Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety but I've been thoroughly unimpressed with every open world game that I've tried in the past decade. Had a friend get me to try Horizon Zero Dawn a couple years ago after talking it up for a long time and I was sort of enjoying it until I realized it's just Far Cry with robot dinosaurs, I read the Wikipedia article to get the rest of the plot.

I think Todd's been wanting to do a space IP for years and figured it would be a sure fire hit. Tbh after finishing FO4 in like a week because I just ran out of stuff to do I assumed every subsequent game was on a downward slide from there.

doing a space game was a dream of todds for like 25 years. it was less about what was demanded and more what hes always wanted to do.

There's alien animals but nothing sapient, just different shapes for mud crab / mammoth Skyrim ai

In terms of near-human or above-human intelligence, I think the plot of the main quest line involves first contact, but in terms of player characters it is totally true that you can only be human, which was the main point.

theres an alien space glowy orb thing that may or may not be alien and may just be a technological thing that was made by humans in the future, but yeah anyone to interact with is human

Just think: NMS was made by like 12 people over what, 6 or 7 years? And it still has more aesthetic variety than Starfield which was made by a studio of hundreds over the course of a decade. So all the limited animal parts in NMS were the work of maybe 1-3 people, while in Starfield the static copy/pasted designs were probably made by a team that's larger than the entire Hello Games studio.

That's unfair to NMS for many reasons, not the least of which being that it has human-like aliens and a ton more of both flora and fauna variety.

They went from TNG season 1 to TNG season 2

nasapunk

i prefer sovietwave myself

Wasn't Prey more of an Art Deco but in space sort of vibe?

Yeah, it would be possible to do something with it. They could also have like three big branching points in the story and have had the different versions you pop into be alternate worldstates that you the player didn't pick.

Not to hand it to Rick and Morty, but at least that show has a POV cast of characters that are retained between the universe hopping that the viewers can have some investment in. Starfield somehow doesn't even have that, it's just the player.

But the player staying consistent the whole time also means that you actually can't experience the different backstories content even though that seems like an obvious feature to have. WHAT IS STARFIELD

Gross. i never played 3 and I'm increasingly glad of that,.