October 2, 2023 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Starfield Play Journal #11 - Let's Not Be Cops
I guess my start to being a pirate in Starfield was becoming a debt collector. Whether or not that counts as being sidetracked depends what you think. I just ran into a tall bank building and they wanted me to find some guy on a remote planet, one that just happened to have one of the artifact castles. This was just after fixing some guy's tree problem again, possibly for good this time, because somehow that quest chain went on a while. Things get a little more criminal after the break here... kind of.
Being tired of the super future clean city planet once again, I went to the cyberpunk planet to follow up on some mission I picked up there much earlier about talking to some guy in jail, where there were just illegal goods sitting out in the open so I grabbed those on my way out to sell at a nearby shop. He directed me to run packages for some other guy, which also involved learning how to make super drugs from bins of random chemicals in a weirdly inefficient manner of doing them one at a time and running between places while only taking the very specific amount of components, and now I can just make the drugs anywhere if I have all the parts. Though I still feel like that would make less cash than my usual playstyle of selling all the weapons dropped by whoever I've had to fight during every other quest, as well as the piles of ammo I trade for when the store runs out of money for my loot. Also the drug is legal only in the cyberpunk city so it's not entirely illegal business I guess?
I also ended up running supplies for a doctor having to treat everyone who was addicted to that very drug that last quest focused on, so that totally balances everything out.
After that, I ended up joining a gang, but one that was apparently fighting a worse and more violent one, so even that had kind of a good guy spin to clean up the streets and such. Somehow that quest chain was about 70/30 on violent to nonviolent outcomes, and the persuasion thing has been working out surprisingly often for largely picking the big red difficult numbers. Then the ending quest confused me because it seemed like there was a clear scam offer to "ascend from the streets" or something, but everyone somehow agreed that it was fine and then it actually may have been a legit offer? I'm still doubtful about that story beat but at least I got cool stuff from it. Quest writing I guess.
At the end in "just one more quest" mode while figuring out which of the random "talk to this person" pointers I got were in town, I helped some guy in a store get revenge for someone painting his robot friend with a bunch of graffiti. It was another member of that gang I fought against while with that other gang, and I once again just talked my way out of a fight somehow. So that's pretty much that session. No idea if/when I'll pick up the actual Cyberpunk game.