‘NASA-punk’ Another cause to be giddy with anticipation has been provided by Starfield.
We don’t know much about Starfield, but it’s one of the most anticipated games of the year.
The chief artist of Starfield, Istvan Pely, has indicated in a new Xbox Wire article that the game would feature a “NASA-punk” look in addition to its expected setting in space. As a result, I don’t expect it to have the feel of a classic high sci-fi game or series like Mass Effect or Star Wars, but rather to be more grounded in pseudo-realism, called hard sci-fi.
In the early stages of this project, “NASA-Punk” was developed to define a sci-fi environment that was “a bit more real and approachable,” according to Pely. “We aimed for a gritty realism. Extrapolating into the future is plausible if you start with today’s state of space technology.”
As a result, we should expect to see head-mounted displays, improved fusion engines, and futuristic projectile weaponry in their stead. Bethesda has its own take on The Expanse with this.
This is wonderful news to me. There have been plenty of video games that have skimmed over the rigours of physics and the difficulty of living in the vacuum of space, but I enjoyed Mass Effect. Interplanetary travel in hard sci-fi shows how spacecraft are likely to follow function rather than form (The Expanse’s Rocinante isn’t gorgeous, but it is considerably more realistic than the U.S.S. Enterprise).
Rick Vicens, Starfield’s main animator, said, “What’s really fascinating is how strongly we all gripped onto that notion.” “When you said NASA-Punk, the art team was able to take those two words and turn them into something beautiful. It was the ideal word to describe our creative direction, which helped us keep everyone on the same page and focused on a single aesthetic. It all came together for me. That word was crucial for us at the outset of the project, in my opinion.”
It’s not obvious how far Starfield plans to go with this. However, based on what we’ve seen so far, NASA-punk spacecraft will include real buttons instead than a swath of crazily manipulable holograms.
Alien: Isolation (2014), which placed players in the shoes of Amanda Ripley on a vast space station, made excellent use of this style. There was no high-tech McGuffin to exterminate H. R. Giger’s alien in that game; instead, there was more of a dependence on human creativity and DIY in the original Alien movie.
To be clear, Starfield does not need you to wear cumbersome motion trackers while you play. This isn’t going to be Outer Worlds, but it should feel distinctively different from other contemporary sci-fi games.
The thought of launching into space aboard a vehicle that may one day be envisioned by a NASA engineer is quite fascinating. A nice palate cleanser for the near-magical notions like artificial gravity plating and FLT drives that lack even a sliver of physics; the less said about spore drives, the better..”
All of this, combined with the exploitation and ambition of Skyrim, elevates Starfield to the status of a game that has the potential to reshape the genre of space-based sci-fi.