This is like mildly racist right?

At its core, the Gilligan’s Island model relies on the lagoon as its main source of conflict – something floats in, the castaways have to deal with it. The lagoon remains constant, the things in it change. Most ship-based Star Treks are anti-Gilligans Island shows in so far as they are what’s floating into someone else’s lagoon. They remain constant, the lagoon changes.

If anything, I would say DS9 is the better Gilligan’s Island analogue, with the wormhole acting as the lagoon.

In this sheriff’s office, like several other law enforcement agencies, ranks jump from junior officers (lieutenant, captain) straight to flag rank (1 star for chief deputy, 2 stars for assistant sheriff, 3 stars for under sheriff, 4 stars for sheriff). Just seems like someone really wanted to dress up in a general’s uniform.

Something really strange about American police forces is their use of military rank insignia. Here we have an elected official overseeing a civilian law enforcement agency of ~4000 personnel wearing the rank insignia of a 4-Star general.

I assume it’s possible, but will BGS commit the time and resources to overhauling their Point of Interest system?

The issue comes down to environmental storytelling. I can travel to any planet in the galaxy and have a good chance of encountering a Science Tower filled with Space Pirates, and in that tower, there will be the same 5 terminals with 2 or 3 slice of life emails. And I can do this multiple times. The only thing that changes is the loot tables and the enemy levels.

How can we fix that? Can you create multiple engaging storylines that populate in the terminals and in the environment at random? Can you create a storyline that spans multiple locations on a planet and as you uncover more and more it leads you to a handcrafted POI with a unique reward?

Fallout 3 did this in a more basic way with its A/B random encounters. And that mechanic added excitement and unpredictability to the world.

Or can you create procedurally generated locations and dungeons? As it stands, a landscape is just populated with a bunch of POIs that never deviate from their blueprint.

The outpost building system would, from a layman’s perspective, lend itself to procedurally generated locations.

I don’t think we’ll see any of that patched in since there’s no money in it.

I don’t think I’ll be returning to Starfield until they fix the underlying issue: the infinite pond of shallow exploration that yields no rewards for exploring the next point of interest other than random generic loot.

I am still bitter we never got a Switch sports frisbee golf.

Well, every shot from 1973 to 2001 at least.

This was briefly mentioned during the 25th anniversary stream – they apologized to an astronaut for accusing them of eating a tomato.

Scale modeling – you can pick up a cheap kit at a big box craft store with some paint and glue for $40. Before you know it, you’re importing specialty kits from Japan, rigging up a spray booth in your basement for your airbrush, and taking trips to air museums to get reference photos of the zinc chromate primer for a cockpit interior.