This is a universe with faster than light travel and near infinite resources. There’s a homeless shelter in one of the major cities. I helped them out. Why the fuck is there a homeless shelter in a universe with FTL and near infinite resources?
I’m starting to think Fallout under Bethesda isn’t a satire and their writers are just incapable of imagining anything beyond capitalism.
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incapable of imagining anything beyond capitalism
you just described about 98% of Americans. And probably Europeans. I won’t speak for the rest of the world but it’s probably still not great.
That’s my most sci-fi is uninteresting to me. The authors often just come up with some Times Square looking moon cities with billboards in space.
Some can manage to be Philip K. Dick and then most end up Orwell.
That’s why you gotta get on the star trek train and enjoy fully-automated luxury gay space communism
outer worlds was a pretty poor satire of capitalism. starfield doesn’t even notice the capitalism swirling around it.
The setting is bleak and dystopian as hell, and doesn’t do nearly enough to justify itself nor does it treat anything with the gravity that it deserves. The UC is a fascist dictatorship ruled by a technocratic military industrial complex, with liberal tolerance and socdem welfare and this is just uncritically presented in a neutral or even positive light, while the FC is just straight up a federation of corporate dictatorships with settler colonialist characteristics and it’s just all smiles and folksy self-reliance with a few asides about “those darn corrupt business dictators sure are self-serving huh” that don’t really have any consequences.
And the thing is I’m not even convinced that the writers themselves couldn’t have done better, because there is at least some awareness that the setting they’re writing is a bad place, but in typical Bethesda fashion all the edges are filed off and the evil despots become nice and tolerant and nothing too bad ever happens because of their misrule. Better writers with better oversight could have definitely done it better, certainly.
Like the two major factions each need to either be changed for the better or changed for the worse: the UC needs to either be as awful as its system would actually require or it needs to lose the fascism and instead be a socialist state grappling with the material reality that corporate power structures (I’m thinking like Soviet “second economy” shit where it’s organized crime outfits and the like doing their own capitalist bullshit outside the state) managed to seize a lot of resources for themselves out in the colonies, leaving it on the brink of a civil war between the party and the colonial powers. Likewise the FC needs to either be genuinely liberationist, representing rebellion against colonial corporations and resistance against the fascist UC, or the consequences of their vile ancap dictatorships and corporate feudalism need to be front and center. As it is they’re both awful and whitewashed to all hell while representing functionally identical fascist ideologies to such an extent that their conflict with one another doesn’t even make sense.
Further, the settled systems need to be enclosed more, with large swathes of owned and occupied territory where you can’t just land a space ship and set up a private mine using a cooler full of rocks to create industrial capital and a living space in seconds.
I ran into a straight-up reddit libertarian in a bar on Mars. I think the organization he was pushing was called LIST? I started slamming the Tab key very soon into the conversation
Meanwhile in Deus Ex you can meet black Australian dengist bar owners in Hong Kong.
Keeps winning!
JC got his ass handed to him in that conversation, but the game kept winning.
You meet LIST colonists who are stranded in space and need help desperately because LIST didn’t give them any resources.
I thought they were lying at first because they didn’t seem to be sure about the name of the organization. They were like “we are with…uh…LIST?”
functionally identical fascist ideologies to such an extent that their conflict with one another doesn’t even make sense
Just remembered about the war going on between Russia and Ukraine
A major limiting factor that hurts the writing is that the game will ultimately still be designed to be complete accessible, so just like Skyrim had lots of racism in its dialogue and worldbuilding but nearly zero in practice for the player, so too does Starfield have subjects that appear in the writing but which the game designers are obliged to completely avoid.
That was laughably present in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It didn’t just whitewash racism and make the new racism discrimination against the poor smol bean augmented people (yes Human Revolution showed people coerced into rented-out augmentation but didn’t explore it much) but that discrimination wasn’t even delivered to the player in any meaningful way.
Yeah, I watched hbomb’s excessively-long video essay on that game and that’s probably the most memorable part, especially the coercion aspect getting mentioned and then glossed over.
Ross Scott of Accursed Farms did an impressive takedown but it focused on the ever-diluted political discourse in Deus Ex sequels, from the deep complex richness in the first game to, as he put it, CYBORGS CYBORGS CYBORGS in the later games.
I was rewarded and celebrated by one of the factions for executing a capitalist who was exploiting people for profit.
The FC questline? It’s an entertaining one, but also part of the incongruity: that guy was the corporate dictator of a planet and one of the rulers of the FC, and the player is a low level trainee cop in a law enforcement agency with no real legal authority, and the dude decides to fight to the death instead of assuming the other cops would murk you for daring to disrespect him and then release him with a formal apology for inconveniencing him.
That’s why he used his governor power to “revoke” your authority and sent his security guards to kill you. That’s far easier than asserting power over a small enforcement agency with little resources of it’s own. I guess the fantasy is that he thought he could easily sweep you under the rug and you get to prove them wrong.
