Foxtrot ΘΔ🐺

I really wish Starfield had more time to flesh out their House Va'ruun faction or actually put their homeworld somewhere in the game for you to find. that would've been nice. as they're in the game now they give off this vibe that bethesda wanted to have klingons in their setting but they're not even humanoid aliens, they're just humans that went away for a while and returned fevereshly religious crusading against the unbelievers.

there's so much potential there, but all the worldbuilding around them is vague, doesn't say much, the religion is vague and you're not sure if it's purely mythological or if a Great Serpent does exist or what the hell that Jinan guy did to found this cult. It's like.. cop-out worldbuilding. Andreja may talk about being born in the great city of Dazra and having underwent the rite of Kr'Jarr but those are just cool sounding words, they don't mean anything. I have no doubt they wanted to do more with House Va'ruun but Starfield is a fucking mess and I have no reason to doubt the development process reflected that.

You can ask a dozen questions about House Va'ruun and the game doesn't have any answers for them. Spies are sent out into the wider Settled Systems, outside Va'ruun Space and they may never return until their "mission" is complete, whatever that means because they don't know where their homeworld is. what? in a universe with easy faster than light travel and space stations that can literally scan thousands of star systems, you're telling me that nobody knows the coordinates to this highly technologically advanced world outside the settled systems? the stars don't stop, the game just doesn't let you explore the whole galaxy due to scale problems. Surely people can just jump outside the jurisdiction of the known factions into truly uncharted space, which this is the slap in the face, Starfield has that same problem No Man's Sky always had, nowhere you visit is uncharted space. there's pretty much always POIs for you to loot and explore in every single planet and moon you find.

I'm getting off track but yeah Va'ruun is stupid. In a sci-fi setting with FTL travel, magic space internet, long range scanners, a whole ass civilization doesn't just disappear, even with all their little spy games about not telling spies how to return. them assuming information wouldn't leak somewhere along the chain of command is just bethesda's poorly thought out worldbuilding. cop-out worldbuilding.

I really want it to cohere into a cool, intriguing setting, but it just doesn't. you know that funny fluid that turns solid once you apply force to it? well I want starfield to be that, except it's just corn starch mixed with water, that shit is not gonna cohere because it's like they didn't think through so much stuff and a lot of it is what I'm now gonna call "cop-out worldbuilding", it's when they just vaguely gesture at the universe being larger than it is but it makes zero sense if you think about it for longer than a minute, it's just a cop-out to write lore and have even that not make any fucking sense like House Va'ruun.

Two dudes in the entire game (afaik) wear eye patches because they're war vets, give me one of those too Todd, let me roleplay my soldier character to be a war vet who also lost an eye so I can bond with the weirdo gun store owner on Neon or just please add some glasses to that universe, why does the Starfield universe not have glasses, like it's already an issue that disabilities are invisible/don't exist in most games, nobody uses mobility aids like canes or wheelchairs, they're just not a thing.

In Fallout they used wheelchairs to be regular static chairs for their skeleton tableaus but nobody who's alive uses one because they don't have the technology for that. In Starfield the cities aren't designed with them in mind (which could be a clever worldbuilding choice saying the future is not conscious of disabled people's needs but I'm sure it's not) but now with modern technology we have even less options than we did in 2015! (Fallout 4) or 2008! (Fallout 3) people don't even wear fucking glasses anymore!

I know there's like magic future plastic surgery in the Starfield universe so maybe they can fix people's vision problems with bionic eyes or new flesh eyes, I could buy that one if it was explicitly said out loud to me, except that still doesn't solve the question of why glasses just don't exist at all, people love to look fashionable, there's several odd and eccentric clothing choices with fancy dresses and suits with bright bold colors and patterns, people wear hats (tbh mostly boring baseball caps or cowboy hats), earrings and piercings, they have tattoos and cybernetic implant looking things stuck on their forehead but nobody wears glasses for style, even if they theoretically don't need it? come the fuck on. They don't even need to provide benefits like "better accuracy" or whatever, even if it had 0 stat bonuses I'd like to have the option to wear glasses because I can't live without mine irl, the world is a blur without glasses to me, but my in game character is too perfect, her vision is fine and there isn't a trait like New Vegas's "Four Eyes" where it could provide you with those said bonuses I don't care about but negatives if you weren't wearing any glasses, but no everybody has perfect vision in the cyberpunk dystopian liberal space democracy hell future, which shows some awesome worldbuilding choices and what priorities they had. they wanted the political setting to be fleshed out and left out basic things like "people wear glasses".

why did the starfield modelers and texture artists do this to me personally (joking). the first two beer cans have plastic bottle caps, weird but fine this is future space beer, it can have a stupid unnecessary plastic casing that's wasteful and plastic caps for some reason despite standard aluminium cans existing in universe and being a proven design in the real world, so the next two look perfect, I have zero issues with the space future beer apart from the silly plastic casing which I assume you pop off like you do a can of spray paint or hair spray or whatever, fine, but then we have the inconsistency, all four of those beer cans are from the same brand, erdebrau beer, why do they fucking have two separate designs of cans, no company would do this, they'd have to have separate production lines for the different cans, why not standardize production so they only print different labels for the different beer types on the differently sized aluminum cans (I know I'm overthinking this) and I guess plastic cans, which are a common thing (mostly in asia irl), and I do think plastic cans look neat and they're fun to drink from. anyways I'm getting sidetracked, the thing that seriously bothers me is the inconsistency between the beer cans, but also the tabs on the energy drinks, both the regular and the drugged up energy drinks were modeled by different people than whoever did the beer cans. they had to have been. the tabs look like they're weirdly fused to the can so they don't look functional, they just look off and in a completely different style than the beer can tabs.

so that's my review of the 3D models for starfield's beer cans and energy drinks, good job to whoever modeled the beer cans with the tabs (hate those caps). I'm gonna resume decorating my virtual house but I had to get that off my chest.

*edited the post for wording and to add a front view screenshot.