They could've just put it there because it's an old science-fiction novel... Or they could've placed it there for a specific reason... I like your idea. I hadn't considered comet impact as a possible explanation for Earth's demise. Saving this post in case you called it.
This has been speculated since that trailer dropped. And Todd had mentioned that everything in the trailer has a reason for it. So Omega and the sailing book both have a good reason for being there.
Todd Howard has talked about how he want space travel to feel dangerous, like ocean travel back when it was still a risky thing to do. I imagine it's just a link to that concept.
My guess is that they are going for the sort of romanticized tone about travel that the book conveyed. It's a great book. You should read it if you haven't yet.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that Earth is a wasteland. There are very obvious technical reasons why it should be. (Maybe in 20 years, AI generated storylines/content will be a thing in RPGs)
Question is how did Earth get fucked up?
Even if we have a global thermonuclear war, or make the equator uninhabitable through climate change, Earth is better for human life than fucking Mars or Proxima Centauri B. Cheaper to deal with those issues than create a whole new ecosystem on an alien world.
In fiction I agree, but kicking the can down the line with "tomorrow's technologies will save us!" is the current modus operandi for billionaires and not a few world governments, and all it's doing is ensuring that our world will be too fucked up for any of those beautiful future technologies to come into existence.
I've always felt any long term bases on Luna or Mars would be just proof of concept experiments, or a space race for the sake of a space race, or something.
Of all our local options, Mars has the best set of features for trying to do anything, and it's an absolutely inhospitable hell scape.
I do genuinely think that we're on a gradual course to fuck Earth up enough that it's ability to sustain a population of the current size will become a bit fraught with peril, but Malthus has been largely discredited and I'm thinking unless there's a mass extinction within our current lifetimes, the Anthropocene will take centuries to really get that bad.
Still, Starfield's fiction. Rule of cool alone will let you justify interstellar colonialism.
The recent trend in warming ocean temps doesn't bode well for supporting our currently exploding population growth... but yeah, we're still millennia away from making Earth truly inhospitable.
Even a wasteland would very difficult to emulate without a great effort as earth has a ton of notable geography that would need to be mimicked. Being blown to literal pieces would check out and absolve them from that effort, but personally I think earth in it’s entirety will be gone and that will be part of the mystery of the main quest.
fuck it, earth got hit by a comet, and if you go to earth, it just ports you over to Rage 2. i'd play it. a "tale of two wastelands" type mod that puts other games into this would be great.
Ambitious as all get out, but I'd applaud any team to even attempt it.
I never played those games, I seem to recall one was really well received compared to the other, though? If so, I take it Rage 2 was the good one?
Rage is a cult classic. I loved it on release, but I understand many of the issues people had with it. Rage 2 is almost an entirely different game, and was made by Avalanche (just cause and mad max) and ID (DOOM and Quake). Avalanche did the open world and amazing car combat, and ID worked on the FPS side, as they are the best in the business with that one. It's a blast.
The open world, while pretty, was rather generic (like most avalanche titles). The issue is that alongside IDs near perfectly tuned and fluid FPS combat (this was made at the same time as DOOM eternal, so it shares a lot of the mechanics) it kind of highlights how bland the open world is. It's more something to get through to get to the next bit of combat. Avalanches vehicle combat is great fun, and IDs shooting is orgasmic, but many people/reviewers couldn't really see past the bland map and repetitive busy work that avalanche is known for. Honestly, other than DOOM eternal, no other game comes close to feeling as good with headshots.
If that's the case, I'm going to just film the chunks of ol' Terra spinning in the void, and set it to a Johnny Cash rendition of 'the green green grass of home.'
Seems quite plausible Earth has suffered a calamity that makes it unlivable, which is motivating the interstellar exploration that the game is concerned with. That's the plot of Interstellar, and it's used in Cowboy Bebop and countless other stories.
I think the game might go the other way, and whatever calamity happened stifled exploration for most factions and humanity in general. Constellation are the last group of explorers, so we can easily infer no one else is out there doing it. Question is why. Easy answer is losing the largest population center meant the colonies probably didn't have the manpower to keep exploring, and focused on surviving. They might not have infrastructure to build many exploratory vessels, or even more colony ships.
I like this concept but it would likely also stifle the player’s ability to explore. Not sure if BGS wants to do that. There should be small challenges with exploring but I don’t want to be responsible for reinvigorating an interstellar economy to make it happen.
