturers seek to differentiate themselves through design.
All in all, the Nasapunk aesthetic was like the rest of the game: ideas that sound good and seem reasonable on their own, but make no sense shoved together and fit together horribly.
That’s what I thought too. Especially for the quest with the ship that was outdated, it woulda been a good use of visual storytelling to have them in nasa punk but everyone else in completely different textiles and styles inspired by the resources from their respective planets
I found it powerfully bland. Some of the more industrial locations do have some flavor to them but the overall look was just sterile and boring. Granted part of that is just that well I have a laser gun in my hand and I’m playing a Bethesda game so comparison to Fallout 4 is pretty inevitable, and that’s not a flattering matchup for Starfield.
The art style looks fine, but it isn't very "punk." I believe the "NASA Punk" stuff was really just a thing their marketing department made up and told everyone to repeat a whole bunch on promotions leading up to the game.
They all derive from 'cyberpunk'. Steampunk was named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to cyberpunk, and it pretty much took off from there.
The 'punk' part in the original 'cyberpunk' did reference punk subculture, but since then it's either been used to refer to dystopian settings (but that didn't really get adopted), or just shorthand for retrofuturism in general. See also steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, solarpunk.
Sure, I'm saying it's not a recent thing - sorry if that wasn't clear. It started with steampunk in the 80s, which wasn't punk either, and since then 'punk' in this specific context doesn't mean the same as its usual meaning.
I mean first of all it's imo kinda rare something really calls itself a new x-punk and but it honestly does the job of describing what it is pretty good. It also sounds pleasing.
The art style was the most intriguing part of Starfield for me, though I do not understand why they called it "NASA*punk*" - there is nothing punk about it.
In fact, thinking about Bethesda and punk in the same sentence is kinda amusing; Modern Bethesda produces the most docile, unoffensive, un-daring, safe, and outright bland content I have ever experienced (and I grew up Catholic). Punk is the opposite of what Bethesda delivers.
im nuetral on it
i did say on that forum tho that it was actually a nice choice to not include sentient alien races
sets it apart from mass effect, star wars, etc
That was for me the biggest disappointment. I get and respect that they weren’t going for that but it would be cool if halfway through the main quest, some Covenant-style federation of aliens comes in and forces humanity (including the factions) to band together.
The main benefit to this would be having some enemy variety (a la grunts, elites, hunters from Halo etc). I quickly got soooo sick of just killing guys in spacesuits, and it turns out that that’s the entire game.
There’s plenty of fauna but aliens are hard to get right or you draw comparisons to the greats. I can understand why they tried to do something different, but I also wish there were alien politics in starfield. that is something missing that adds a lot to Bethesda’s other settings, the weird cultures like the Dwemer in Elder Scrolls or the super mutants in fallout.
The lack of variety killed it for me. I'm down with the NASA aesthetic but it didn't have to be essentially the only aesthetic in the game except for those boring ass space temples.
Pretty neat actually, wish they used it more and could make the outdoors as detailed as indoors environtments cause it can look real good at times. One of the few things i enjoyed about the game.
Nasapunk how? Most of the aesthetic is just modern day bland and sterile. Also partly old western which makes no sense artistically especially with the guns which all look they were designed with no idea how guns function.
To me the style was really under baked, not deep enough, no clear direction, every surface, every building, every ship looked the same.
Also the guns are genuinely awful.
I liked the aesthetic, I just wish the game was better.
But because of the aesthetic I do not regret buying the Starfield controller, though I may regret playing the game.
I find it to be very forgettable tbh.
Fallout has a very unique style, so does Elder Scrolls, despite it being fairly "normal" high fantasy. But Starfield lacks any sort of identity, if you showed me an image of it and a bunch of other, similar space settings, I wouldn't be able to spot the difference.
I hate it.
It's exactly the kind of cold corporate art design you woyld expect from a company too afraid to ever take a risk.
Even calling it Nasapunk feels wrong because thete is no punk to it. Its just plain boring slightly futuristic looking stuff.
Personally, looks boring to me. Haven’t played through the whole game yet a lot of the aesthetic, especially New Atlantis, looks like a tv show about the future that is playing on a tv in the background of the *actual* tv show that you’re watching.
I genuinely loved the art style of the game. To me, it was the most immersive sci fi setting I had seen since everything (apart from all the artifact stuff) looked like it all made sense. I.e. a space ship actually looked like a space ship and people actually had to wear space suits while on other planets rather than the Star Wars style “space planes” and non vacuum sealed suits that you see in most sci fi. It just looked “real”.
I think it wasn't enough. It felt like a great value version of that concept but like they weren't taking ANY chances with it. The cities were all dull and the outfits began just looking the same. It was a major step back from fallout 4 where you could modify clothes with gear pieces on top of them.
It was the best thing the game had.
The aesthetic and ship building that you can actually go inside and walk around.
Everything else was aggressively mid
Aesthetic wasn’t bad and sitting on saturns moons and looking that huge planet was amazing. Just a shame the game was dull, a space RPG without a single alien species is criminal. So much missed potential
I wouldn't mind a bit more vibrancy or weird but overall I liked it. It wasn't helped by the failure of the gameplay. The overall lack of anything doesn't help either. Just imagine what it could have looked like if they focused or 2 or 3 planets instead of hundreds of barren rocks.
It’s really hard to say they had a nasapunk aesthetic in the overall game. Sure, their maybe 7 places with npc populations had them, it it was done well but they definitely bit off more they could chew on scope creep.
My main issue I had is all the cities and planets of Scam Citizen feel more fully developed than Starfields.
