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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 
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" 
Its ruining fiction. Why do people want to "escape" in a story to just another capitalist hellhole. Its fucking space futurism! How has the economic conditions not changed in any way?! How have they made this massive effort to develop industries capable of this level of colonization, terraforming, and fucking countless FTL ships when divided up in such a primitive economy like CAPITALISM!
Star Citizen is primarily appealing to aging gamedads that want to be cogs in the capitalist machine, but in space. The biggest spenders have literal top hats and monocles with space yachts on top of it all and talk on their forums about how they might allow the space poors to mop the yacht if they beg. 
I forgot how much I hate gamers
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?
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.
WHERE IS MY COMMUNIST REVOLUTION BETHESDA
Where is tho, it would sell a shitton if they only had some fucking spine to write it
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
Is it even the same writers as Fallout 3 though?
~~probably not~~
turns out yeah
Same lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, a hack of a writer who somehow has been the head of every Bethesda project since Oblivion.
The cruelty is the point for libs.
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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