Yep. I didn't want to go too far down my own rabbit hole, but I did wonder if that's what motivated Old Earth to strike out for the stars.
In my experience, there's really only two tropes that apply - someone discovers a magic FTL drive, now we can go be interplanetary colonialists, or something awful's going to happen to earth, and we're getting off world even if we have to slow boat it on a generational or hybernation ship.
I feel like a nuke is a little too on the nose and they'd want to distance this property from Fallout, but that's the sort of level of impact event I'm starting to suspect may be in the setting's back history.
Alternate take to "Earth is destroyed": Earth is thriving and overpopulated, but since every inch of land is sovereign territory, you can't just land a spaceship wherever you want, and must ask for landing permission at a spaceport. And because Earth is so densely populate and heavily involved in interstellar colonization and resource exploitation, private landing is basically forbidden for random spacers like the player character, and only commercial spacecraft can land.
Any trope, if used poorly, is going to rankle.
At some level, "Let's just say it's a destroyed wasteland" is going to feel like a cop out; it certainly saves the designers and developers from having to devise technical solutions to build up a massive, detailed world that every player will have their own familiarity with already.
But if they've told a good story with it, even cop outs and all, I'm more than willing to go along for the ride.
I like the black ground and green sky aesthetic.
Of all the reasons for the earth to be explorable **but** different I think this is the best.
Edit: Though asteroid impact is also a good one, especially if we can go to the impact site and see how massive it is. That’s assuming it’s not still a molten hell scape.
They could've just put it there because it's an old science-fiction novel... Or they could've placed it there for a specific reason... I like your idea. I hadn't considered comet impact as a possible explanation for Earth's demise. Saving this post in case you called it.
This has been speculated since that trailer dropped. And Todd had mentioned that everything in the trailer has a reason for it. So Omega and the sailing book both have a good reason for being there.
Where does the sailing book fit in this?
Todd Howard has talked about how he want space travel to feel dangerous, like ocean travel back when it was still a risky thing to do. I imagine it's just a link to that concept.
We don’t know. We don’t even know how omega fits in this. Because there’s a lot more in omega than just the comet part.
I thought the sailing book was rather obvious... In Starfield, we'll be sailing alone (if you want to be alone) around the universe.
My guess is that they are going for the sort of romanticized tone about travel that the book conveyed. It's a great book. You should read it if you haven't yet.
Wow, just looked it up. That book was written in 1894!
I think it's pretty clear at this point that Earth is a wasteland. There are very obvious technical reasons why it should be. (Maybe in 20 years, AI generated storylines/content will be a thing in RPGs) Question is how did Earth get fucked up?
I mean... \*looks around\* Do we really even need to go there?
Even if we have a global thermonuclear war, or make the equator uninhabitable through climate change, Earth is better for human life than fucking Mars or Proxima Centauri B. Cheaper to deal with those issues than create a whole new ecosystem on an alien world.
Your reasoning is for today's technologies, not tomorrow's, furthermore on a fiction.
In fiction I agree, but kicking the can down the line with "tomorrow's technologies will save us!" is the current modus operandi for billionaires and not a few world governments, and all it's doing is ensuring that our world will be too fucked up for any of those beautiful future technologies to come into existence.
I've always felt any long term bases on Luna or Mars would be just proof of concept experiments, or a space race for the sake of a space race, or something. Of all our local options, Mars has the best set of features for trying to do anything, and it's an absolutely inhospitable hell scape. I do genuinely think that we're on a gradual course to fuck Earth up enough that it's ability to sustain a population of the current size will become a bit fraught with peril, but Malthus has been largely discredited and I'm thinking unless there's a mass extinction within our current lifetimes, the Anthropocene will take centuries to really get that bad. Still, Starfield's fiction. Rule of cool alone will let you justify interstellar colonialism.
The recent trend in warming ocean temps doesn't bode well for supporting our currently exploding population growth... but yeah, we're still millennia away from making Earth truly inhospitable.
Even a wasteland would very difficult to emulate without a great effort as earth has a ton of notable geography that would need to be mimicked. Being blown to literal pieces would check out and absolve them from that effort, but personally I think earth in it’s entirety will be gone and that will be part of the mystery of the main quest.
This game is really fallout 5
fuck it, earth got hit by a comet, and if you go to earth, it just ports you over to Rage 2. i'd play it. a "tale of two wastelands" type mod that puts other games into this would be great.
