> Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all th

> Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email. Nothing but landline phones and voice recorders. The landline phones are huge panel things that look like something from the 1970s (and/or Star Wars). I think the lack of maps is heavily dependent on that weird tech baseline they were trying to hit. They seemed to have wanted "60s/70s tech plus FTL" and the Constellation 70s ideal of a smart watch (a space "diver's watch") to be nearly as "diegetic" for game UI as the Fallout "pipboy" as the grand central UI for everything. But then they waffled and included a ton of menus and couldn't decide how much to outright own that they seemed to have wanted a retro-future vision rather than true futurism. (But also possibly disagreed on that internally and never quite decided what they were trying to do with the tech level. It feels inconsistent from outside.) It's very hard for me not to compare here to Outer Worlds with a similar team making similar technology decisions but actually owning them and following them to more absurd lengths. I feel like Outer Worlds had a lot more fun with its technology decisions because it knew it wanted to truly own "Fallout but Space Travel". Starfield has so many moments where it acts like it wants to be "Fallout but Space Travel" but then pulls some punches and just absolutely waffles. Maybe some of it is because they also wanted to add Cyberpunk elements from a decade or three later (the Ryujin storyline, for instance) and sticking to just one retro-future alone wasn't interesting enough for (some of) the team. Had Starfield truly owned 60s/70s retro future maybe there would have been Alien/Aliens-style maps with all those cool, swooping simple green vectors (more Tron-like perhaps than the "pipboy" 40s/50s CRT maps). There's a lot to mine in real world NASA moon maps from the 60s, but those were all paper and many hand-drawn elements. (Relatedly, Outer Worlds gave us fun "paper" tourist maps as a part of their retro playfulness.) I think in waffling about whether or not Starfield was retro-future they couldn't figure out how maps would even look, because they couldn't decide on (or perhaps agree on?) the appropriate tech level in the first place, and gave up for "story reasons" that they couldn't fit in maps.