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Starfield Slander - "Nasapunk" is offensively boring
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Would you consider the art direction of Prey to be NASApunk?
The design of Prey was like an alternate reality where art-deco never stopped and consumed midcentury modernism and then Richard Danne became the most important living artist.
The game has a weirdly retrofuturistic vibe to it, like it takes as much inspiration from Fritz Lang's Metropolis as it does NASA's 1970s designs. Also before anyone mentions Bioshock also being art-deco, a lot of it is, but they also threw in a lot of Art Nouveau design elements. Bioshock is kind of a mishmash of styles popular from 1900 to 1940, which does make sense in the narrative.
That's because it is! If you read the magazines laying around, you'll see that the cold war never happened in the world of Prey. America and Russia reached for the stars together, and the Vietnam war never happened.
Oh right, yeah. I remember there's a portrait in the starting area of an elderly JFK too, so he didn't get assassinated.
This. It wasn't sterile and corporate by accident, or aspirationally the way Starfield seems to be. The corporate environment was part of the story and intended to heighten the player's sense of unreality and highlight that they're in a different world. It looked corporate because it was corporate, and the whole story was about the corporation doing horrible unethical things.
The space station in Prey looked like an NYC sky scraper. Starfield has that off white all over the UI that makes it look like its constructed from ablative shielding. Thing is the station in Prey was intended to look corporate and soulless
I was a fan of the 1930s style architecture elements clashing against the post modern office building vibe
I feel like at some point Prey may have been going for NASA punk then they noticed that the aesthetic is too limited for a full station and added the art Deco element in. Might be the other way around, or just going for the most extreme contrast of Deco and utilitarian.