October 22, 2023 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Starfield Play Journal #13 - I'm doing my part, matey!
Imagine hating a game so much you end up spending months writing a roughly 12 billion word essay/rant/manifesto/thing on how bad Starfield and its developing company's design philosophy are, but instead I'm deciding to have a whack at some kind of fun seeing for myself what's still hiding in plain sight in this weird mess, whenever I'm not up for a more involving game, despite the whole "I don't know what's going on with the leveling and crafting systems redundancies" for one thing. I mean, at least it's not one of those "THIS GAME IS THE WORST EVER AND YOU ARE BAD FOR PLAYING IT" YouTube videos with a terribly shopped expression and a million red circle arrows. I also feel like this would end up being the last modern Bethesda-developed game I'll end up playing at this rate (I skipped Fallout 76 as well even if that was more for that being multiplayer-only). Anyway, while I'm still on this thanks to Game Pass not running out until later next year, my quest to become a space pirate at last took a detour into actually starting, and it happened while on the way to getting in with the United Colonies military-type-thingy, where Service Guarantees Citizenship. Would you like to know more?
I went down to the local recruiting office in Future Space City for the hell of it and was led down a hallway telling their side of all the wars they got into and how good their military is versus the savage tactics of their opponents. After that was immediately a flight simulator that pretty much just bootlegs the concept of the "Kobayashi Maru" thing, including an "impossible" tier that, instead of being forced into a tactical situation weighing life and death and seeing how someone acts when faced with a no-win scenario, is just more spaceship shooting. Naturally I used every tool at my disposal, including hacking the really convenient computer right next to the cockpit to spawn "debug" things and also "hacking" the difficulty setting in the game settings because I just wanted to see what would happen since that pretty much only changes how much damage is done versus taken. Long story short it also bootlegs the whole "cheating at the Kobayashi Maru" thing. Also the game crashed once during the space fight stuff. I'll be honest, the rarity of crashes I've encountered in this game is a welcome development given usual launch-window stuff or PC versions of console-focused games in general.
The first assignment was a routine "bring supplies to place" thing, which turned out to take place on that abandoned meat factory I found on a planet while doing the main quest way back. So now I wonder if the more interesting landmarks I've seen will just turn out to be part of a later quest instead of "here's a neat thing of no quest significance, just a fun thing". Anyway, the quest turned into something straight out of Aliens, complete with beeping proximity thingy, all while trying to sneak around and activate turrets to murder the super monster called a Terrormorph. Even the name is bootlegged.
The next step in that questline took me to Mars again, which just happened to coincide with another mission coming from the UC, which is to go undercover as a double agent working with the space pirates. The initiation involved trying to sell a bunch of space drugs the UC just happened to have on hand, which for all I could tell didn't actually show up in my ship cargo as even a plot-related item unlike the supplies I was told to bring to the meat processing planet, to draw out the pirates, who wanted me to shake down some random guy who I just told to run off and cover the debt myself because I'm loaded. Somehow this is sufficient enough to get a potential audience with the King of the Pirates I guess.
After wrapping up the other UC quest on Mars that involved finding a guy through one of three methods, and I chose the one that involved taking care of a bandit dungeon, which turned out to be where the guy was hidden once I went all the way back to town and got a key to unlock a door there, and then it took me a good while to find him because the hallway the door was in was dark and the "go here, idiot" arrows weren't working to point me to it, I went to become more of a space pirate. The next initiation test involved murdering some random guy on a random ship. That was easily resolved by not murdering the guy and telling the people on the ship to just drop him off at a random place because that somehow also works, and then doing a little spaceship shooty on returning to the pirate recruiter. After that I'm somehow generally officially a space pirate.
Before heading to their base to make it official, I had a weird detour where, after fighting some space bandits in orbit, I tried stealing an enemy ship on a planet I stopped by on the way, because you have to at least visit a system before jumping through it, and the ship took off while I was on it, and in the end I couldn't take it for myself because my pilot skill points were too low. Instead I looted as much from it as possible, having to drop some off in its cargo hold to... somehow fast travel back to the planet where my ship was without being able to fly the ship, then fly my ship back the ship I couldn't steal, which the game helpfully left in orbit, and I grabbed the rest of the loot before blowing it up because I needed the XP to be able to steal other ships. This is peak gaming I guess.
After that, I went to the secret-not-secret space pirate space station, known as the Key, and met the vendors and a hacker with a bomb stuck in him for "loyalty", as well as the current King of the Pirates. My first pirate assignment was to search for clues to a secret treasure on the planet directly below the space station and also fight swarms of local beasts with a recently acquired full auto somehow poisonous (or venomous?) rifle from the Mars mines in true Aliens style, minus the beeping encounter thing, while navigating an abandoned space prison, known as the Lock. The pirates had made it well known that they knew about the terrible naming scheme and blamed the original UC owners.
Because we'd somehow ended up far from where we started by the time my assigned partner both thought up and abandoned a plan to take over as King of the Pirates, I ended up grabbing an abandoned prison transport ship that had pretty much no frills, not even a shield, so I fixed it up with said frills, including some shielded cargo space, once I got back to the space station. Inevitably I swapped back to the Stargle before leaving for the sake of that still being pretty good as an all-rounder.
Because I had to leave Vasco behind, I had to get him as a follower again since he somehow wasn't sticking with my ship, and he somehow got back to Constellation HQ as well. On the way there, I turned in another debt collection quest for the big bank that I managed to complete unintentionally by fighting those space bandits on the way to the Key, after wondering how that random quest ended up in my list. The one issue I have with that is that you can't be like "Oh, you mean this thing?" when you go to whoever you're supposed to turn it in to, regardless of how sequence-breaky it is. The dialogue overall sometimes alludes to past actions but it's a bit spotty.