It's a planetary colony run by Space Temu and other corpos in a joint venture, with their corporate logos plastered all over everything, It's not surprising to have that kind of result; think of the purchase and transportation costs they saved!
Thing is, there wasn't much in the original games to suggest that the Tau Ceti colony was being built in such a slapdash way. Granted, a lot of this is speculation and putting together what little you get from the terminals on the backstory, but the secret plans for the colony were to establish a new, prosperous state away from Earth's control, not to mention sufficiently armed and able to defend itself should Earth attempt to bring them back into the fold (the weapon caches on board the Marathon, the battleroids, the Marathon itself (described as effectively invulnerable to most UESC space attacks due to its size)). These were plans set in motion over the course of years, and figures like Strauss would not have wanted to cheap out by going with the lowest bidder when so much was at stake. Maybe you could make the argument that they were desperate enough to take whatever they could get, but the implications are that this was a well-funded secret society that would spare no expense to achieve their goals.
Now, I will
also grant that maybe that's just how future colonies are started, by dropping prefabs and using them as temporary shelters until more permanent structures can be built. But if that's the case, why do they not look like places people would actually live? Again, I'm going to point to Destiny, where the remnants of old pre-Collapse space colonies still look and feel like sturdy, lived-in spaces, and not neon-splattered junk piles. If you're going to build a colony on a planet a three hundred years' journey away from Earth, you're going to want to give your colonists someplace they actually are going to want to live if you want the colony to thrive.
Or maybe this game is just one of the infinite alternate timelines and the old games' stories don't matter for this one.
This is the crux of my issue with nu-Marathon, where they took a world with an interesting and multi-layered story and pretty much ignored all of it for generic "dude corporations bad dude wacky AI dude cyberpunk dude" schlock. MIDA isn't a facet of a secret society, it's just a bunch of kids spouting generic anti-corpo slogans. Tau Ceti isn't the next step in a grand master plan spanning centuries, it's a pile of junk practically set up to fail. Cyberpunk as a genre is already getting played out at this point, so it makes this game even further behind the curve. It's such a waste.
I miss Greg Kirkpatrick. I wonder what he's up to these days.