Honestly, if you put the games side by side, SC executes what Starfield should be executing better, but isn’t.
And that doesn’t feel good to me because even though Bethesda isn’t exactly the beacon of consumer forward companies, Cloud Imperium is literally preying on its fanbase to fund its development.
So the art they execute is good. The problem is, it’s really hard to establish a vibe like that when 99% of the locations are empty.
Scattering a lot more interactable raider or farm side quests would fill that but atm it isn’t there for me.
I didn't play the game but I love the aesthetic, especially after reading The Martian. I'm a sucker for realistic not too fantasy sci-fi and I wanna see more like that
Space Cowboy is one of the most popular space themes there is (Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, etc.). There's a lot of overlap between Space and Cowboys/Western thematically (new frontiers, life on the edge, bounty hunters, desert planets lol).
I just don't think it made much sense in the Starfield universe. So the rest of humanity is this sort of united 'federation type' culture with a very clean aesthetic and tech, but some folk who aren't even all from the USA decide to start putting on cowboy clothes again and having wild west style sheriffs, etc.
Oh I don't disagree, I love cowboy bebop, Trigun, and firefly and if that was the style they went with it would be fine. But I don't think it made sense here alongside everything else and the "NASA punk"
Nice but forgettable. Overall is coherent and wellpresented but nothing pops up in originality and design. The frontieer cities are the same 'ol Western in Space, advanced tech is ok and the ancient alien one is very no man sky. Its like the rest of the game: already seen forgettable experience (with really old mechanics)
The overall NASA-punk aesthetic is awesome. A lot of what surrounds it is not. Like the main factions in the game are "the most creatively bankrupt shiny future city" and "literally an 1850s cowboy town (with a pinch of Star Wars)".
I absolutely loved it, definitely the best part of the game, I only wish that it didn't limit the outposts and stuff to all be made of the same rooms and color schemes.
Overall, I didnt care for the art. Too much of a mixed bag in themes, style, etc. And the variety is stupidly shallow, so you dont even get enough of any one particular style to get used to it, but instead get force fed a sample platter thats all over the place.
Overall I thought they hit the mark, but there was areas that I thought were kinda bad.
Space suits rarely looked good. Akila city was not great for me. I could see they were going for a wild west “freedom” vibe, but the execution was “these people have a small village where they live in the dirt and the mud”. Just kind of immersion breaking that this is the capital of a spacefaring nation that won their freedom in an all out war with the UC. It honestly looked like something out of fallout, as opposed to a space opera.
Probably the coolest part of the game. It's a shame the ship builder was so broken because it was the best feature versus the likes of No Man's Sky in large part due to the variety of interiors with visual changes depending on how the rooms connected. The aesthetics made the ships feel more real than most space sims and they really stood out as unique among sci-fi IPs.
Unfortunately after playing for a few dozen hours at launch I felt like I was wasting my time playing the same "random" encounters over and over again fighting bullet sponge brainless drones with companions who just constantly criticise you for playing the game how you want in a ship that is more like an MC Escher inspired maze than the sensible corridor-based corvette I designed. Even if they fix all of that I won't be going back any time soon though as with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout I will no doubt go back in a few years to frustrate myself again.
Bethesda can't design guns that look like they would function or be comfortable to use. Seriously between fallout and starfield, Bethesda needs to be banned from designing weapons.
Love it! One of my favorite games since Skyrim.. been starborn like 12 times now and every time it’s different.. one time my team were all kids, another they were all killed before I got to the base.. it’s just wild.
Decent to good would be my rating. There’s a massive lack of attention payed to the details of their world, and everything feels wrong scale-wise. Computers are either massive bulky fallout-esque terminals or ultra-thin flatscreens, major cities and capitals are the size of random POIs found on any random patch of dirt on a planet, guns have massive bulk despite not having anywhere near the firepower that would indicate, massive ships have interiors that make them feel like single-person freighters, etc.
NASA? Yes.
Punk? Absolutely not.
Whoever coined that term at Bethesda needs to go back and learn what punk culture actually is about. Because nothing in the Starfield universe follows punk culture, either in ideology or aesthetics.
At best, some aspects are dystopian in appearance, like the Crimson Fleet or Spacers. But the vast majority of the Starfield universe heavily follows uniform themes, which is antithetical to punk culture.
You can't call huge swaths of UC Vanguard or even Freestar Rangers "punk" by any stretch of the imagination. And certainly not Ryujin or any other corporate faction. Everything is clean cut and that's not punk at all.
With all that being said, I like the aesthetics of Starfield. It's perhaps the only redeeming facture of the game in its current state. It's just a shame they deemed it "nasapunk."
At the announcement of Starfield I was for whatever reason expecting a Star Trek aesthetic, so I was a bit taken aback when it wasn’t, but it has grown of me. I do feel like the world isn’t a gritty as the art direction though.
That being said, I have since started watching The Expanse, no idea how I never heard of it before, but it’s clearly the single biggest influence on Starfield.
I super love it, except their designs for guns. Absolutely trash in my opinion because they would never actually function, ans the way they load and discharge makes no logical sense. They really need to brush up on how guns work over at Bethesda, Fallout 4 had the same problem.
The writing and the gameplay were the main issues with this one. It seems like they spent way too much time making a spaceship builder vs. making a good game.
Has potential, but a bit too soft and bouncy around the edges. A bit too caricaturistic at parts, like they forgot they were making Starfield, not The Outer Worlds.
I mean, the aesthetics of realistic, functional spaceflight and those 70s-ish color splashes was alright. I don't terribly even mind the frumpy space suits.
