this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] axont@hexbear.net 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The design of Prey was like an alternate reality where art-deco never stopped and consumed midcentury modernism and then Richard Danne became the most important living artist.

The game has a weirdly retrofuturistic vibe to it, like it takes as much inspiration from Fritz Lang's Metropolis as it does NASA's 1970s designs. Also before anyone mentions Bioshock also being art-deco, a lot of it is, but they also threw in a lot of Art Nouveau design elements. Bioshock is kind of a mishmash of styles popular from 1900 to 1940, which does make sense in the narrative.

[–] DroneRights@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The design of Prey was like an alternate reality

That's because it is! If you read the magazines laying around, you'll see that the cold war never happened in the world of Prey. America and Russia reached for the stars together, and the Vietnam war never happened.

[–] axont@hexbear.net 11 points 1 year ago

Oh right, yeah. I remember there's a portrait in the starting area of an elderly JFK too, so he didn't get assassinated.

[–] Frank@hexbear.net 10 points 1 year ago

This. It wasn't sterile and corporate by accident, or aspirationally the way Starfield seems to be. The corporate environment was part of the story and intended to heighten the player's sense of unreality and highlight that they're in a different world. It looked corporate because it was corporate, and the whole story was about the corporation doing horrible unethical things.