why are there so many games with medieval fantasy settings but not as many with sci-fi ones?
why are there so many games with medieval fantasy settings but not as many with sci-fi ones?
why are there so many games with medieval fantasy settings but not as many with sci-fi ones?
have a nice day furchud.
This is what i wanted Starfield to look like
Same here
Would have been kino if they did the 50 style Buck Rodgers theme, but alas no
>Buck Rodgers
>50s
Try 20s
Are there any games close to this aesthetic nowadays? Some Nebula Awards retro-futurism short story come to life, like John Carter or some shit.
The astest I can think of is Space Rangers 2.
there are multiple shadowrun games
https://store.steampowered.com/app/353700/The_Deadly_Tower_of_Monsters/
what? 2d image?
>Oh, a new sci-fi space game. Are there any aliens in it?
>What do you mean, "no?"
First and last interest I had with that game.
Starfield does have aliens though. Alien doesn't mean "basically the same as humans except with blue skin or a weird forehead or oversized ears or whatever".
it also doesn't mean "basically a bug but oversized and carnivorous" lmao.
good morning sir.
You absolutely can have setting with no Aliens just look at Dune the immediate problem however is that I knew Bethesda or modern Bethesda doesn't have the talent writing wise anymore to actually pull that off and the setting is far too bare bones to the point there aren't even things like Psychics or Androids/Cyborgs also going to be extremely real though I get what they're trying to go for with it "Nasapunk" is one of the most stylistically devoid aesthetics I've ever seen in one of these games and I have never been so bored playing on of Bethesda's games
dont compare books to videogames anon
But anon, Dune HAS games
good art shit gameplay
same with his other project
Human only sci fi can work just fine, but you need better writers than what bethesda has to pull it off.
There's no definitive "base" they can lean on and copy without making a total ripoff
Fantasy has:
>Lord of the rings
>Dungeons and dragons
Sci-fi is less defined on the other hand,
There's fantasy shit like Star Wars and then there's 2001 Space Odyssey
Too bad since it looked like a "NASA-punk" game since the very first trailer
>and then there's 2001 Space Odyssey
There's nothing to take from that. They went to great lengths to be as realistic as possible. It's almost like considering Apollo 13 influential for sci-fi.
Exactly. The problem with Sci-fi is how realistic do you want to be and what does it look like?
>There's nothing to take from that.
Are you moronic?
2001 didn't invent the centrifuge. That was always considered the easy solution to the problem of no gravity in space.
not an argument
Bethesda has no good artstyle, gameplay or quest design.
if only crpgs were sci fi instead of fantasyslop
This holy frick I'm so tired browsing rpgs and every game is the same boring fantasy slop
Because of the "Science" part of science-fiction. There's an expectation that background things and technology have some kind of basis in reality or an explanation that makes sense beyond "it's magic I dunno lol", and it's typically something they would have to make up, at least in the details.
Most writers, especially game writers, can't be bothered or don't have the skill. It's not even a completely necessary component, but these people out themselves as incompetent when they enforce this restriction on themselves, if they choose between the two.
Anyone has that pic comparing modern scifi artists with retro scifi artists? The one where the old guy is saying "it's plutonium idk lol"
while i agree the writers can't be bothered because they are dumb, there is an additional component of no existing real life equivalent to draw upon
fantasy tends to be "medieval europe unless stated otherwise", which provides a backdrop that feels authentic because it's based on history that actually happened. we don't have history regarding spaceships etc because they haven't been made yet. so the writers have to extrapolate, which leads to a less robust story even if they think it through well. all the most impactful fiction is always based upon and inspired by real events after all
Fantasy just isn't an interesting setting for precisely this reason. Once you've seen one you've seen all
Medieval style uses God a lot as a device to ground the story despite relying on 100% fantasy elements like magic and it works pretty well, a lot of the baggage that comes with science fiction is having to create a new representation of god from scratch so you can write the unexplainable (as in not relatable at all to current real life) around it.
there's is hard scifi and soft scifi though, the latter being "magic" technology basically
Yeah that's why I added that it isn't necessarily required for a sci-fi story, but it can certainly be something that is approached if the author chooses to.
That's a good point, having that solid basis certainly helps when crafting a believable world and then the magic or otherwise unexplained parts is the cherry on top. I guess I feel it lacks a little creatively, but that could just be a personal gripe. I probably also have a preference for harder sci-fi because of the rationality aspect, so I'm a bit biased in that respect.
nobody gives a shit about the science part of sci-fi since the 60-s
Nobody has ever given much of a shit about the science ever. The whole motivation behind the creation of the sci-fi genre was as humans began to learn more and more about the universe it became very apparent there's not actually a lot of magic out there and that was kind of disappointing. Sci-fi was a "What if science wasn't actually as limited as it is in real life?" thing. It was basically just magic, only by another name.
nah they were theorizing about the future back then. Space travel, how will this go, possible scenarios, what could be found out there, how will the human society change in the future, all this stuff, no magic, no super hero bullshit, just more or less realistic ideas.