I hate that the factions are dumb neoliberal American brained stuff but most of the quests I’ve done so far have been good.
It’s kind of like the expanse in that the major factions suck. If they had an OPA group to join I would have been extremely happy. I’m just going to pretend the crimson fleet are the beginning of the OPA until there’s a mod or an official expansion. I’m genuinely enjoying the game a lot and I think I might love it.
I mostly agree with your take, though I dont see why they should spend any time justifying how the society got how things got the way they are. Real life is usually a mixed bag of good and bad. And I’m here for the space game, not a societal critique.
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I think the confusion is from thinking they were trying to make a star Trek space game. I’ve played it a bunch and it’s very clear that was not what they were going for.
The issue is the incongruity and how it’s fundamentally irresponsible to write inherently bad things in an uncritical or positive way. It’s fine to have morally grey things, but they should be consistent: the problems need to be shown, the consequences need to be shown.
For example with the UC one can’t just be like “so yeah it’s a military dictatorship that renders anyone who hasn’t done a term of service in the government as stateless, but uh they do social welfare and they’re super tolerant and nice and stuff” because that doesn’t make sense: it’s incongruous that a state oriented around brutal militarism and its war machine that demands people actively participate in its machine to attain basic rights is then going to be this paragon of religious and cultural tolerance with a social safety net for all its stateless residents; it needs brutality and rage and sadism or it would not be designed the way it is, it would not have the rulers it does, it would not allow the social problems that it has.
That’s why I describe it as it either needs to be better or worse: it needs ideological compassion and a drive to improve things for the people even if it is materially unable to do so and it needs to lose the fascism to do this, or its villainy needs to be played straight and its tone should reflect its elitist and militarist nature with the consequences of what such a system wants and needs put front and center.
so yeah it’s a military dictatorship that renders anyone who hasn’t done a term of service in the government as stateless
Unexamined Starship Troopers brain has infested generations of consumers and those consumers are now writing stories.
Fuck it literally is
It’s just what the US will be once it goes into space and it’s borders become nebulous. It’s the smiling face of neoliberal fascism (in space edition). Poor people in the US already live in that world.
There’s nothing wrong with any of the analysis here, and I agree with all of it, but I think they are more applicable to a directed narrative experience or a movie rather than a sandbox game that simulates the authors world and serves as a hub for a bunch of different isolated stories.
It’s good analysis and very informative for games like Disco Elysium or Baldurs Gate 3, but maybe not as useful for sandbox games that don’t have a main plotline. Other sandbox games like GTA have similarly flavored settings.
I was also originally very turned off by the lack of personality in the factions and how generic a lot of the things are in the universe, but it really is a universe and there are a ton of different stories that are built on top of it and I’m starting to recognize that the stories might actually benefit from having a canvas that more closely reflects our own world to build on top of.
Damn, this is good media criticism.
Yeah damn I’m glad I posted this thread cause some of these posters have very interesting things to say.
some of my favourite threads to lurk in on the subreddit were the ones relating to vidya and their worldbuilding looked at through a marxist lense. it gives me easy examples to understand the theory and it’s just fun to see clever people talking about dumb shit
Good lord how can someone write fascist apologia that stupid.
Like, c’mon for fuck sakes
The genre is “immersive sim”, though a very corporate “mass appeal” dumb-down of the genre. You cannot escape politics in a game about factions of humans navigating problems of scarcity, ownership, social disputes, etc., whether it is “IN SPACE” or not. What the hell do you think the stories would even be otherwise?
Not sure if you are disputing this or not but just FYI there is a ton of societal critique in the game, but the world itself reflects the American hellscape where the main forces in play are blue fascism or red fascism and there is no communist force anywhere. I’m having fun shooting the empire in the face without facing real life consequences.
I think that’s an excessively generous characterization
Of the factions? The world of GTA is similar. That kind of setting flavor isn’t necessarily bad for open world sandbox games. I just wish there was a “good faction” to join. The crimson fleet is the only good choice it seems for now
LMAO, if you don’t want “politics” go choose a “rogue-like”, not an RPG
Tbf the biggest rpguelike is traditionally Binding of Isaac
Ok, I meant “no talk, only pew pew”
though I dont see why they should spend any time justifying how the society got how things got the way they are
Because that’s the foundation of good world building, otherwise the setting comes out as flat, boring, inconsistent and completely arbitrary
It fleshes out and cements the stakes of the story, provides scale and the chance for the characters to be grounded in anything other than archetypal traits, that’s why in the most celebrated sci fi, the setting itself defines the story as much if not more than the characters
The only faction to support are the space snake guys
Why the fuck is there a homeless shelter in a universe with FTL and near infinite resources?
The thing that really stuck out to me about (the intro to) the Conquest Of Bread was that Kropotkin is just completely enamored with the technology of his day. He thought that there was easily enough to provide for everyone using the miracles of modern technology. In 1892.
