Today's game is some more Starfield. I neglected the Main quest for a bit to go off and join a faction along with decking out my Crew. I found the Adoring fan, immediately he was the first addition to my crew. Love the guy and i'm so happy to have him back. I also had Sarah join the crew just to fill out the slots.
At the bar in New Atlantis, i picked up two other people as well. The first is Simeon Bankowski. He used to be some sort of Field Weapon's Tester for the UC Military. He decided he was tired of going off to deserted planets to test weapons and retired. That's when i found him and hired him.
The second one is Marika Boros. I didn't pry too much into her past though and just hired her (responsible practice, i know). She's had a big problem with sleeping the bed in the Captain's Quarters. I mean, i rarely use it so okay i guess. But it's still a bit creepy to sleep in someone else's bed.
I've been spending a lot of time in New Atlantis doing diplomatic work after joining the Vanguard and fighting off a terrormorph invasion. After a long questline, i walked out of the building, and just stopped to chill. I wandered up to this tree, and man. Say what you will about the gameplay but this game really gets it's graphics right. The whole game feels really prettily made, at least from what i've seen so far.
I ended off for the night by finally picking up the main story and going to the moon. Or, well, a space station orbiting the moon. I play in first person, and it was really cool to see the scale of it upfront. I'm a sucker for Sci-Fi things with massive scale, that's part of what made Star Trek one of my favorite series growing up. They really had some moments that showed off the scale of ships.
There was one last thing i wanted to show off though and that is that i discovered the ship builder and bastardized the Frontier. It's now 3x as long and as a result of the extra mass i had to give it a better engine. I don't think this thing counts as the "Classic" it was anymore. I'm loving the stupid ship builder because despite all the regulations i can make the stupidest looking ships ever and no one can tell me no. At some point i want to just try and make a horribly long one and see if it will let me.
I actually feel the opposite.
As an Elite Dangerous Enjoyer (I enjoy Star Citizen too, but SC is more "rule of cool" than "rule of real" than Elite) I appreciate the more or less "grounded in reality" setting that Bethesda created with Starfield. Most planets are giant, empty, desolate rocks or iceballs, which is exactly what one would expect from real life planets. And I suppose this may be a big reason why many people were disappointed. It seems that many expected the game to be "Star Wars Skyrim," but Star Wars is very unrealistic with regards its planetary depcitions. Planets are varied and generally not shown to be mostly empty, desolate space rocks. Full world cities, jungles, magma, gas storms, etc. Likewise I more or less find the gameplay enjoyable, even with its annoyances (most of which are fixable with mods that are available right now).
However, I actually found myself very disappointed with the visual aesthetics of the game. When Bethesda marketed the game, they described it as "NASA-Punk." But I suppose my disappointment comes from them failing to communicate what that meant to them, since it obviously meant something different to me.
When I first heard the term "NASA-Punk," I became excited to see an abundant use of white and black, with copius amounts of shiny gold foil. I expected to see exposed mechanics and rocket piping. Basically, a mood board of NASA created technology from the beginning of NASA up until now. Ships inspired by the Lunar Landers, Lunar Rovers, etc. Bethesda on the other hand, seems to have created an aesthetic of "what would NASA look like 1000 years from now?" Since the two are so drastically different, you likely can imagine my disappointment at what I see as a weird, ugly aesthetic for many of the ship designer parts and space suits.
Well said. I adjusted my expectations and found myself liking the game. I didn't find the planets lacking in anything, really. I expected things to be barren as it felt more realistic. The game is photographiclly beautiful. While a lot of the gameplay and writing critique is valid, I didn't think it was a fundamentally bad game, just mediocre in some parts and excellent in other parts many people simply overlook.