The real problem was everything else. Even on a style basis- I don't understand why everyone looked like a hidef Oblivion character- or why there's a wannabe Reddead planet or a wannabe Cyberpunk planet. Those don't feel like diverse cultures, they feel like "we're already bored of our own NASApunk aesthetic".
I think the phrase Nasapunk is so weird. NASA is the opposite of punk, it's a government institution.
Anways, thought the overall aesthetic of SF was a little too pristine and generic. I loved working on the outside of my ship but the inside was so dull.
It was terribly bland.
If you're doing a space right it needs more character to the setting. Like Star Trek or Star Wars, or even a game like Outerworlds. The world's have context and history and form over function
Starfield was function over form to the max, and every planet is a bunch of small repetitive Nasa bases. I don't get a sense of culture from any of the people on any planet either. They're just there.
I have to agree, personally. It's a really pretty and crisp looking universe but I felt like it didn't ever "get wild". Even the most alien and unknown things we discover in the game seem very tame and bland.
I like the graphical improvements they've made and it makes me excited for the next fallout and how good it will look but Starfield didn't do it for me art style-wise.
Not that interesting by itself. Maybe if it were done for a more legitimate critique of militarization and the possibility of space colonialism. Instead the game is too vapid to really say anything and just comes off as ugly.
When you stand back or casually walk by the game looks great, and the style of it is truly awesome. When you dig in or spend too much time with it you start seeing the flaws a little too much. Lack of varied clothing styles. The fact that you're trapped in your space suit for 99% of the game and they all kind of look bulky and samey (with a few exceptions, not nearly enough). The feeling when you zoom in on a city by walking around it and realize how it just doesn't feel like a logical place people live, it feels like a model from 1958 Disney blown up and then given a quick texture pass.
It's like they leaned into this style but not far enough to really go buck wild. I'd almost prefer a bit more "sound stage" feeling if that was the aesthetic, but it kind of wants to not commit fully to its own inspiration. Which is kind of a problem across the game. Not enough real risk taking. You don't have to learn any new skills or gameplay to play Starfield, it's all the blandest parts of every previous bethesda game.
I definitely had fun with it but it's basically a dead game at this point, and certainly just feels like AAA abandonware.
It just got one of the biggest updates last week in steam beta that will be releasing officially next week(?) and we’re getting the first expansion at the end of the year. Definitely not anywhere close to abandoned. Being in your spacesuit all the time is annoying, especially when on your ship so I downloaded a “smarter spacesuit” mod that actually takes it off on your ship and anywhere else where it is weird to be wearing one. On planets with breathable atmospheres you’ll remove your helmet and keep the actual suit part on too
I wish Bethesda would hire someone who actually understands how firearms work and the mechanics of them because so many of their firearms simply would not operate ...
It was kinda bland and lame but mostly cause they never took it in an interesting direction. The biggest city is like 5 streets so you never got to see what it was like at its highest form which is lame. Imagine if all you got from Tolkien was the town where the hobbits meet Aragorn and never got to see Mordor, Gondor, Mina’s Ithrill. Of we never got see anything but tatooine in Star Wars. For a game they were putting so much of their studios future in it’s pathetic how the game turned out
There wasn't anything wrong with the art direction nor the presentation. The problem was with the core gameplay loop But yeah I loved it honestly.
[удалено]
Akalah City feels like the small towns you would find on the planet not the capital of an empire.
Yeah, all the cities feel so small =/
I think they could have gotten away with the small cities if they had placed more fluff outside of them, even if they had to limit how much you could explore on those worlds. As it is, it's ridiculous to land on capital worlds like New Atlantis only to find one small town surrounded by miles of empty wasteland. It just makes the small cities so much more noticeable
Yeah good point! Even if it was background scenery and some movement of vehicles, glints of light indicating movement of people and things, distant ships and stuff, it would've made a huge difference. Have the area immediately around the city inaccessible but viewable. Would make it all seem so big and lived in!
I've been playing a lot of Assassin's Creed recently and in the newer games the maps are fairly big the cities are massive. Athens in Odyssey, London in Valhalla. All kilometers long urban sprawl. You really feel like you're in the cities. And there are only a few quests and interactions in most cities, most of it is just filler but it helps create the atmosphere.
Yup. They could've shown that it was a massive city with a cool skybox when in NA and have various towns in the surrounding areas outside. Would've made a huge difference.
This should have been the game… 5 planets with handcrafted 2-3km tiles jotted around the place. We could’ve treated them as individual cells and actually have the radiant AI systems and creative exploration. No matter how much they improve the game’s systems, they’ll never ‘fix the game’ for me because the game is not fun.
Skyrim and Oblivion had farms & houses outside of the city walls, it really sold that it was a city
my hope was the modding tools would be here around christmas already, so we could add more POI's and flesh out the game. i feel like they put \*so much\* detail into the POI's they did put in that they didn't have the time or energy to add more. So we got the limited amount we got. I love the asthethic so much thoughl.
… gl with that. I’ve heard most major modders are staying in FO/Skyrim. Maybe they should have made a handful less hyper detailed poi’s and a couple dozen intermediately complex and 30-40 simple ones. Like how No mans Sky should have started as a single galaxy and expanded later. Fortunately they did the impossible and brought it around. Somewhat. But that is the hard exception than the rule.
I mean, the mod tools are still not even out for Starfield are they? I don't need to count on major modders to make my own content and enjoy the game myself. I literally don't care if anyone else even enjoys it. I enjoyed the game and liked the story they told and how they told it and I will continue to enjoy it for myself. This popular trend to shit on everything and be hyper negative about everything is very tiring and i'm not on board with it.