The only sci-fi that was doing that was dystopian sci-fi. The science fiction of that shit was purely incidental as a result of the fact that they were setting their stories in the future. Traditional sci-fi was mostly about exploring the shit science was telling us was going to be impossible to happen for real.
A lot of sci-fi was about using scientific advancement and the inevitable social upheavals it would cause to push the writer's vision for utopia. See Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek and H.G. Wells' The Open Conspiracy
yes like "from the earth to the moon". Absolutely outlandish idea, simply ridiculous.
The mood 60-80-100 years ago werent as it is now, people saw rapid technological advancements and used their imagination to try to predict the future.
basic sci fi is just 'it's X element/mineral/crystal at work i dunno lol' and it works most of time
what matters the most is ayy lmaos, spaceship/mech and planets
That's just hard sci-fi and it's literally no fun allowed autism that turns a novel into a maths class. Good science fiction handwaves it away so you can get to talking about the human condition like all stories are supposed to do.
everything at the left is over complicated anime bullshit with close to none basis in reality
>in case of emergency
I feel attacked.
That bastion of grit and realism, Vanquish
theres a million sci fi games wtf are you talking about
There isn't a sci-fi Bible like Lord of the rings, it does the heavy lifiting of world building and providing concepts that you can expect your audience to have some familiarity with and are already interested in seeing being explored, fantasy worlds are generally simpler which makes them easier to simulate in a believable way within the limitations of games.
>There isn't a sci-fi Bible like Lord of the rings
Idk, Dune maybe? Though i guess that's more of a bible for science-fantasy since Star Wars, 40k, and Halo ripped it off
I wouldn't say the layperson is aware of any specific part of the Dune settings. At best they might recall the concept of a super valuable planet-specific resource like Spice, but I wouldn't even expect them to know what Spice actually does.
nah, Dune is as much a sci-fi bible as LotR is a fantasy bible and Neuromancer is a cyberpunk bible. They all serve as a general framework for the genre, it is just that none of them have had a successful current-era film adaptation like LotR. without the movies, people would be able to tell you as much about LotR as they can about Dune.
>Dune is as much a sci-fi bible as LotR is a fantasy bible and Neuromancer is a cyberpunk bible
This is crap. LotR and Neuromancer are actual seminal works. Dune is not even close. Sci-fi already existed for like a century before Dune came along.
...as did fantasy before Lord of the Rings, what is your point? Blade Runner released before Neuromancer, what is your point?
>...as did fantasy before Lord of the Rings
Not really. You had mythology. You had horror. But you didn't really have modern fantasy before Lord of the Rings.
>Blade Runner released before Neuromancer
Blade Runner is not and has never been cyberpunk. Blade Runner is just sci-fi mixed with noir. The book it's based on is just regular sci-fi. I have no idea why people keep insisting Blade Runner is cyberpunk. It's not.
well considering you are in denial over both Dune being a seminal sci-fi work and Blade Runner being cyberpunk I think the conversation is over, I'm not here to argue with your own bizarre self-defined standards
Blade Runner is not cyberpunk. Only recently have I started to hear people claiming it is and you're all fricking morons for doing so. It was always just considered a neo-noir sci-fi and that's it. If you think Blade Runner is cyberpunk then you're also claiming Total Recall and Screamers are cyberpunk.
>Only recently have I started to hear people claiming it is
>>the good ol' if I pretend my opinion is le oldgay opinion it'll seem more legitimate surely
Oh, here's Wired describing Blade Runner as cyberpunk, circa 2008.
>Ghost in the Shell isn't cyberpunk it's just sci-fi mixed with spy fiction
He's sort of right. GitS can't be "-punk" because it's told from the point of view of the authoritarians and it presents said authoritarians as being generally in the right. This is being kind of pedantic though; it's still cyberpunk-adjacent and can be considered a subgenre of cyberpunk.
That's not what makes GitS barely cyberpunk. You can have cyberpunk from the view of the authoritarian. What makes it barely cyberpunk is that it's missing the whole "total social degradation and laissez faire capitalism supplants nations" part of the genre.
Feel like the closest thing to a sci-fi Bible would be like Blade Runner. Obviously not a book but that's about the first thing I think of.
Asimov mostly for robot shit.
Dune is very influential for sci fi, but not nearly to the same degree as LotR.
