starfield: a lesson in yappanese
my thoughts on starfield -
this post presumes some familiarity with the bethesda game, starfield. it contains spoilers to the main storyline.
well, starting on a positive note, i loved the lighting and architecture of this world, it was breathtaking at every moment and i can NOT stress it enough!
stores after stores after stores after stores after stores and oh- a place where the player character could actually work for a while!
the big animal was friendly, who would have guessed
there was a mystery at every 10th or 12th corner i guess, got a bit too repetitive every now and then. but there were nice things that i came across while exploring. such as -
an interesting wild west type city (with a sheriff and all the bells and whistles that come with gold rush era westerns)
the "astral lounge" was supposedly a smuggling hub, but there wasn't a single soul there who wasn't civil as a preacher, and polite as ned flanders. this critique of non-player characters actually extends to a lot of the "villains" throughout the game. making them feel shallow, if not pointless at times.
but the story was not very good. it was FINE. but felt so forced and the dialogues, more often than not, had such highs and lows in terms of emotions that it was immersion breaking.
it brings in the cliché multiverse trope at the end and takes 70 hours to say what cities skylines did in 40 minutes.
"things lose their meaning in excess. - " and even if we try really hard and believe, it's impossible to build the same connections afterwards.
here, the connections were with the characters and places i visited. in skylines, it was with people moving into my city. i kept track of maybe the first 40 people but right after that, i got so caught up in the cycle of efficiency that i didn't care about them anymore. even from a role-playing point of view, all i cared about was the numbers on the screen going up. rebuilding relations is difficult because now, everything has a mechanic. you're not exploring a person or a place anymore. instead, you're threading a needle in an attempt to latch onto something that's necessary.
every action and every word is mechanical and the feelings once involved are just a vague motivation. and that sucks. again, 70 hours vs. 40 minutes, and the same message.
i do not feel like my time was wasted with it, but maybe it didn't need so many drumrolls before saying something that doesn't need a blog post to be said.
thank you for reading.