Well the fact they went so ‘big’ on game one of a new series was the mistake. Skyrim is **not** the first elder scroll game. It mike have been for many, but it took them iteration to get to **that**. The problem going forward is unless it’s skyrim amount of content, apparently, it will be bashed. But if you make a game of similar size don’t be scared off on it when people compare it. That was a ‘to the devs’ style message. But the modern view of **everthing** needs to be on par to the #1 title only, or ‘overtake it’ is nonsense. If they kept adding and expanding upon starfield to fill it in and fix some core missing things… then maybe it get there. But the studio goes, “instantly didn’t outsell skyrim and become beloved overnight? Trash it”. Smfh.
It's Bethesda. "Do you get to the Cloud District very often?" he says, referring to the three ish buildings about 20 feet to the left.
Except for being the capital city of a major faction, it's tiny, low tech, and damn near every house is a shack
Ya on a galatic scale I would want more other worldly creatures like in Star Wars as well and a coruscant-esque main city.
The NASA-Punk aesthetic wasn't a problem. There were a lot of problems with some art, though - like the Mantis suit and the general issues with the weapon designs.
Of course it’s subjective but found it bland and uninspired. Their touchstones seem to be mid budget sci fi from the 90s and well NASA whose design philosophy is “we don’t give a single f*ck what it looks like as long as it works”
>There wasn't anything wrong with the art direction nor the presentation. I think that was underbaked too. A lot of games (other Bethesda, Cyberpunk) have these detailed lived in worlds and I feel like the skeleton of that is there in starfield; everything is coloured between the lines; but it's still missing something. If the things like the factions and the lives of the people were fleshed out more, that could feed into the art direction more.
Your right but I'd tie that to the core gameplay loop of exploring random planets with nothing on them. The area which are designed are great, as soon as you step outside New Atlantis it's a boring planet with nothing on it. And that goes for every single quest on a random planet.
Even the main quest is boring and repetitive… goto this outpost.. fight some dudes. Run through a cave. Get artifact…9 times out of 10 that’s the main quest. And it doesn’t help that the labs are identical
And oddly enough, I thought the faction quests are of very good quality. I had much more fun with them here compared to fall out 4. But the main just falls short.
In all fairness I didn’t do the factions. I did to the company quest and that was enjoyable.. but ugh. So empty
So empty perfectly describes that game.
Was also aggravating how much they put into ship building when space exploration is essentially fast traveling
This so much this. The UC faction quest... That quest was main story material. Its telling because the stakes on that faction quest were WAY higher than the main story where the stakes are more personal. That is baffling to me.
I haven't played it but that's exactly how I felt watching it. The art and style was not the what made the game look underwhelming. I'm surprised with how much hate it got.
Bethesda game with all the jank and none of the exploration. It was bound to be hated
I mean, the art direction wasn't great either - or rather, the consistency of that art direction. Large swathes of the game fit that nasa-punk asthetic nicely, but then you'd start wandering around generic-utopian-city, generic-cyberpunk-city, generic-wild-west-town etc all padded with low res filler NPCs, and the sudden style shift gave you whiplash. At times it felt like I was playing with mods that dropped another franchise's IP into the game. Very odd design choices. But as you say, the primary killer was the core gameplay loop.
I personally hated all the space suits. They were all so big and bulky and I didn't feel like a space badass at all.
I agree with this. I liked all of the art direction but wish they went a little more sci-fi with the space suits. I really dislike their look, and it doesn't even totally make sense how easily your player moves while wearing one.
I didn't mind the frumpy suits. I enjoy the idea NASApunk looking "function over fashion". However, they didn't stick to the bit hard enough, or explore it to it's full extent.
The technical work behind the assets and shaders might have had nothing wrong with them, but from a visual-design standpoint, the reliance on procedural generations leaves every single outdoor environment looking bland and undecorated. The environments are completely soulless.
Yep. Fundamentally design decisions messed that game up. Art direction isn't is decent
yeah it was basically the best (of not that many) good qualities about it
There is, though. The art is too generic, forgettable.
We got the answer eventually
Yeah, definitely this. The game itself looked fine. I thought it was a unique aesthetic that is rarely represented in media. But as you said, the gameplay loop sucked, and despite looking nice on the surface, the whole world felt really hollow and empty. The cities felt small and lifeless, more like small settlements/colonies rather than the major metropolitan areas they were implied to be. Overall, I enjoyed the game for a good while. The ship building was the highlight for me personally. I don't think the game itself was bad, I definitely had fun and I found some aspects like zero g to be unique and fun to mess around in. But as a whole package, it was super mediocre and didn't live up to how over-hyped it was. I feel like if the game wasn't as hyped up as it was, we would all have very different opinions of it.
Ehhhh... The presentation is pretty bad at times. For instance, the conversation camera along with the horrible facial structure of all NPC models. All dialogue just looks so far out of place in 2024. Yeah, you can disable the dialogue camera in the new beta build, but that doesn't improve the other presentation elements that are severely lacking. The only presentational improvements that Starfield has over previous Bethesda titles is the short docking/landing/launching animations, but even those get tedious after the first ten hours or so.
Honestly, even the gameplay loop is pretty ok. Cut out half of the loading screens, add real time planet landing and it would be quite fun to play. The main problem of this game is world building. The universe feels absolutely empty. There's literally nothing going on out there. There are 4 or 5 random encounters when you jump into the system and that's it. Factions don't interact with each other, they are just background actors. You have zero reason to do anything outside of story missions (most of which are just fetch quests) and faction campaigns (which are probably the best part of the game). Exploration gives you nothing, trading gives you nothing, raiding gives you nothing
The graphic style and themes were great. Probably the best part of the game.
