My Impressions of the City of Cydonia in the Starfield game

 

Cydonia: The Essence of Starfield's Nasapunk Aesthetics

Starfield is one of those kinds of games that seems to be attracting lots of attention from many people. Over the past couple of weeks, there has been alot of interest in talking about this game, even from people who do not ordinarily talk about video games. Generally speaking, the YouTube aristocracy has been very harsh on this game. They have talked about the generic nature of the game and that it lacks the flavor or character of games such as Outer Worlds or Mass Effect. These are all valid points. I can understand where they are coming from when they are talking about the generic nature of the game. However, one has to understand that the game was meant to have this sort of realism. Real-life is not always interesting in its style and Starfield has this in spades. However, we can get some incredible insights into what it means to live in space through using more realism in such games. There is no better place to understand this design philosophy than the city of Cydonia on Mars.

The city of Cydonia is an interesting aspect to Starfield's world-building. In comparison with most Science-Fiction, Mars is seen as a backwater planet compared to Jemison, which is home to headquarters of the United Colonies, the strongest faction in the game. Mars is a symbol of the past of space exploration, before the invention of the gravity drives that changed everything. Cydonia has a the air of being a place out of time, a place that is a symbol to man's desire to conquer space rather than rest on its laurels. In many ways, the city of Neon. represents the current desires of man better than Cydonia. Neon is the place where money does not sleep, and Cydonia instead represents the opposite of that. It is a place of industry rather than being a place of commerce.

When one enters Cydonia from the outside, one can see that it is a city of industry in the traditional sense. There are several spaceships at the spaceport and there are also many areas of industry in the colony. The city has two major industries and one can see those demographics of the citizens in the urban area. Most of the people who meet in Cydonia are either people who have been there for generations since the 2050 colonization or miners who are seem to people looking to make their fortune with getting their hands dirty with the laser cutters. 

Cydonia: Rust-belt Blues in Space

It has vibes of being reminiscent to the rust belt in the United States. I speculate that the Bethesda team probably used some metaphors in their designing of these cities to get more grounded in the real world. That's way you get people to understand their environments. 

It seems like to me that Bethesda wasn't trying to make cities seem like a parody or a joke. This was very common in the Fallout games, with cities like Diamond City being a mix of a joke and serious. This is one of the reasons that I find it hard to return to those games.

However, in Starfield, the studio was looking for realism over slapstick humor. The Outer Worlds seemed to marry the realistic pretensions of science-fiction with poking fun at Corporate America. Starfield aims for more of the former than the latter. While some elements of the game, like the synthetic cubical cuisine known as Chunks could be seen as satire, Bethesda seems to leave more to the player than the narrative making it about satire. 

In comparison with the cities in Skyrim, the cities that I have seen so far in Starfield so far surpass what I see in Skyrim. The only city that had any character in Starfield was probably Solitude, as it was actually designed in a way that made it seem like it was a defensive structure and not just a random city that had been placed there for the sake of gameplay. 

Cydonia, while it is not as nice as New Atlantis is a city that seems functional and has a purpose. While people may say that it seems boring, I believe that Cydonia is a testament to the Nasapunk style of Starfield. While many players are jaded about the way how video games are being made these days, this game by Bethesda shows that they at least understand what they were trying to achieve with Starfield. We have to understand that this game is huge and scale and what Bethesda has managed to achieve with this game is incredible.