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.
Tangentially, I consider NASA to be an integral part of the US Military Industrial Complex and I find the English-speaking left’s somewhat uncritical embrace of it to be strange.
I mean, I get it. NASA is civilian and much of its work is exploratory and non-military, but let’s not pretend against all evidence that all of its discoveries are being fed directly into missile development or dual use shit like GPS.
I think we should be at least as critical of NASA as Boston Robotics or any of the other MIC adjacent companies who do civilian work but with extremely obvious military applications.
NASA’s public image is so cool and wholesome. Pictures of entire rooms of engineers erupting in cheers when their ship successfully soft-lands on a distant world and it’s telemetry comes back green across the board. Smiling astronauts in their iconic space suits fussing with robot arms and deploying satellites. As long as you never think about how the space shuttle’s entire design was dictated by demands that it be able to deploy nuclear weapons it seems like a great institution.
NASA is just as bad as any other US institution. The reason it’s funding has been cut so drastically is that it isn’t needed for PR against the Soviets anymore, and because weaponizing space is mostly handled by other agencies.
My answer is: People like Star Trek, and want a thing like that IRL.
Except if it’s Americans exploring the stars, every colony will be established by biowarfare against the natives and then populated by involuntary transfer of slaves and indentured servants so… yeah…