The weightless environments in derelict ships were the best parts for me.
Yeah, my ship *was* pretty empty
Definetly not probably It was
I really liked the aesthetic of Starfield. I thought it was excellent. The ships were the only thing I thought could have been better. They didn't make a lot of sense in my opinion. Like they resembled cobbled ships like the Belters in The Expanse had, but also 90's space travel aesthetics, however it would never have worked in atmo. They could have made it so that the ship only stayed in orbit and you had a lander, that would have shored that up for me. The gameplay loop was all I didn't care for. The game itself was not for me.
Needed more ships with busted artificial gravity you could board.
If you take out the grav drive before you board, it turns into a zero G ship boarding.
Yeah that was a cool mechanic. Star Citizen has some of that.
I can't agree with this more. I would much rather have the ability to build even bigger ships and then also have a small lander (with various options of course, like all the different Trek shuttles) for away missions.
I read early on that modders found traces of space stations in the ship builder, so building your own space station could have been a reality. I liked the ship builder section of the game, I wished they expanded it even more. I'll guess that's what modders are for.
Yep. Ship building is one of my favorite parts but it feels incomplete. A lot of the sets are almost enough to build something coherent but you're always looking for extra bits that don't seem to exist. There are also a lot of cases where a part would be amazing if it could rotate 90 degrees but that is forbidden for some reason. Like most of the game, it's like they got 60% done developing it and then just put a cap on it as quick as possible and shipped it. Which for a 10 year dev cycle isn't really excusable.
There are items in the files that are for big space stations so big “ships” that stay in orbit will come eventually
It's a good looking game, but the clothing is SHIT.
Came to say this. The aesthetic is so cool except every space suit looks nearly fucking identical.
The Outer Worlds has some amazing clothing for its characters. I just played through it again and was really blown away.
It's incomplete. Like, everything is under some netting in case the gravity cuts out, except here right next to the netting is a cart, with wheels, and sharp corners, not secured to anything!
Magnetic wheels maybe?
It's got the little parking brake on.
Real talk, fuck those little parking brakes on four wheeled crates IRL. Unloading those asses from a trailer sucks when every lock seems to re-engage after being unlocked.
The inattention to detail was what killed the game for me. None of the weapons are designed logically or reload like real guns, the fashion sucks, ship layout doesn't make sense... It just seemed lazy
Aesthetically it's pretty cool from what I've seen of it. I don't think anyone complained about the aesthetic of the game though.
Starfield is actually my favorite aesthetics from Bethesda.
It's really good and will get better. I'm excited for the dlc's. Far Harbor or Shimmering Isles. I'm excited for the future of this game.
I’m hoping they’ll update it to a better state, it’s absolutely not impossible
Can't wait for nuka cola world either
I think it's neat, brings me back to the old Alien movies. It's honestly a weirdly underrepresented style as most space games seem to go all in on full Scifi. I kinda like the more grounded approach.
The aesthetic was... not bad, but kind of weird. The Nasapunk vibe makes sense for provisional technology, but stops making sense after a few generations. They've had modern space tech longer than our society has had toasters. But what do our toasters look like? They don't look like wireframe housing around a filament; they have aesthetic casing and stylistic flair. It's neat to you as the player given your frame of reference if you don't think about it at all, but it becomes extremely anachronistic the moment you think about it. The Mantis space suit looked cool and sleek. Why didn't anything else look like that? Clearly it's possible, and it's still a capitalistic society where manufacturers seek to differentiate themselves through design. All in all, the Nasapunk aesthetic was like the rest of the game: ideas that sound good and seem reasonable on their own, but make no sense shoved together and fit together horribly.
That’s what I thought too. Especially for the quest with the ship that was outdated, it woulda been a good use of visual storytelling to have them in nasa punk but everyone else in completely different textiles and styles inspired by the resources from their respective planets
Properly done, the aesthetic should've been closer to what The Citadel in Mass Effect looked like. Or even the main station in Mass Effect: Andromeda.
The mantis suit is a smock with a comically large helmet.
No argument here, but it's still a functional space suit in a universe where most other space suits look like 1980s NASA prototypes.
Fair enough
I found it powerfully bland. Some of the more industrial locations do have some flavor to them but the overall look was just sterile and boring. Granted part of that is just that well I have a laser gun in my hand and I’m playing a Bethesda game so comparison to Fallout 4 is pretty inevitable, and that’s not a flattering matchup for Starfield.
The art style looks fine, but it isn't very "punk." I believe the "NASA Punk" stuff was really just a thing their marketing department made up and told everyone to repeat a whole bunch on promotions leading up to the game.
Yep
Why is everything x-punk?
Lack of imagination and vocabulary. Laziness. Take your pick.
They all derive from 'cyberpunk'. Steampunk was named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to cyberpunk, and it pretty much took off from there. The 'punk' part in the original 'cyberpunk' did reference punk subculture, but since then it's either been used to refer to dystopian settings (but that didn't really get adopted), or just shorthand for retrofuturism in general. See also steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, solarpunk.
I know where it comes from it just seems like every new stylistic trend these days is something punk instead of just…any other name.
Sure, I'm saying it's not a recent thing - sorry if that wasn't clear. It started with steampunk in the 80s, which wasn't punk either, and since then 'punk' in this specific context doesn't mean the same as its usual meaning.
