this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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"NASApunk" as a proposed big faddish next new aesthetic sounds bleak to me, not least of all because of how much of that has already been appropriated by
cultists as it is.
In a way I kind of hope Starfield is only as popular as it deserves to be, flaws and all, and doesn't cause ten years of imitations.
give me sovietwave please its so much better than the cringe this word elicits
Sovietwave would have some seriously awesome-trippy colorful art, too.
Neat music as well. Bethesda never has the balls to make a communist faction
Also the idea of just having another "capitalism in space simulator" is annoying. Let me be a soviet partisan.
smh the woke agenda censoring my leftism again smh
It's downright bleak to me that 99% of video games with space civilizations are focused on mercantilism in space or exploited truckers in space or some kind of predatory capitalist dystopia in space.
I just want me some fully automated luxury gay space communism, not fucking blade runner with spaceships.
They really saw the cyberpunk dystopias of the 80s and went: woah thats so cool, we should have that in everything now unironically
I used to be a massive cyberpunk genre enjoyer but I am getting really sick and tired of the horny-but-ideologically-vapid version of it that drops the punk and inflates the cyber and is loaded with enlightened centrist bullshit.
Because the ruling class likes that version, it's the dominant version.
I've never bothered with The Expanse because it's just people being shitty to each other the same way they are now, but even more horrific because now they can bombard cities with asteroids.
Same.
I tried watching the show, and as soon as it went to its first standard issue dae le very mature prestige tv torture scene, I noped out.
Where's my Culture VNs?
This game fucking shits me. The three main factions are technocratic capitalism and Libertarian petty bourgeois capitalism and hyper libertarian cyberpunk corp capitalism.
Theres a small faction of yeoman farmers but thats as close as you get
There's a fucking town called Gagarin Landing that's currently being literally midgar'd by a corp and there's a literal statue of Gagarin and still, still, they couldn't commit to some socialism.
I kinda don't mind the aesthetic. It's better than all things being
and will be hard for the awooga people to mod without completely and totally breaking the aesthetic. The effort that will be necessary for clothing mods in this game is going to be very high because there's pipes and shit hanging off them in all directions. It's not an easy art style to mod for.
I actually think that's partly why it won't catch on. It's a hard aesthetic to do and everything in the industry is about streamlining your asset creation. That and doing it in an optimised way is just not possible, and I don't think any other companies like putting out things that perform this poorly.
The factions seem uninspired right now and after a few hours I have absolutely zero emotional investment in literally anything at all. It's a run, kill, loot, gameplay loop with so far absolutely no emotionally interesting anything, the space stuff only brings to the table disjointed fast travel and terrible space fighting. Oh and since it's not Fallout the one thing that makes up for Bethesda's terrible shooting the VATS system isn't here, so you just have Bethesda's terrible shooting with no redeeming features.
If it can't emotionally invest the player in any of its universe building then it's just going to leave people feeling like the aesthetic itself is the problem, when in reality the problem is most likely that Bethesda has no creative talent left at all and can only rehash rather than create anything new.
I can't stress enough how disjointed it feels travelling between planet ground, your ship interior(loading screen), your ship seat, takeoff loading screen, go into menu, find place you want to go, fast travel (loading screen) to place, watch cut scene of your ship flying from A to B, look at planet you're now orbiting, go into menu, select planet, select landing site, watch cut scene of you landing(loading screen), get out of chair, walk to door of ship, loading screen, get on ground of new planet.
All of this should be seamless by now it's SOOOOO disjointed and feels really bad.
Oh I also think my computer would probably run Star Citizen with more frames. So there's that too. Not that I want to but it's a serious mark against it.
You got me there. I concede that it's a plus that it isn't yet another grimy "mature" quasi-medieval backdrop or another edgy/horny tech-neon setting with a lot of cyber and very little punk.
