this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I'm doing all the main and side missions while ignoring radiant or filler stuff and it fuckin' sucks. I played Fallout 4, which I consider mediocre at best, the same way and remember having a MUCH better time. Starfield is so utterly boring that I'm actually kind of fascinated by it. It's immediately obvious the first time you set foot on an "unexplored" planet that the entire allure of Bethesda games since at least Oblivion has been abandoned. There is no intricately designed open world here, just copy-pasted garbage.
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren't both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
But as it is the two factions are "the fascists from Starship Troopers" and "the Confederacy but it's constituent parts are feudal corpo-states" and they're both stagnating and rotting away and being chipped away at by petty warlords in a universe where the literal only hope is that maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology and they successfully wipe out all the fascists and ancaps, but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is. And the Bethesda execs and a terrifying chunk of their fans think it's a good, aspirational setting full of hope.
I think the real problem is that they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic, when the two are clearly mismatched. The FC makes sense if the grav drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
:todd: had to remove any content involving House Varuun so that it could be made into a $30 DLC later.
Having watched a bunch of Bethesda game analysis essays, this is a problem that is consistent with their writers. Bethesda doesn't really seem to understand time spans.
Aside from the obvious issue of Fallout 3 where 200 years later everything is still a wasteland and unlooted, the same problem is present in Skyrim. For instance, Esbern, one of the last remnants of the Blades, somehow manages to live in hiding for 25 years in a sewer, without any way to earn money and buy food, and while avoiding detection.
The Thieves Guild questline is also made substantially worse by a 25 year gap in the backstory.
Like DAMN Karliah, you were working on this revenge plan for 25 years and this is all you have? A stupid mead business scheme and one single dose of the poison everything hinges on?
Of course, the fact that the writers keep patting themselves on the back by having every other character comment on how genius her plan is doesn't help
If you're interested in something fun, there's an old blog post about how terrible the Thieves Guild questline is:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422
It's a bit long, but I think it's very entertaining. Deep dive into every single plot hole, and nonsensical story beat.
Lmao I haven't read Shamus Young in forever
I'm imagining a setting where Starfield's early designers made that same typo and just rolled with it instead of admitting their mistake to tod, and how much more interesting of a setting it would be if their FTL tech was some weird necromantic bullshit.
Lol, woops. But hey, space magic is already in the game, so why not?
I'm glad I'm not the only one that picked up on that. In that "making of" video, Bethesda made a huge deal about wanting to capture "the wonder of space flight and exploration", but at the same time having space travel be routine. It'd be like getting excited by driving down the highway.
Capitalist realism ideology requires there to be no future possible without capitalism dominating everything.
They could have also have gone for squabbling Space Anarchists vs Space MLs and had both parties come off somewhat synpathetic against the corpo city states. Genuinely angry that the planet named Gagarin is a fucking company town.
Not holding out much hope for Space Iran.
All of that "transhumanist" "futurology" euphoria about humanity leaving the cradle and spreading to the stars and overcoming death and so on and they're absolutely fucking terrified of even the possibility of capitalism ending... or trans people existing. Or black people being in their neighborhoods.
My favorite bit is what Sseth's review pointed out: you can literally kill the last practicing Jew in the universe as a side effect of choosing the "evil" choice in the resort planet quest. One of the unfrozen colonists has kept up all the rabbinical traditions and is implied to be the last living example of his religion in a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn't serve corporate interests. What the Austrian painter started, Todd will make you finish
Holy fuck... How the? What the what?
You WILL carry out Todd's final solution
The thought that had to go into this detail... That's fucking intentional, it has to be, right?
Considering they bullied a transwoman into quitting the company maybe
That was ZOS, a different company/studio under Zenimax, which has its own unique sort of awful to it. It's the studio/company behind ESO, which is the cash cow subsidizing Bethesda in general.
Zenimax is a shell corporation built out around Bethesda Softworks (publishing arm) not the other way around
Oh, I'm even more happy that I pirated now. Fuck Bethesda, all my homies hate Todd Howard.
Check it out here in her own words https://youtu.be/6kglNioOuK8?si=E2Q9sZnVnL1BM9VH
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
zero historical materialism mfs
How is this a background tidbit and not the actual plot of the game?
Well this is Bethesda so the game had to be about you becoming the ~~dragonborn~~ starborn and learning the ~~dragon shouts~~ star powers.
You left out the (CW: lazy ending)
spoiler
wholesome chungus multiverse cliche!Isn't that what happened in Firefly
You're probably right that's where they got it from, though I think it's kept deliberately vague there because they didn't care about the war itself and it was just a way to justify it being a western in space.
Perhaps part of it is that the writers at Bethesda thought they had to provide sufficient backstory because players would be interested. The colony war in Starfield is supposedly a peer-to-peer war of two stellar nations started over the dumbest shit imaginable: there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems. Also the cowboys won.
That's honestly a very funny way to justify why there are only 6 cities in the game when humanity has supposedly explored like 200+ systems (many of which are habitable). Like its not that we are lazy or went way overboard with the procedurally generated planets, it's becuase of space law.
There is exactly 1 other non-procedural inhabited planet that I have found so far, and it's fucking Paradiso, a beach resort that occupies, if I had to guess, less than 20km^2^, and with no security.
Also every fucking planet has some human habitation, so despite a pitiful zone of control you're never actually out beyond the frontier, you're never exploring.
Yeah but a) space confederates got curbstomped because they attempted regular warfare. b) There is clearly at least a couple of well established major metropolitan planets in the outer planets, they're just not all fascist star trek.