For me, it's space fantasy
I read this little trilogy a couple years back. It's really fun and probably the closest thing I've found to the old Phantasy Star games. The only thing it was missing were cool aliens but it did have weird demihuman races made by long forgotten genetic engineering. I liked the deformed bird guys who could cast wind magic.
for me its space kots
This is the only book I've read by CJ Cherryh but it was really good.
The second installment was a bit dreary though.
I read most Cherryh books but not this one
she writes pretty well(as expected from times when women used male pen names or shortened their names to hide that they are women) and her older books are pretty great even if usually follow similar theme
sadly her latest series is quite bad
Whats interesting is that I could immediately it was a female author when I started reading Rusalka but while usually thats a bad thing, in this her focus on internal turmoil vs struggle vs external forces worked well with the setting of the story and the kind of obstacles that the protagonists had to contend with.
yep
she is more psych focused which is pretty good
also its not like her settings sucks, her alliance-union/company wars series and so some of her single novels are pretty great]
>also tape based computers
I'm glad you got what I was getting at despite how badly I butchered that post.
I had a quick look at her wikipedia to get more of an understanding and I like the way she approaches world building. Apparently she's also done a lot of stuff with a military setting which makes me hopeful. Has she done anything from the perspective of a belligerent military force? I find that extremely lacking in scifi. Usually if itsd one its only so they can stick a protagonist in to begrudgingly be a par of an evil/flawed system.
>belligerent military force
what do you mean exactly? elaborate
the company wars setting have some points from military personnel although they are not purely military
>Heavy Time&Hellburner(t. expanded universe prototype)
>Downbelow Station(clone army vs earth expeditionary forces turned pirates vs trader alliance)
>Rimrunners(about spook ship)
The Faded Sun Trilogy is worth mentioning as most of the characters are either military or alien merc/warriors
The Chanur novels are about merchant ship turned blockade runner/privater but the crew are alien space cats(mostly)
Cuckoo's Egg novel is interesting but I don't want to spoil much
The Paladin is about retired swordmaster on exile in not Nippon who is forced to action by some teen pussy who want revenge, its quite entertaining
I've always wanted a fantasy setting where people used magic to start colonizing space.
Because sci-fi is gay.
Fantasy is based on things that are familiar because they come from our history, folklore and intuitions; sci-fi is based on papers and theories almost no one's familiar with.
Fantasy has no limits beyond one's imagination, relishing in wanderlust and appealing to our sensibilities; sci-fi always imagines the future to be sterile, pragmatic and cynical.
Fantasy is written to be fun or dramatic, to show characters grow and celebrate humanity; sci-fi is written to push a political agenda, usually of the familiar kind.
Which is why the cyberpunk genre is one of the few interesting sci-fi genres, it creates the new cyberspace dimension to explore and is always filled with very human conflicts instead of only sterile abstract concepts.
Cyberpunk's idea of what cyberspace would be and the impact it would have was complete nonsense though. It was so far removed from reality they may as well be talking about magic. Dystopian sci-fi was way, way, way, way more prophetic than cyberpunk ever was. It's a nonsense genre. It's can be fun like Lord of the Rings can be fun but it's all a bunch of fantasy bullshit.
something being "prophetic" doesn't point to any kind of quality, and the most popular works like 1984 weren't even prophetic, they were just extrapolating already going ons and then saying "what if it was....le bad"
What's it called when people who have no fricking clue pretend they know anything? Simply being a secondary?
Rick and Morty and not all of sci-fi
Sci-fi can be fun
>sci-fi always imagines the future to be sterile, pragmatic and cynical.
you don't know shit son
Because space is very limited and boring. Despite how basedence gays try to act like space is interesting, it really just is a bunch of scattered clumps of matters from subatomic particles smashing into each other.
Fantasy is a product of human imagination. And products from infinitely more complex things such as living beings are going to have more depth and human centered appeals.
There is nothing out there, space is gay. Thus making scifi gay.
These
>Because space is very limited and boring
Which is funny considering how huge space is
>our life is boring so that's why vidya and escapism should be boring too
nice logic
Japs make fantasy sci-fi all the time. Probably more often than medieval fantasy. West used to do it a lot back in the day but stopped for some reason.
take a character, put him in the rugs, give him a stick, done, you got yourself a medieval character. Not as easy in sci-fi
obviously generalizing
You just described a jedi
because star wars isnt sci-fi yes, its space-opera
its space marvel/superhero now
>it's not a rock it's a stone
designing shit like this from scratch is mega expansive, while in fantasy everything is already there, 90% of fantasy is completely generic copypasta.
