Lemming42
Arcane
Now that the dust has settled, the thing that interests me most about this game is the art style. Adam Adamowicz was Bethesda's secret weapon, it seems - Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim all had supremely strong art direction (yes, I know Oblivion is boring LotR ripoff high fantasy and an insult to the TES universe, but taken in isolation away from the other TES games, it had a nice 80s-style sword-and-sandal feel). After the tragic loss of Adamowicz, Fallout 4 looked like dogshit and Starfield has literally no art direction at all.
Like I've never seen this before - a game with no art direction. There is absolutely nothing tying any of it together. Cyberpunk, space western, solarpunk... except it's also meant to be the 1970s or something, with blocky computers and grim tobacco-stained stained beige walls everywhere? What the fuck's happening? We're using clunky-ass CRT monitors but we also have cheap plastic surgery that can make you 50 years younger? That washed out multicoloured stripe on the box art is weird as well, it deliberately invokes the likes of Logan's Run and Blake's 7, but again, the game's 70s influences are totally out of place with absolutely everything else.
They should have just bought an existing license that everyone's forgotten about and worked on that instead. Starflight would have worked, if the license is available - dinosaurs and sentient plants!
Space 1889 is absolutely ideal too:
Running around shooting shit in an identity-less hodgepodge made by outsourced Indian workers and visiting a boring solarpunk city = ehhh
Running around shooting shit as a classy gentleman/gentlewoman accompanied by men with big mustaches and women with fancy hair and visiting Mars to meet the Martian princesses = yes yes yes
I firmly believe that this game would have been warmly received if it had simply looked different. The procedural generation gimmick is a non-starter and sucks balls, but the quests, dungeons, game mechanics, and combat encounters that do exist are all decent enough to make for a solid game - it just needed to have the style and aesthetics and backstory to draw players in, and it fails unbelievably hard on all of those aspects.
Like I've never seen this before - a game with no art direction. There is absolutely nothing tying any of it together. Cyberpunk, space western, solarpunk... except it's also meant to be the 1970s or something, with blocky computers and grim tobacco-stained stained beige walls everywhere? What the fuck's happening? We're using clunky-ass CRT monitors but we also have cheap plastic surgery that can make you 50 years younger? That washed out multicoloured stripe on the box art is weird as well, it deliberately invokes the likes of Logan's Run and Blake's 7, but again, the game's 70s influences are totally out of place with absolutely everything else.
They should have just bought an existing license that everyone's forgotten about and worked on that instead. Starflight would have worked, if the license is available - dinosaurs and sentient plants!
Space 1889 is absolutely ideal too:
Running around shooting shit in an identity-less hodgepodge made by outsourced Indian workers and visiting a boring solarpunk city = ehhh
Running around shooting shit as a classy gentleman/gentlewoman accompanied by men with big mustaches and women with fancy hair and visiting Mars to meet the Martian princesses = yes yes yes
I firmly believe that this game would have been warmly received if it had simply looked different. The procedural generation gimmick is a non-starter and sucks balls, but the quests, dungeons, game mechanics, and combat encounters that do exist are all decent enough to make for a solid game - it just needed to have the style and aesthetics and backstory to draw players in, and it fails unbelievably hard on all of those aspects.
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