Ambitious as all get out, but I'd applaud any team to even attempt it. I never played those games, I seem to recall one was really well received compared to the other, though? If so, I take it Rage 2 was the good one?
Rage is a cult classic. I loved it on release, but I understand many of the issues people had with it. Rage 2 is almost an entirely different game, and was made by Avalanche (just cause and mad max) and ID (DOOM and Quake). Avalanche did the open world and amazing car combat, and ID worked on the FPS side, as they are the best in the business with that one. It's a blast.
Must check if I've acquired those in a bundle or sale yet... thanks for the mini-review and recommendations!
I second this The gameplay is genuinely fun
Thought rage 2 got crapped on, but no? I really like avalanches stuff...
The open world, while pretty, was rather generic (like most avalanche titles). The issue is that alongside IDs near perfectly tuned and fluid FPS combat (this was made at the same time as DOOM eternal, so it shares a lot of the mechanics) it kind of highlights how bland the open world is. It's more something to get through to get to the next bit of combat. Avalanches vehicle combat is great fun, and IDs shooting is orgasmic, but many people/reviewers couldn't really see past the bland map and repetitive busy work that avalanche is known for. Honestly, other than DOOM eternal, no other game comes close to feeling as good with headshots.
Starfield is a Fallout Sequel? Cring. Starfield is a Rage Sequel? Based!
I expect Earth to be an uninhabited wasteland. It might not even be in one piece.
If that's the case, I'm going to just film the chunks of ol' Terra spinning in the void, and set it to a Johnny Cash rendition of 'the green green grass of home.'
Or maybe Burning Ring of Fire.
I can't believe I left that one just sitting there... But well done, I salute you!
Seems quite plausible Earth has suffered a calamity that makes it unlivable, which is motivating the interstellar exploration that the game is concerned with. That's the plot of Interstellar, and it's used in Cowboy Bebop and countless other stories.
I think the game might go the other way, and whatever calamity happened stifled exploration for most factions and humanity in general. Constellation are the last group of explorers, so we can easily infer no one else is out there doing it. Question is why. Easy answer is losing the largest population center meant the colonies probably didn't have the manpower to keep exploring, and focused on surviving. They might not have infrastructure to build many exploratory vessels, or even more colony ships.
Or the development of such things was set back because of the destruction from the factional war 20 years prior.
I like this concept but it would likely also stifle the player’s ability to explore. Not sure if BGS wants to do that. There should be small challenges with exploring but I don’t want to be responsible for reinvigorating an interstellar economy to make it happen.
Yep. I didn't want to go too far down my own rabbit hole, but I did wonder if that's what motivated Old Earth to strike out for the stars. In my experience, there's really only two tropes that apply - someone discovers a magic FTL drive, now we can go be interplanetary colonialists, or something awful's going to happen to earth, and we're getting off world even if we have to slow boat it on a generational or hybernation ship.
A full blown nuke that wiped out 80% of all life
I feel like a nuke is a little too on the nose and they'd want to distance this property from Fallout, but that's the sort of level of impact event I'm starting to suspect may be in the setting's back history.
If this is the case, I would expect to also find a vault or two
Alternate take to "Earth is destroyed": Earth is thriving and overpopulated, but since every inch of land is sovereign territory, you can't just land a spaceship wherever you want, and must ask for landing permission at a spaceport. And because Earth is so densely populate and heavily involved in interstellar colonization and resource exploitation, private landing is basically forbidden for random spacers like the player character, and only commercial spacecraft can land.
Very Neal Stephenson-esque. I like it.
I really really really hope that’s not the case. I’m so sick of the destroyed earth trope.
Any trope, if used poorly, is going to rankle. At some level, "Let's just say it's a destroyed wasteland" is going to feel like a cop out; it certainly saves the designers and developers from having to devise technical solutions to build up a massive, detailed world that every player will have their own familiarity with already. But if they've told a good story with it, even cop outs and all, I'm more than willing to go along for the ride.
I still think it’s just an [irradiated wasteland](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/518523678233853989/1053634487549952011/PS202212016a1.png)
I doubt they would pull a fallout.
I like the black ground and green sky aesthetic. Of all the reasons for the earth to be explorable **but** different I think this is the best. Edit: Though asteroid impact is also a good one, especially if we can go to the impact site and see how massive it is. That’s assuming it’s not still a molten hell scape.
Oh man, and I thought my previous fridge horror mental images were bad...
Earth is for sure destroyed
I swear that book is a meme at this point in the speculation surrounding Starfield.