I helped out a homeless shelter in Starfield
I helped out a homeless shelter in Starfield
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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!
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
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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.
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There's literally conflict in Star Trek though lol
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 blowing up the UC in Starfield is.
I would also love exploring and navigating through conflicts in a star Trek game though.
Not every vision of the future is as optimistic as star trek