So yeah, I think the scarcity will continue until capitalism goes away, and post-scarcity technology doesn’t mean the end of capitalism unless people successfully do something about it.
It would have been worse if they made a game with space capitalism that didn’t have the problems of capitalism in it. I would have also enjoyed the shit out of a game that let me play in a fully automated luxury gay space communism universe but I’m also ok playing a pirate in the space capitalist one too.
That’s what puts me off of so-called “post cyberpunk.” It decides that cyberpunk is over… without even trying to get past the inherent contradictions of capitalism. It’s just superficially nicer looking and the ego-insert protagonist gets a holo waifu.
I haven’t done any of the cyberpunk stuff yet. I spent like a minute in that city so far. It’s not good?
I’m not saying Starfield is post-cyberpunk. I’m saying that post-cyberpunk as a literature genre tends to bleach all the social issues framed in cyberpunk under a firehose of hopium instead of seeing those issues resolved meaningfully.
Starfield just rocketed past those issues and left them still sitting out there.
I always thought of Post Cyberpunknas things like The Diamond Age or Mirrors Edge or Glasshouse, which critique the individualistic response of a Cyberpunk protagonist vs social responses.
I am familiar with Mirror’s Edge, and if that’s post-cyberpunk, the setting has promise.
Much with cyberpunk libs took all the shiny white singularity dyson sphere bullshit and none of the “they made capitalism sentient and it ate the humanity of everyone who took part in it , then itself, then promptly collapsed into a post apocalytic economy made entirely of grifts.”
He thought that there was easily enough to provide for everyone using the miracles of modern technology. In 1892.
He wasn’t wrong. Scarcity is artificial.
Capitalist realism is a plague that has spread all over contemporary western fiction. It’s hard to even imagine settings without it for most people.
Even fantasy fiction is loaded with it. One of the first worldbuilding details most D&D style generic fantasy worlds bring up is “where are the trade lanes and who are the rich assholes profiting from them”
I helped out a homeless shelter in Starfield
r/uplifting news
The main problem with this is that the economy makes no sense. There shouldn’t be homeless camps in America from the standpoint of reasonable allocation of resources, but in Starfield a spaceship costs pocket change, so it actually just doesn’t make sense, as opposed to a more grounded sci-fi capitalist version of the setting where there absolutely would be homeless, but that’s because homes and ships actually cost a lot.
I assume the answer is yes because this is a bethesda game, but is the player still expected to go around looting random junk and bandit shinbones from every encounter, then sell them to some random merchant in a hub afterwards?
Yes
DeBeers diamonds should cost a fraction of what they do, but artificial scarcity was enforced.
The long fantasized prosperity that space billionaires promised to bring to Earth from asteroid mining would be gated off and hoarded the same way.
This is also my central critique of the setting/world building in Mass Effect and one of the major reasons I wasn’t super hype for this game. At least mass effect has super interesting characters, even if their overall world building is paint by the numbers capitalist realism sci-fi.
Bethesda though? Oh dear…
Because you still have capitalism there
The cruelty is the point for libs.
Is it even the same writers as Fallout 3 though?
probably notturns out yeah
Same lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, a hack of a writer who somehow has been the head of every Bethesda project since Oblivion.
Hey, the dark brotherhood questline in Oblivion was good (and that writer probably had nothing to do with it because he was too busy writing the doodoo-ass main plot).
He sucks so much. He must have compromat on Todd or something.
Fun fact:
He voices a character in Fallout 4. Specifically, he voices a character who, regardless of your interaction with him, calls you the R-slur
This fact was not so fun but thank you
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There’s literally conflict in Star Trek though lol
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Ah yeah you’re right! You can totally make exploration dangerous and exciting though. But it would change the feel a bit for sure. If you wanna blast people with laserguns then you’re out of luck.
A lot of the things that are fun to do in Starfield wouldn’t be as fun in a star Trek game: piracy, taking down the main faction, stuff like that. I would have loved a star Trek game too but it would be a completely different vibe.
There’s plenty of interesting stories to tell without invoking aliens. The Measure Of A Man, for instance, where Data’s personhood is debated
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Okay it’s been a while since I watched it but I recall being thoroughly disappointed with that episode. Like this is a sci-fi setting with all manner of strange alien life that has been determined to have legal rights (hence the prime directive etc), but there’s no legal definition of what does or does not constitute a legal person? Then Picard ends up “winning” the argument with what was IIRC mostly empty rhetoric.
To be clear I don’t disagree with you, I quite liked most of Asimov’s I, Robot anthology which is mostly about interesting logic puzzles and the difficulty of creating inviolable rules.
Yes but not the kind of conflict that would make a good “pew pew I’m a ship captain bopping around systems and maybe being a pirate too” game.
Blowing up the federation in a star Trek game would not be as fun as it is to blow up the UC in Starfield.
Not every vision of the future is as optimistic as star trek