After reading the rest of your post, sounds like grimy "mature" quasi-medieval backdrops and/or edgy/horny tech-neon settings with a lot of cyber and very little punk are likely not going to get changed out with "AAA" game development for the forseeable future.
lol that sounds amazingly awful
Yeah, agreed. That said as annoyed as I am with constant horniness I'd have liked at least some feminine clothes.
I've been to every shop in every major city and I've found 1 dress and two shapeless tunics out of close to 100 variants.
The entire industry has overcompensated for sexualisation by removing ALL femininity from games and it fucking sucks. It's relatively nice that feminists have successfully influenced large parts of the industry but they went much too far the other way.
Yeah. BG3 was better but not by much. (Why can't I wear the pointy sleeved medieval dress the pregant lady in the hag den has?! No it isn't practical, but I'm a bard so that ship has sailed. I want to ride sidesaddle on a white horse playing the Ballad of Enemy Explodes while my companions roll their eyes at me!)
I don't think it's the fault of feminism more than a lot of male designers having no clue about what femininity in design even is beyond "makes me horny".
Starfield though seems to really commit to the "no pretty things ever" bit. Do they not realise that if ordinary people go to space there will be lace on spacesuits before the week is out?
Yes don't get me wrong here. I am not blaming feminism for the problem. I am blaming developers for overcompensating and out of fear they're just removing everything that could be considered high levels of femininity from games entirely.
I'm on the side of the fence that actually doesn't care about sexualisation if you do it right either. If you're going to do sexualisation to women and do it in equal amounts to the male characters I am completely fine with it. The japanese developers seem to get this right in some games, although they tend to have different cultural problems.
New World committed to this too and I hated it.
Sequens and sticker bling jewels.
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I think one of the bigger issues with their fear of this content is that they're also completely averse to having anything about it in their games too. Questline with a staff team on a remote facility where the women are treated as a lower stratum? They wouldn't make this because they're afraid of it. Questline involving space sexworkers? Which would ONE HUNDRED PERCENT be a major issue in most of the cities present in these games? They're afraid of it.
The worldbuilding that they are doing suffers because they are ideologically afraid of approaching it properly. They end up with bland worlds because they're afraid of touching anything that might have an edge, anything that might upset certain groups of people, what they're creating ends up being like unseasoned food. Sure it's edible but it's lacking a lot of human elements created by the problems and contradictions of societies. They don't want to include "marginalised" topics, whether it's women or race or lgbt, all those topics are white washed away and don't exist in futureverse, it would be almost utopian if it weren't also full of pirates and megacorps waging private warfare, but at the same time even the evils of the megacorps don't really feel real because the FIRST thing corporations would do is find marginalised people they can hyper-exploit.
Caveat: I have not played enough quests to guarantee that none of this is in the game yet. But it is my impression so far.
The space suits are so dull! No decals, no graffiti, no color. Uft.
Lol my buddy is probably wearing the same dress. I didn't realize it was the only one.
The TES modding community will figure it out. You really can't sell them short.
I've been hanging around the edges of hte TES modding scene for twenty years now. They will have skin-tight space suits within 8 hours of the GECK dropping. Space bikinis in maybe 8.25.
TES clothing models are vastly more simple than these models. I suspect simple clothing will be made but really detailed high quality stuff that meets the requirements to fit into the aesthetic will be rare.
Oh absolutely this will happen the fastest. In particular because it's the simplest content to make. Very few polygons are needed in a bikini.
If I had any chops on the 3d side of things what I'd do is go steal Cyberpunk 2077's models. 90% of them won't fit in but a couple will work.
Honestly I think modding will focus most around regular clothing rather than armour, space suits and helmets because those things are way harder to make and the standard in game is pretty high, with clutter detail all over the outfits that are a bit beyond non-professional work in my opinion. We'll see though. Regular clothing on the other hand anyone can learn to make especially as it all already exists.
I really think you're underestimating the mod community. The clothes have gotten more complicated but the tools have gotten more sophisticated. And these are deeply weird people who dump massive amounts of time in to their hobby. And a good number of them are professionals, or as good as... Or, you know, better, since it's Bethesda.