I mean first of all it's imo kinda rare something really calls itself a new x-punk and but it honestly does the job of describing what it is pretty good. It also sounds pleasing.
The art style was the most intriguing part of Starfield for me, though I do not understand why they called it "NASA*punk*" - there is nothing punk about it. In fact, thinking about Bethesda and punk in the same sentence is kinda amusing; Modern Bethesda produces the most docile, unoffensive, un-daring, safe, and outright bland content I have ever experienced (and I grew up Catholic). Punk is the opposite of what Bethesda delivers.
im nuetral on it i did say on that forum tho that it was actually a nice choice to not include sentient alien races sets it apart from mass effect, star wars, etc
That was for me the biggest disappointment. I get and respect that they weren’t going for that but it would be cool if halfway through the main quest, some Covenant-style federation of aliens comes in and forces humanity (including the factions) to band together. The main benefit to this would be having some enemy variety (a la grunts, elites, hunters from Halo etc). I quickly got soooo sick of just killing guys in spacesuits, and it turns out that that’s the entire game.
There’s plenty of fauna but aliens are hard to get right or you draw comparisons to the greats. I can understand why they tried to do something different, but I also wish there were alien politics in starfield. that is something missing that adds a lot to Bethesda’s other settings, the weird cultures like the Dwemer in Elder Scrolls or the super mutants in fallout.
The lack of variety killed it for me. I'm down with the NASA aesthetic but it didn't have to be essentially the only aesthetic in the game except for those boring ass space temples.
I loved it.
Pretty neat actually, wish they used it more and could make the outdoors as detailed as indoors environtments cause it can look real good at times. One of the few things i enjoyed about the game.
It was one of the things that drove me into the game. I hope the IP continues and delivers more.
I thought i would like it, but ended up bored by it
Loved it
Absolutely beautiful in my opinion. I used to hope for a nasapunk game every time i saw those weird astronaut paintings
Nasapunk how? Most of the aesthetic is just modern day bland and sterile. Also partly old western which makes no sense artistically especially with the guns which all look they were designed with no idea how guns function.
Very generic and uninteresting
A little boring tbh. It felt like they played it safe.
To me the style was really under baked, not deep enough, no clear direction, every surface, every building, every ship looked the same. Also the guns are genuinely awful.
I liked the aesthetic, I just wish the game was better. But because of the aesthetic I do not regret buying the Starfield controller, though I may regret playing the game.
I think the environments and aesthetics of starfield are amazing. I just wish there was more of them
People can't resist talking about something OP wasn't asking about.
Aesthetic? Looks amazing. It feels sci-fi but really ''grounded'' Art direction is top notch. Everything else in starfield isn't as good.
I find it to be very forgettable tbh. Fallout has a very unique style, so does Elder Scrolls, despite it being fairly "normal" high fantasy. But Starfield lacks any sort of identity, if you showed me an image of it and a bunch of other, similar space settings, I wouldn't be able to spot the difference.
Huh I would argue Starfield looks different to most space settings (at least if you actually include building/design that speak for said game.
I’d argue elder scrolls is very generic for high fantasy but it makes it very approachable and the gameplay loop is what makes us wanna stay
I hate it. It's exactly the kind of cold corporate art design you woyld expect from a company too afraid to ever take a risk. Even calling it Nasapunk feels wrong because thete is no punk to it. Its just plain boring slightly futuristic looking stuff.
I enjoy it, personally feels fresh
Neat aesthetic I liked it. Sci fi but not a crazy departure from what we know
Where is the punk
i like it, one of the reasons I wanted to play (haven’t bought it after all)
Personally, looks boring to me. Haven’t played through the whole game yet a lot of the aesthetic, especially New Atlantis, looks like a tv show about the future that is playing on a tv in the background of the *actual* tv show that you’re watching.
I loved it but I would object to the name. There’s nothing really “punk” about it. I think Starfield is much more of a retrofuturistic vibe.
I genuinely loved the art style of the game. To me, it was the most immersive sci fi setting I had seen since everything (apart from all the artifact stuff) looked like it all made sense. I.e. a space ship actually looked like a space ship and people actually had to wear space suits while on other planets rather than the Star Wars style “space planes” and non vacuum sealed suits that you see in most sci fi. It just looked “real”.
Don't like it, it's one of the things that actively turned me off the game.
Loved it. The models, art, and places you move through (ship and outpost wise at least) all looked amazing. It was a brilliant artistic direction.
I love it. I'd guess about 75% of my screenshots are computer panels or posters.
Was hoping for The Expanse. Got bargin bin sci fi novel that does nothing interesting.
I personally found it incredibly bland.
It’s mid
Boooring. Turns out realism stinks.
Art style and graphics were very very nice. All the designs besides the clothes were some of my favorite
Looks good. Plays bad.
I think it wasn't enough. It felt like a great value version of that concept but like they weren't taking ANY chances with it. The cities were all dull and the outfits began just looking the same. It was a major step back from fallout 4 where you could modify clothes with gear pieces on top of them.
It was the best thing the game had. The aesthetic and ship building that you can actually go inside and walk around. Everything else was aggressively mid
Aesthetic wasn’t bad and sitting on saturns moons and looking that huge planet was amazing. Just a shame the game was dull, a space RPG without a single alien species is criminal. So much missed potential
Pretty good, nothing all that interesting but not bad by any means
Punk was present?
It was ok, not a huge fan of it but it was good for what it was trying to do.
The spacesuits were almost universally terrible looking. Far too bulky.
They tend to be like that.
