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I helped out a homeless shelter in Starfield
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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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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?"
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.
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"
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