>implying space opera isn't SF
problem with sci-fi is a metric frickton of its fans are the type of people who obsess over small insignificant details and want the 'universes' to be as thought out and in depth as Real life.
while fantasy fans might see a small plothole in a side thing and they might discuss it for a bit before dropping it and saying something like "if its important it will be expanded upon later" which may lead to it never being elaborated on.
meanwhile Sci-fi fans will argue over the plothole and demand explanations calling the whole thing shit and force the writers to acknowledge it.
and thats not to mention how many sci-fi fans obsess over space itself, they ain't happy with just simply seeing a ton of different aliens/planets, they want nonstop spaceships and shit.
the whole genre is just too fractured, in fantasy almost every fantasy fan likes lord of the rings, they all enjoy elder scrolls, and so on.
but for sci-fi its just nonstop Star Trek vs Starwars vs Dune vs whatever the frick else there is
I was watching 2001: Space Odyssey last night and I'm surprised we don't have more games with level design based on gravitational twists and halls. The closest thing I can think are the twist hallways in OoT and the neighborhood level in Psychonauts.
I mean, if games can have le hyper realistic graphics I don't see why levels like those would be impossible to make nowadays.
Serious Sam has arenas with varying gravity direction.
DO NOT FRICK GREEDO!
bros give me recs for space western games and anime
Actual space sims or adventures with a space theme?
Adventures with a space theme
There aren't many
>Mass Effect
>Destiny
>Starfield
Halo maybe, but that's a stretch since you are spending most of the game on a hall
Space Battleship Yamato 2199
I really love this type of art style, it's like the ones you would see on fantasy/sci-fi book covers from the 70s and 80s.
Conan, Elric, and BotNS all had killer covers in the 70s-80s
Gene Wolfe's scifi is great because it leans so heavily on "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I enjoyed that kind of scifi a lot more than merely extrapolating from current technology.
it helps that Severian is a moron, but it speaks to Wolfe's writing ability that both Long and Short Sun don't have tard protags and still retain that same mysticism in a sense
Nothing wrong with bussy (bug pussy).
real scifi is not that as popular. when normies think scifi they think Star Wars. Most people didn't kniw about cyberpunk till Cyberpunk came out.
They knew about Blade Runner though
Which is no help because Blade Runner is not cyberpunk and nobody but a handful of dedicated cyberpunk fanboys desperate to validate their juvenile genre has ever thought of Blade Runner as cyberpunk. Cyberpunk fanboys are so moronic and desperate Kojima tried to argue Dune was cyberpunk.
Blake Runner established a lot of cyberpunk imagery
lmfao dude what's up with the chip on your shoulder
Alien, Matrix, Back to the future, Jurassic park
its popular but the real answer is that its much more expensive to make.
Clarity.
Magic sword goes into squishy thing, it's made of metal in a forge.
Blizzo ray shunts body parts into different timelines, it's made of nanotechs, flibflams, whisker pins and Neptune slime. It needs a geofab and a bongwarbler to make.
This is why the popular stuff ends up being Star Wars and Mass Effect. It's grounded enough in our reality to understand. Star Wars space combat is completely unrealistic. It's WW2 in space.
in other words: Civilization Vs Alpha Centuri
That's exactly it. The first time you look at a tech tree in a sci-fi strategy game is terrifying. None of it makes any god damn sense. Especially the more out there ones.
Something like Civ? You recognize most if not everything instantly. Granary is for food, barracks for military. I want gunpowder because I know where that leads.
Directed spatial manipulator. No fricking clue what that does but manipulating space is spooky. Probably does frickloads of damage. And its directed, point and shoot.
Games that have convoluted unrecognizable "technology" where the name doesn't tell you anything are usually just high on their own supply. I don't think its endemic to scifi, but its endemic to the people that scifi tends to attract.
>how to design fantasy level: lol just make some woods
>hiw to design scifi level: alien planets, complex cities
Each planet you visit is defined by the one location on the planet you go to that one regional culture. Each planet will end up having languages and cultures that have more in common with each other than cultures in the real world. So it is generally redundant even when you are blowing up planets (nuking a country but on a larger scale) or discussing alien overlords (just colonisation but in the future).
There is rarely a good reason to do multiple planets as one planet can generally have varied enough environments for whatever wacky ideas you want to come up with unless earth is actually in the game and you want to come up with scientifically rational arguments for all of your theoretical biomes.
So the focus of a sci fi should really be space travel, living on a space ship and space colonies
You can forget about it after Starfield flopping. Mass Effect 4 will flop even harder and the hundred year reign of fantasy slop will start again
>best recent space game is a capeshit license game
how did this happen?
>11/10 tomboy transforms into a toxic hair prostitute at the end
many such cases
The moronation from fantasy gays and casuals who have watched star wars once in this thread is staggering. Please leave and never return
cus sci fi sucks ass, i wanna hit other players with swords and take their shit