Nope. That and the critical bugs fixes are still MIA.
Daggerfall in SPAAACE - Starfield
- Thread starter Hykal94
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Nope. That and the critical bugs fixes are still MIA.
Is Aurora illegal elsewhere? Exporting it off-planet is made illegal by Neon, but I'm not sure they can declare it illegal once it's left the planet.
Yes. It's a banned drug in the FSC and UC
So the idea here is that somebody starts making this hot new drug and decides to make their market a thousand times smaller than it could be by making it exclusively local? I mean, I guess it makes sense if the boss just had a fetish for running resorts and didn't have to take constructive criticism from anyone.
As previously pointed out, tourism and industrial cyberpunk nightmare aren't super good friends. And tourism can't take more than a small tithe off the overall trading system's economy, so it's not going to be the pillar that holds up The Biggest City.
Let me ask you this: do they? Mostly what I see is they open new offices, but don't close the old offices in any hurry.
Firing all your R&D people if they don't move to a different star system under a different government is a great way to hand a lot of your R&D people to a competitor who is not currently abandoning their existing location. And to ruin every single project in progress as you lose key people scattershot throughout your organization.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
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There is literally only one place where drug can be made. There is literally only one place where the drug is illegal.
Imagine, for a second, that there is marijuana ban on entire continent. Suddenly, one city, where marijuana can be grown, gets to make it legal to own and smoke it. You just can't take it away. Do you really think that there is no tourism to this new place that offers exclusive exprience?
Like, stop for a second and read the lore. I swear half of these complaints are basically "but I didn't read the lore, so I assume there is no reason and I assume it's something else".
Neon isn't "The Biggest City". It's phyiscally can't, because it's still a fishing rig. It has very restricted space. FFS, do you even know what Neon is? Or are you just reading info from some site? And it's cyberpunk city, but it's not cyberpunk nightmare. Not sure where the hell you got that, unless it's just people saying "LOL it's copy of Cyberpunk 2077" and you unironically just repeating that claim without any thought.
My mom lost her job because her duties were transfered elsewhere. In fact, all the jobs similar to what she did (foreign sales) were all transfered to same location. All across the country.
Yes, yes they very much close whatever they don't need and move stuff to where they want. There was no need to centralize, corporate just decided that instead of each location having their own sales manager who knew what the fuck was happening and what could be done, they should have bunch of people far away from the actual sites doing the sales.
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- The Hague
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- He/Him
- Location
- The Hague
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- He/Him
Apart from this being an absolutely daft thing to complain about to begin with as one of the fun things about science fiction is people living in unusual places, the entire basis of complaint is fucking wrong. Volii Alpha has a breathable atmosphere, infinite amounts of water, and is run by a seafood corporation. People live in less hospitable places ON EARTH.
I think the amount of tourism is an invisibly small share of sales compared to the huge amount of black market exportation in your hypothetical, because nearly everyone who wants the drug doesn't want to have to travel internationally every time they want it.
The distinction is?
Pretending 'a huge central city wouldn't be here' is the same as 'nobody would live here' is certainly convenient I guess.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
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It's quite easy to clamp down on black market when there is literally only one way off the system, there is only one landing site and you control the only access to it. All while everyone else is also clamping down on said smuggling.
You seem to be utterly ignoring the actual situation in favor of thinking that drug trade in Settled Systems is same as US-Mexican border where there is shit ton of unguarded desert.
Tell me again places in real life, that rely on tourism, manage to work? Since clearly by your superior world building, it is impossible for a resort to work. It is impossible for people to travel to resort site for unique experience.
What distinction does "fantasy" and "horror fantasy" have again?
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- The Hague
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Have you heard of a place called 'Dubai'
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
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Listen gaming is here to help us escape our flaccid cyberpunk real word why would you do this
Yes, if Neon authorities want to stop export they might well be able to. The question is why do they want that? That's a bizarre way to use exclusive production of an in-demand good. That is like France deciding to prohibit the export of Brie cheese or Champaign on the theory that making people come to them was better than selling stuff.
Most of them work badly. Tourism and hospitality as the dominant portion of an economy seems to sort of work if you're Las Vegas, or if you're only trying to barely keep a tiny town afloat.
Obviously, we're going for Las Vegas here, but that again relies on a big world of big-spending tourists. Which you're saying took off at a time where the sparse-looking setting was even sparser. That's the complaint, isn't it?
If you make a happy nice setting and call it cyberpunk, you've committed a blatant labeling error.
Literally an international trade center? Yeah, it's almost like I talked about how trade happens for reasons and those reasons are missing. Neon isn't a strategically located interstellar shipping port, is it?
Why do any of the shopkeepers, who hate it there, stay on Neon? Like there's nothing keeping a good chunk of the population on neon. Neon fucking sucks. It's a cyberpunk city in a settin with MUCH better alternatives. And Neon has an obvious middle class and petite bourgeois who hate it there. Why are they there? Why is anyone with even little amount of affluence on Neon?
Neon should not be a great city. It should be, at most, a company town with a resort attached. That's what neon supports.
