October 24, 2023 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Starfield Play Journal #14 - Citizenship Achieved
Yeah, I'm still somehow playing Starfield on my tired hours to see what weird plot stuff happens next on anything but the main quest. I think everyone's moved on to... whatever the most recent big game is. Spider-Man 2 the Not Movie Game for PS5 exclusively I guess. So everyone else just has a PS5 I guess. But not me, I'm playing an Xbox Exclusive. On PC, because Game Pass also has PC games and other marketing slogans, etc. Anyway, this chunk of gameplay was focused on the Service Guarantees Citizenship questline I did while stopped over in their capitol city. Would you like to know more? Do you even care to know more? Are you even concerned about weird early-mid sidequest plot twists being revealed?
This one started by running over to the woman from the meat processing plant waiting outside of the big tall government building spire. She just drops this bombshell immediately about being a modified clone sorta of an infamous general in the recent Colony War and I had to take a minute to process that plot twist just being suddenly out there without much lead-up, if there was any. Imagine waking up and being all "I should tell that randomly helpful guy who always wears a spacesuit that I'm the gender-bent not-quite-clone of a war criminal". Anyway, after that was a board meeting with the government heads, where while I would have loved to push for mechs being playable, I had to convince them to allow access to grabbing some old research data from the forbidden knowledge archives. And it was actually going well because I somehow immediately swayed them in favor with one sentence, but then the plot decided, no, we need a real reason for them to approve it, let's blow up the city! Or at least part of it.
Long story short we had to run down to the spaceport part and fight off some Terrormorphs, but before that there was a section of having to use an EM weapon to knock out people who were being sent into a frenzy from some power they have, and if the player character gets hit by that power there's a bunch of hallucination voices saying things. I still had the EM rifle I was using on the Ryujin quests on me, but I also had Vasco with me this time, who was shooting the people with very harmful lasers and causing them to enter the "essential kneeling pose" because they were scripted to not actually die there, so after which I had to then shoot them out of the kneeling pose into the unconscious ragdoll phase the game was after.
I was then tasked with getting approval from the other two factions by visiting the local embassies. I managed to talk my way to getting the Freestar approval after attempting the stealth route and that falling apart because I had to fight off every guard in the building otherwise, but the Va'ruun faction or however that's spelled, the one that's not really present aside from the offshoots who murder everyone, was some weird wander through a foggy office full of murderbots. That one took less convincing due to the whole having to find someone stuck in a weird building. And once again the "interesting location is a quest location" theory was proven right because I'd been to the Archives before while wandering through random doors, just not able to go in without the whole security sequence at the end of this leg of the questline.
Once that was taken care of, the Quest for Citizenship finally concluded on a really high up balcony on the government spire. The UC just has a thing for people swearing on balconies I guess. But I have a thing for pushing NPCs off balconies with physics that had to have come from prior Bethesda games, and having a similar power here, I had to give it the good quicksave-then-shove try a few times. I managed to get this particular NPC to go flying off the top of the building before sliding and tumbling down the curved slope and somehow landing safely on the ground below thanks to the Essential system, something I surely would have done more if I was recording anything. I feel like they were practically begging for this to happen and it would probably be an ideal place to bring the Adoring Fan if I was going to recreate ancient YouTube videos.
With my guaranteed citizenship acquired, I went for the one property for sale in this whole sparkly future city, a dingy apartment in the underground. Sure says a lot about society probably. I generally live out of my ship anyway and only return to the Lodge to dump random items I find for later. Of course the actual questline isn't done yet, and I was led to go to the super secret basement of the government building to talk to a prisoner there, who turned out to be a long-thought-dead war criminal general guy from the Colony War, the same "father" to the other NPC I'd been working with. After asking him about his war crimes and him saying that they weren't as bad as they seemed, he told me to go murder some mech weapons specialist who went missing, as his job as an imprisoned war criminal involves tracking down other war criminals. Now, the thing about that is I'd actually like to bring mechs back to stomp all over the city, and if this requires modding content and/or concepts from this game into a proper mech game then so be it. If there's any possible way I could figure out how to put stuff into some version of MechWarrior 2 then that'd be awesome.