Starfield's rotoscoped animated advert pokes fun at hoarding players

And the adoring fan

If you spend your days refreshing the YouTube homepage in lieu of doing work, like I do, you might have at some point come across the work of Joel Haver. Haver makes, among other things, comedic rotoscoped animations riffing on science fiction and video game tropes.

It makes sense that Bethesda would have tapped him up to take the mick out ofStarfield, then, given it combines both those tropes into a mockable whole.

Here’s the six-minute short that Haver (and team) put together:

As the title suggests, the animation tells the story of a crew of NPC pirates who have been following the player across the galaxy, assuming that his ship is full of valuable treasure. It is not.

If you’re not familiar with it, rotoscoping is a form of animation created by tracing on top of real world footage. It’s perhaps most associated with early Disney films and Ralph Bakshi’s Lord Of The Rings, but it pops up in a lot of places. I like Richard Linklater’s use of it in Waking Life, for example. Haver’s own process involvesa lot of automationand the results are fun.

I enjoyed the above short a lot more than I’m enjoyingStarfielditself. I’m only three hours in, though. Alice B has played much more for theStarfield reviewand found her way towards having some fun with it, albeit with lots of caveats and awkward systems along the way. And not the fun kind of Bethesda awkwardness depicted above, either.