Neon should not be a great city. It should be, at most, a company town with a resort attached. That's what neon supports.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
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...Okay, how difficult is this to explain: Aurora is illegal across the Settled Systems. It's not matter of "does Neon want to export", it's matter of "sure, Neon could export it to some random no-name settlement in middle of nowhere, but you can't deliver it to places where there might be actual customer base".
Tourism is part of the economy. Not the economy. Again: fishing, tourism, corporations in general? These all come together. FFS, Xenofresh still runs fishing business, you know, the founding business of the Neon.
Is Neon nice? No. But neither is it a "nightmare". It's standard cyberpunk, in the same vein as original ones, instead of modern ultraedgy "everything sucks".
Okay, let me ask you: have you actually played the game, or visited Neon in the game? Or are you just reading complaints off from some site that also whines about pronouns being a thing?
Why do people work sweatshops in real life instead of moving somewhere else? Why do small businesses who struggle not pack up and move somewhere else?
Oh right, debts and moving away cost money. That might be the reason. Also, it's literally a company town. There is no city council, there is Xenofresh Incorporated. Everyone is under the thumbs of corporations.
I already mentioned how FC sells you oligarchy and calls it freedom.
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That's easy to explain, but you're not explaining why it suddenly matters when nearly all modern Earth drug trade is illegal on the selling side and yet extremely prolific. Were you trying to claim that the fundamentals of space trade in Starfield make drug smuggling impractical in general? Instead of just that Neon itself could be locked down? That seems unlikely.
You've presented tourism and the drug non-trade as what made Neon take off. If you're now saying they're a minor aspect of the economy, okay, but some consistency would be nice.
If you don't think "everything sucks" in the original ones, I have major questions about your reading of Gibson.
I'm just reading mostly your posts, and arguing with what you said in them.
I have not played the game, and may never play the game considering I don't think I've played a Bethesda game since literally Morrowind.
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One of the thing I've realised as I've gotten older is that we walk in the shadow cast by needless nitpickers who supposed that just because they didn't get something that this represented some deficiency in the work, rather than a failure on their part to engage with the narrative. I know this because I was a participant in the same rituals. That someone does not engage with a narrative is not really an issue, that's just how it is when it comes to media, but it sure can make a discussion thread tiresome.
Take Neon for example. At a very basic level it exists in the game because during a concepting phase for environments to explore it struck some level of the team or several levels of the team as one of the better ones. It keys off some classic cyberpunk aesthetics, but with some distinctive twists that normally would not be possible on Earth: cyberpunk is often known for rain, so Volii Alpha is perpetually shrouded in storms which contribute to the theme while also feeding into the design, with its lightning absorbing shroud being one of its most distinctive features. Night City by way of Kamino. From a game development perspective it's basically perfect, but you've got to justify it to some extent, but the theme provides the answer: put simply, some people are making lots of money out of it.
Neon's backstory is that a fishing corporation invested in an exploratory mission and the guy in charge saw an opportunity to be more than the CEO of fishing corporation. By setting Neon up as a low regulation tax haven, Xenofresh attracted corporate partners who mainly produce high technology for export (in the game the most prominent example of this is Ryujin's commercial neural electronics), and by building it as some kind of Space Amsterdam it makes it appealing to move there for well monied corporate types. As far as justifications go this is hardly some outrageous thing. No more unbelievable than, say, Las Vegas.
And for the most part is does hold up, so long as you're willing to give the game the smallest benefit of the doubt, as opposed to acting like Todd Howard personally killed your dog. It's not as if you're supposed to think it's some kind of flawlessly executed and sensible colonisation project, the place is extremely corrupt and the whole vibe is of a black hole that must be constantly fed. However if you put in a little work you'll find that most of the complaints have less to stand on. Case in point:
Volii is one of the main routes through to south east section of the star map.
Case in point:
Because they don't really have anywhere else to go. Neon's isolation and its sense of enclosure is immediately apparent from the moment you first touch down. In order to leave Neon they would have to leave Volii Alpha, with all the cost and uncertainty that implies. And before you say, ah, but space travel is easy in Starfield, that is not entirely true: it is easy for the player, and it is common in the setting, but it is not necessarily easy for everyone. Certainly it would probably be pretty difficult for people who have sunk their entire lives into businesses to just pack up and shift to another world, where there is no guarantee that they would be able to put food on the table. Why do people live on Neon? Why do people live in places they hate in real life? That's hardly uncommon.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
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Okay, so you don't know anything about Neon or the setting. Yet, you feel like you can argue how it should be?
This is... I honestly know what to call it that doesn't result in infraction. It's essentially just complaining for sake of complaining, nitpicking for sake of nitpicking without actually nitpicking because you don't know anything about the setting, all while ignoring every single explanation that has been given.
Quite honestly, this admission right here cast your entire line of questioning as one of bad faith.
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Then why are you arguing about it? You're wasting everyone's time, including your own. Go find something else to do.
I do wonder if there are people commuting to work from different planets. Space travel seems pretty cheap in the setting.
You see tours and kids on field trips, a grandma deciding to just wander around meeting strangers isn't considered exhorbitantly wealthy for being able to afford that, and in the ship building quest the person suggesting a budget dual-family camper ship wasn't laughed out of the room.
