Could this beautiful game signal the end of our dystopia fetish?

[Permalink]

1 Like

Fallout 4 is in the works, so NO!

2 Likes

Not an end, but rather a beginning of a new, beautiful fetish.

Further evidence: Steven Universe

4 Likes

This thing better come out soon because it is rapidly building a mountain of hype no game can live up to.

2 Likes

This game has been Vaporware™ for a few years now, especially since the devs’ studio got flooded out, so shrug…
I damn well, however, want it if it ever becomes a real thing!

3 Likes

We’ve had dystopia fetishes since we’ve had utopia fetishes, so “the end” is a mite shortsighted.

But dystopia has its place, so we shouldn’t WANT it to end.

What we should want - and what this game might help bring if it ever emerges from its hole and lives up to its impossible hype - is more than JUST dystopia.

So looks good, and we shall see.

3 Likes

It’s not like it was anything more than Techdemo to begin with.

False. Simply google the game/devs. No, it isn’t finished, but yes, it IS (or at least WAS) intended to be a real game.

2 Likes

By that logic, the Chinese food I had for lunch today signals the end of Mexican food.

5 Likes

For of us who pored over the Terran Trade Authority (TTA) sci-fi art books as children, wondering if it would be real when we grew up: Well, it didn’t really happen like that, but we’re grown-ups now, so we get to make it real… virtually. :smile:

Similar to what is happening in the virtual sphere, there has also been an explosion in making the TTA illustrations “real” by recreating the scenes as models and miniatures. ( https://www.google.com/search?q=terran+trade+authority+models&tbm=isch )

Basically, if you’re interested in this cover-art style, those TTA books are good collections of sci-fi illustration right before the emergence of techniques/technologies like Photoshop ended that style of illustration.

7 Likes

These things take time…

3 Likes

Been there, done that, saved time in the long run.

1 Like

All those beautifully rendered alien creatures… we can blow the crap out of them, right?

I mean, we have to skin them to craft stuff, surely…

1 Like

Could be a nice game mod…

I don’t think so. As long as we have governments and corporations working together to crush people under their boots with stuff like the Trans Pacific Partnership (only stalled because they’re too busy fighting with each other over who gets to stomp what faces), the NSA, US police departments, Obama admin insisting pot is as bad as crack, Silicon Valley looking to track every single thing you do, global censors wanting to control all messaging, etc. etc. sci-fi is gonna keep being pretty dystopian. It didn’t come out of nowhere.

That was US centric, but could apply to most places. Maybe not Scandanavia - but they’re naturally depressed.

Of course I’ll happily enjoy this kind of game whenever it pops up too.

3 Likes

You can, but there are flying drones left on a lot of planets by some mysterious civilization. If you’re poaching they’ll come after you. Not sure of all the mechanics there, and anything in the game is up for change, but at the moment you can shoot them if that’s your thing.

Huh? It was first revealed only a year-and-a-half ago. It was clearly an early build put together for demo purposes, obviously not finished and with no release date given. (It’s not unusual for games to be shown off when they’re years from being finished - and sometimes before they’ve even been started.) It doesn’t even have an official release date yet, so it’s not even late (it’s expected sometime later this year or early 2016). Plus, they’ve been showing off work they’re doing, so it’s not like they’ve fallen into a black hole:

6 Likes

Please let it be better than Spore (sBore).
I loved that ol Roger Dean art phase and all, but the whole game aspect seems a bit vague: go to the center of the galaxy? Gosh that sounds so… familiar. My kids love the creature creator (they still tool around making monsters every once in a while), but the actual gameplay other than the microbe stage was meh.

Make monsters, 3-D print em! Customize your ship: 3-D print that too! Create a Roger Dean world: print it stat!

Or open up a mod friendly SDK of some kind and let people go nuts. I tried to play that ‘watercolor’ style game Love. Anyone here play it?

1 Like

I remember reading that SimCity came about when Will Wright was working on a game where a helicopter could fly over procedurally-generated cities and blow them up, and he found it was more fun playing with the map creator than the helicopter.

Playing Spore after spending a lot of time with the free Creature Creator was like going backwards from SimCity to the helicopter game.

4 Likes

I realized that a major appeal to me of post-apocalyptic fiction is that it allowed me to indulge in the fantasy of rebuilding after a collapse. For most of my life, I’ve believed a devastating collapse was inevitable.

There are plenty of “optimistic” game narratives around, but they’re all about imperialist capitalism expanding into space. As they say, it’s long been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, 75-79.

An underlying problem with many computer games is they’re locked into power fantasies – a logic of conflict and pyramidal hierarchies. Sandbox games, at least sometimes, are an escape from that, but they seldom allow for narrative. Here’s a puzzle to solve.

2 Likes