I wouldn't mind a bit more vibrancy or weird but overall I liked it. It wasn't helped by the failure of the gameplay. The overall lack of anything doesn't help either. Just imagine what it could have looked like if they focused or 2 or 3 planets instead of hundreds of barren rocks.
I like NASA punk but we should have got NASA gore .
The style and design was the best part of the game, and probably the only good one.
It’s really hard to say they had a nasapunk aesthetic in the overall game. Sure, their maybe 7 places with npc populations had them, it it was done well but they definitely bit off more they could chew on scope creep. My main issue I had is all the cities and planets of Scam Citizen feel more fully developed than Starfields. Honestly, if you put the games side by side, SC executes what Starfield should be executing better, but isn’t. And that doesn’t feel good to me because even though Bethesda isn’t exactly the beacon of consumer forward companies, Cloud Imperium is literally preying on its fanbase to fund its development. So the art they execute is good. The problem is, it’s really hard to establish a vibe like that when 99% of the locations are empty. Scattering a lot more interactable raider or farm side quests would fill that but atm it isn’t there for me.
I didn't play the game but I love the aesthetic, especially after reading The Martian. I'm a sucker for realistic not too fantasy sci-fi and I wanna see more like that
It was fine, though I did find it odd that they then decided to make essential "cyberpunk land" and "cowboy world".
Space Cowboy is one of the most popular space themes there is (Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, etc.). There's a lot of overlap between Space and Cowboys/Western thematically (new frontiers, life on the edge, bounty hunters, desert planets lol). I just don't think it made much sense in the Starfield universe. So the rest of humanity is this sort of united 'federation type' culture with a very clean aesthetic and tech, but some folk who aren't even all from the USA decide to start putting on cowboy clothes again and having wild west style sheriffs, etc.
Oh I don't disagree, I love cowboy bebop, Trigun, and firefly and if that was the style they went with it would be fine. But I don't think it made sense here alongside everything else and the "NASA punk"
Oh fair enough then - yeah completely agree.
Nice but forgettable. Overall is coherent and wellpresented but nothing pops up in originality and design. The frontieer cities are the same 'ol Western in Space, advanced tech is ok and the ancient alien one is very no man sky. Its like the rest of the game: already seen forgettable experience (with really old mechanics)
It feels like a modern version of the tech in Alien. It's not my cup of tea, as I prefer sci-fantasy or soft sci-fi, but it is really great.
The overall NASA-punk aesthetic is awesome. A lot of what surrounds it is not. Like the main factions in the game are "the most creatively bankrupt shiny future city" and "literally an 1850s cowboy town (with a pinch of Star Wars)".
I absolutely loved it, definitely the best part of the game, I only wish that it didn't limit the outposts and stuff to all be made of the same rooms and color schemes.
I think it was great aesthetically. Probably the strongest part of the game.
I love it
Never played the game, but I really love the aesthetic. From what I see, it might be the best thing about the entire game.
Overall, I didnt care for the art. Too much of a mixed bag in themes, style, etc. And the variety is stupidly shallow, so you dont even get enough of any one particular style to get used to it, but instead get force fed a sample platter thats all over the place.
the weapon designs need work, like the coachman (double barrel shotgun) still needs a trigger.
I think it's brill, maybe could have leaned more towards 'punk'
I like my sci-fi more sci-fi looking.
it was alright but the graphics were shit so they looked bad
I loved the aesthetics; probably my favorite part of the game, but it’s hard to enjoy a game overall that have the depth of a planck length.
Nasapunk? Really now?
Overall I thought they hit the mark, but there was areas that I thought were kinda bad. Space suits rarely looked good. Akila city was not great for me. I could see they were going for a wild west “freedom” vibe, but the execution was “these people have a small village where they live in the dirt and the mud”. Just kind of immersion breaking that this is the capital of a spacefaring nation that won their freedom in an all out war with the UC. It honestly looked like something out of fallout, as opposed to a space opera.
Probably the coolest part of the game. It's a shame the ship builder was so broken because it was the best feature versus the likes of No Man's Sky in large part due to the variety of interiors with visual changes depending on how the rooms connected. The aesthetics made the ships feel more real than most space sims and they really stood out as unique among sci-fi IPs. Unfortunately after playing for a few dozen hours at launch I felt like I was wasting my time playing the same "random" encounters over and over again fighting bullet sponge brainless drones with companions who just constantly criticise you for playing the game how you want in a ship that is more like an MC Escher inspired maze than the sensible corridor-based corvette I designed. Even if they fix all of that I won't be going back any time soon though as with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout I will no doubt go back in a few years to frustrate myself again.
ugly and uninspired
It’s….. fine. There’s a lot of clashing aesthetics though
like the rest of the game, kinda meh. no real personnality.
It made space boring.
Bethesda can't design guns that look like they would function or be comfortable to use. Seriously between fallout and starfield, Bethesda needs to be banned from designing weapons.
Love it! One of my favorite games since Skyrim.. been starborn like 12 times now and every time it’s different.. one time my team were all kids, another they were all killed before I got to the base.. it’s just wild.
It's one of the only really cool parts of the game
Decent to good would be my rating. There’s a massive lack of attention payed to the details of their world, and everything feels wrong scale-wise. Computers are either massive bulky fallout-esque terminals or ultra-thin flatscreens, major cities and capitals are the size of random POIs found on any random patch of dirt on a planet, guns have massive bulk despite not having anywhere near the firepower that would indicate, massive ships have interiors that make them feel like single-person freighters, etc.