I haven't seen how much "real time" gravity drives take, so how close to instantaneous it actually is if you don't just see a loading screen is unknown to me.
It seems perfectly plausible that there could be a decent sized population that actually commutes from a different planet.
You see tours and kids on field trips, a grandma deciding to just wander around meeting strangers isn't considered exhorbitantly wealthy for being able to afford that, and in the ship building quest the person suggesting a budget dual-family camper ship wasn't laughed out of the room.
I haven't seen how much "real time" gravity drives take, so how close to instantaneous it actually is if you don't just see a loading screen is unknown to me.
It seems perfectly plausible that there could be a decent sized population that actually commutes from a different planet.
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There is definitely a pretty large spacefaring population in the Settled Systems and there's enough space travel that interplanetary tourism isn't some weird thing. However some of the difficulty and expense of space travel is heavily abstracted for QOL purposes, like fuel. We also see that the non-spacefaring population is probably much larger: to use an example from the very early part of the game, you are a miner in a fairly large operation, but impliedly everyone was brought there by the company and has to live on site. In some way similar to FIFO mining work in Australia, though much more controlled by the company.
It's definitely more accessible to the general public than, say, Mass Effect where the private spaceship is only very lightly alluded to and never depicted (the closest you get is a comedy second hand dealership in the second game and a couple of crashed vehicles in the first), but perhaps not as accessible as, say, Star Wars, where Obi Wan sells Luke's shitty car with the intention of buying a spaceship. I'm not sure what a good point of real world comparison would be, it's not quite at the level of owning a helicopter, but in that range, perhaps. And certainly more depending on where you shop. Obviously if you pick up something from Deimos you are buying directly from the UC's main military contractor lol
- Location
- Singapore
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- Singular They
I'm not sure what "addiction rate" means specifically, so apologies if I'm interpreting it incorrectly. But if you're referring to how addictive Aurora is, we do know Aurora is addictive, and part of the consequences of Aurora addiction in general society is a steady influx of people who visit Neon, get addicted to Aurora, spend all their money on more Aurora, and then can't get off the planet.
According to the doctor at Reliant Medical, short-term Aurora addiction is fully treatable/curable, presumably by the same methods that Addichrone works. Long-term Aurora addiction is much more difficult to treat, if not impossible, and has other serious health issues.
Despite all that, people still go to Neon to try Aurora. I strongly suspect it's part of the allure of the forbidden, possibly helped along by deliberate advertising from Neon. Even Cora knows about the existence of Aurora, and that it's a drug that people like to take.
If I might speculate, I would believe it if Benjamin Bayu is fully aware of attempts to smuggle Aurora out of Neon, and allows some amount of it, entirely so more people would hear of it, even if they never manage to try it outside of Neon.
It does seem like owning a personal spaceship is like owning a more expensive bus or van. Part of it might be due to the specialization of each manufacturer, with only Stroud-Ecklund even attempting to get into the mid-range consumer market. And that's only if you steer the associated questline ("Overdesigned") to an affordable Kepler-S variation.
(Tangentially, I'm curious what Walter says if you pick the "expensive everything" Kepler-R. He likes the Kepler-S.)
Deimos is "military-grade", both in the sense of being primarily a military contractor, as well as marketing to the sort of people to whom "military-grade" is a selling point. HopeTech advertises itself as "trucks in space", for the industrial logistics market and those who want that aesthetic. Taiyo is firmly in the "luxury style" upper-end market. And Stroud-Ecklund is, as mentioned, still finding its own niche, while claiming "innovation" as its vague tagline.
I don't know what the current state of Nova Galactic is. They're the oldest manufacturer, but also almost entirely defunct (Nova Galactic Staryards is abandoned, and the Nova Galactic specific vendor is the generic Ship Technician at New Homestead), yet Nova Galactic ships and parts are everywhere. It feels like if a random spacecraft is "donated via charity" or "bought third-hand", it's Nova Galactic.
So you have people or organizations rich enough to buy their own personal spaceships, but most people use communal spaceships like the schoolbus or pilgrimage random encounters. Or the "company car" variations like the scientist with the wonky grav drive.
And then there's Trident cruises, who I think are their own manufacturers? But that's in the "luxury for rent" market, so not really personal consumers.
- Location
- Luton Airport
Yeah, on earth. As opposed to "metal fishing rig, every single part of which had to be imported from another planet, every new bit of construction (like big corporate towers) has to be imported. In fact, anything you can't make out of a combination of water, fish and electricity, you have to import".
Neon as set up is fine as a minimally manned extractive outpost that was expensive to set up, but exports vast amounts of seafood in return, then found superdrug in one of the fish which it also exports.
However, that doesn't jump naturally to Ibiza-Wall Street hybrid.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
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As opposed to... you know... every single colony out there? Like, seriously. Doesn't matter what colony we are talking about, unless they start massive local industries as a first thing, they are going to have to import a lot of stuff. Because no colony starts as self-sufficient.
Also, I am going to point out that very few real world cities can produce goods for their own needs, they import shit ton of stuff to fuel construction.
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- The Hague
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Literally every interplanetary colony has to start from nothing lol