Oh yeah and they will definitely rip every asset that isn't nailed down and has even remotely similar fidelity. I can't wait to run around as Doomguy or something, if I decide to get the game at some point.
The game seems to literally look bleak and washed out as well, every screenshot or video clip is colorless as hell.
It's more mature or whatever but yeah to me it's dull and lazy with excuses.
Who coined βNASApunkβ? I need to know so I can shout at them until Iβm blue in the face itβs so stupid.
Iβm tired of people just abusing language and just smashing words they donβt understand together to make a shorter words that are even more incomprehensible.
When people use βpunkβ in this way they prove they only understand it as an aesthetic and not itβs ideology whatsoever.
Or fuck it maybe Iβll just give in. Everyone knows there is nothing more punk than a literal government agency.
When people say that it's also an excuse for it to get less informative and more deceptive sometimes.
If NASApunk was actually like 1960s retro-futurist with a hard realism aesthetic, sort of like what Alien did with it's space truckers aesthetic, that'd at least be something. This is just nothing. Everything is incredibly sterile. There's nothing about it that defines a product, that tells a story, that says anything. I hated how Beth's Fallout leaned hard in to the 1950s aesthetic despite that not really being a thing in Interplay's Fallout games, but at least it's a look. TES is full of distinctive elements that set it apart from other fantasy worlds. This has nothing.
The whole NASApunk thing is so funny. First off, it's the epitome of the modern corporate cyberpunk trend. So we have this trend of adding -punk to aesthetic styles without even thinking about punk. Then we have the trend of soulless companies unironically trying to produce cyberpunk content. So Bethesda is trying to create its own punk style that has zero punk. Very bizarre but also very expected.
So let's ignore this ridiculous "NASApunk" misnomer and just look at it as NASA aesthetics in science fiction. Well, we already have that in the form of retrofuturistic art from the 60s to 80s - oftentimes commissioned or made by NASA. If you want something to look like NASA, you paint it white with some black detailing. That is the classic NASA aesthetic. If you're borrowing from this period of NASA-inspired futurism, then your world should have rotating space habitats, moon bases, mass drivers, big spaceplanes, space-based solar, and obviously ROCKETS!! But from what I've seen so far, Starfield takes very little from these aesthetics. "NASApunk" is just bulky spacesuits and spaceships that aren't pristine transposed onto a generic scifi world where capitalism exists in the 24th century, there's dogfighting in outer space, and FTL and artificial gravity is trivial.
If you want to see SpacePunk that actually has some Punk in it check out the Indy warships in the 15 minute long FMV intro to 1998s Independence War/I-War
One of my favorite pieces of short-for Sci Fi even 25 years later
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij0NlMVd4Mw
This is the best quality I could find. It's an old game.
It's so fucking cool, though. It's a sim. Your ship, and every other ship because there's only two classes of warship iirc, all behave the same way. So you have to be a mean tricky SOB to win fights. You've got two particle cannons, missiles, and shields. You've got scanners. And you've got your repair teams. And that's it. That's your tool kit. Figure it out. Everything that happens in the FMV, including iirc handling FTL travel yourself, happens in game.
And the shape of the ships isn't arbitrary. Their shields and power systems are generated by a large ring, so the destroyers are flat pancakes with two wings to act as spars for the weapons, a huge cowling for shaping the engine exhaust, and a tiny command pod nailed to the front. They came up with a reason behind their spaceships so there's some in world justification for the cool ship. And they're really just an iconic look, very distinctive with their flat, aggressive profile and huge flaring engine cowling.
Did I mention it has Newtonian physics? IT HAS NEWTONIAN PHYSICS! Yeah, it's simplified, but you can fly in one direction, flip your nose around, and shoot at ships following you, or whatever other silly Newtonian Drift stuff you want to do.
Sounds pretty cool! Thanks for sharing