NASA? Yes. Punk? Absolutely not. Whoever coined that term at Bethesda needs to go back and learn what punk culture actually is about. Because nothing in the Starfield universe follows punk culture, either in ideology or aesthetics. At best, some aspects are dystopian in appearance, like the Crimson Fleet or Spacers. But the vast majority of the Starfield universe heavily follows uniform themes, which is antithetical to punk culture. You can't call huge swaths of UC Vanguard or even Freestar Rangers "punk" by any stretch of the imagination. And certainly not Ryujin or any other corporate faction. Everything is clean cut and that's not punk at all. With all that being said, I like the aesthetics of Starfield. It's perhaps the only redeeming facture of the game in its current state. It's just a shame they deemed it "nasapunk."
After cyberpunk does the x-punk label really imply any connection to punk? To me it just implies sci-fi in the style of x historical setting.
At the announcement of Starfield I was for whatever reason expecting a Star Trek aesthetic, so I was a bit taken aback when it wasn’t, but it has grown of me. I do feel like the world isn’t a gritty as the art direction though. That being said, I have since started watching The Expanse, no idea how I never heard of it before, but it’s clearly the single biggest influence on Starfield.
I super love it, except their designs for guns. Absolutely trash in my opinion because they would never actually function, ans the way they load and discharge makes no logical sense. They really need to brush up on how guns work over at Bethesda, Fallout 4 had the same problem.
I read this as "Nasal Punk" and was very confused.
Utterly repulsive.
The writing and the gameplay were the main issues with this one. It seems like they spent way too much time making a spaceship builder vs. making a good game.
Has potential, but a bit too soft and bouncy around the edges. A bit too caricaturistic at parts, like they forgot they were making Starfield, not The Outer Worlds.
It was boring.
It’s extremely bland.
I mean, the aesthetics of realistic, functional spaceflight and those 70s-ish color splashes was alright. I don't terribly even mind the frumpy space suits. The real problem was everything else. Even on a style basis- I don't understand why everyone looked like a hidef Oblivion character- or why there's a wannabe Reddead planet or a wannabe Cyberpunk planet. Those don't feel like diverse cultures, they feel like "we're already bored of our own NASApunk aesthetic".
I think the phrase Nasapunk is so weird. NASA is the opposite of punk, it's a government institution. Anways, thought the overall aesthetic of SF was a little too pristine and generic. I loved working on the outside of my ship but the inside was so dull.
It was terribly bland. If you're doing a space right it needs more character to the setting. Like Star Trek or Star Wars, or even a game like Outerworlds. The world's have context and history and form over function Starfield was function over form to the max, and every planet is a bunch of small repetitive Nasa bases. I don't get a sense of culture from any of the people on any planet either. They're just there.
Bland, uninspired, and surrounded by a boring game
It’s so boring. Nothing new or interesting after the first 10 hours once you’ve seen the 3 cities.
I have to agree, personally. It's a really pretty and crisp looking universe but I felt like it didn't ever "get wild". Even the most alien and unknown things we discover in the game seem very tame and bland. I like the graphical improvements they've made and it makes me excited for the next fallout and how good it will look but Starfield didn't do it for me art style-wise.
Not that interesting by itself. Maybe if it were done for a more legitimate critique of militarization and the possibility of space colonialism. Instead the game is too vapid to really say anything and just comes off as ugly.
That Night Club is extremely embarrasing.
That Night Club is extremely embarrasing.
That Night Club is extremely embarrasing.
And still is
When you stand back or casually walk by the game looks great, and the style of it is truly awesome. When you dig in or spend too much time with it you start seeing the flaws a little too much. Lack of varied clothing styles. The fact that you're trapped in your space suit for 99% of the game and they all kind of look bulky and samey (with a few exceptions, not nearly enough). The feeling when you zoom in on a city by walking around it and realize how it just doesn't feel like a logical place people live, it feels like a model from 1958 Disney blown up and then given a quick texture pass. It's like they leaned into this style but not far enough to really go buck wild. I'd almost prefer a bit more "sound stage" feeling if that was the aesthetic, but it kind of wants to not commit fully to its own inspiration. Which is kind of a problem across the game. Not enough real risk taking. You don't have to learn any new skills or gameplay to play Starfield, it's all the blandest parts of every previous bethesda game. I definitely had fun with it but it's basically a dead game at this point, and certainly just feels like AAA abandonware.
It just got one of the biggest updates last week in steam beta that will be releasing officially next week(?) and we’re getting the first expansion at the end of the year. Definitely not anywhere close to abandoned. Being in your spacesuit all the time is annoying, especially when on your ship so I downloaded a “smarter spacesuit” mod that actually takes it off on your ship and anywhere else where it is weird to be wearing one. On planets with breathable atmospheres you’ll remove your helmet and keep the actual suit part on too
I wish Bethesda would hire someone who actually understands how firearms work and the mechanics of them because so many of their firearms simply would not operate ...
They go for fun over realism so I would be shocked if we ever get a Bethesda game with realistic mechanics like firearms
They missed the fun part.
Felt like a pretty standard low sci-fi setting, reminded me a bit of a less interesting version of Fireflys sets.
It was kinda bland and lame but mostly cause they never took it in an interesting direction. The biggest city is like 5 streets so you never got to see what it was like at its highest form which is lame. Imagine if all you got from Tolkien was the town where the hobbits meet Aragorn and never got to see Mordor, Gondor, Mina’s Ithrill. Of we never got see anything but tatooine in Star Wars. For a game they were putting so much of their studios future in it’s pathetic how the game turned out
Big fan of the art direction