I've got a bit of a question for you all. I got into an argument with someone about settings. He wants to do a game with a moon setting(not OUR moon). This would be a habitat for a species, by the by. I think a gray boring crater-ridden terrain is pretty boring, and he agreed. So we started talking about ways to create a terrain that is still has the beauty and interest of Earth, but still reads as a moon instead of Earth.
He thinks, however, that it's perfectly fine to populate the setting with lots of green grass, blue water, brown dirt, red lava and such. He says that it would be better to have different cultures and climates to portray an alien world.
I, however, had the idea of change the colors of the world. Why does the water have to be blue? Why does the water have to be water we know as water? Why does the grass have to be green? I figured we could change the overall colors of the world to show that it's a totally different world other than Earth, but still have features people are familiar with. Of course, this would also have fictional vegetation and all.
He was very against the idea though, as he has the idea that people don't wont relate if it isn't like Earth. It's something I tend to hate in video games. No matter how far away the planet is from Earth, whether it's lightyears or dimensions, it still looks like Earth. The plants may be fictitious, but they tend to still be green, or as though you could pluck them out of the game and put them on Earth and they'd fit in fine. It's also a mindset I see in scientists a lot, where they think whatever life that may be out there in the universe follows the same rules as life on Earth. I dunno, I tend to really disagree that people won't see beauty in a setting if it doesn't have the same colors people associate with Earth. Am I wrong in this?