August 22, 2024 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Starfield Play Journal #16 - More like... CARfield.
It has been almost a year since I last played a fair bit of this game and apparently all it took was a funny car. I don't remember the last time exactly a Bethesda-developed game had a driveable ground vehicle instead of an automated sequence or someone with a funny hat. I'm also not sure if horses count, so as far as non-horse ground vehicles it may have been as far back as those Terminator DOS games. And it actually works fairly well, a bit like the classic indestructable Warthog with a built-in jump and slightly weirder physics.
As a test with interacting with areas not really made with vehicles in mind, running over crowds of people is hit-or-miss because a lot of the time the car just gets stuck on them, so not quite like the chaos that would happen in GTA games. However the NPCs will flee in terror of this strange new metal machine, sometimes running right into it and even pushing the car around, so at least the pedestrian behavior from some older GTA games is present here. Also I managed to fit the car inside some buildings and got it stuck in an elevator.
I did also end up playing the game itself aside from screwing around with the shiny new car, more on that follows, with late spoilers for the Vanguard questline.
While seeing if I could jump the car into the city of Neon, and I got as far as the lowest part of the city with the run-down looking stuff, I literally ran into an NPC who wanted to give me a quest, so I decided to check it out. Turns out it's that quest I heard about that serves as an intro to a faction made joinable in an update, and whose further quests are paid mods in the fun bucks shop where I would only grab whatever the free ones are at the moment. That's also probably how they'll add more cars if they do that.
After the part of that quest that served as an intro to this bounty hunter scanning thing where finding NPCs marked red triggers an encounter and automatically pays out if they're murdered (which explains why I kept randomly getting money in my vehicle test/rampage in New Atlantis), the quest itself was a fairly standard run through a zero gravity raider kinda station. It also had a weird kinda cliffhanger ending but still had a reward crate and another random ship for the fleet.
Going back to questlines that are fully included in the game, I found that one guy I was meant to find in the space marine storyline when I'd last played almost a year back. I disabled his ship since I just happened to have the zappy guns on the Stargle and then boarded, grabbed the quest item after he had a very long sound-only dramatic death behind a scripted locked door, then looted and blew up the ship for XP because I couldn't steal it (also scripted).
The next quest involved finding a robot on a planet with a lot of old war wreckage on it. The scrappers there gave me a hot tip that the robot I was looking for was hardly any distance away from their base I landed at, even without the car. Just surrounded by various invasive species of monsters, which weren't a problem. Again, even without the car, but that just made it trivial, though the cannon on the car doesn't do a ton of damage so it takes a while to take out the feral bullet sponges with that for that highly-necessary-to-do-anything XP. After fixing the robot, they ran around the area that I'd already mostly cleared out while looking for the parts, probably meant as a display of their firepower, and then we took out a usual sort of small enemy base, just with a boss monster this time.
Back on Mars, I was told about an upcoming choice that I figured would likely come up at the end of the questline, either bringing back weird giraffes with parrot beaks and lots of skin flaps from the brink of extinction, or some kind of biological agent that certainly won't go horribly wrong and result in that artsy Flash game that can only be played once about a biological agent gone horribly wrong. All of this is to stop demonic creatures from wiping out all the colonies. Probably meant to be a less obviously leaning moral choice than that corpo questline about "unleash mind control or don't" thing, but I don't know.
The next stop was HELL PLANET a.k.a. Fallout London or whatever it's actually called. I sure would like to sit down and play Fallout London at some point when I have time and maybe it's been fixed up a bit more. Anyway it's a frozen place full of bullet sponge monsters, so I was given a microgun (because minigun wasn't sci-fi enough) to dispense just enough bullets to take them down in the search for genetic material scattered through the base. There was a bigger boss version of the monsters that also had a gimmick in its massive arena to turn its summons against it so I wouldn't have to use all of my thousands of bullets that I'd stockpiled over the course of the game and also a previous exploit that allowed just grabbing free stuff from the dirt in Akila.
It also ended up that the secret guy from before who blew up the city on HELL PLANET did it to also prevent the magic secret that creates these "terrormorphs" easily from getting out. And then it also ended up that he had his accomplice, the guy from earlier in the post whose ship I blew up posthumously, spawn in the demons at New Atlantis, and this was all some crazy plan to not only tell the secret to quickly spawning "terrormorphs" in order to find a way to prevent it and drive them to extinction, but also help his cloned daughter get a better name for herself, plus I'd benefitted by having my citizenship guaranteed faster so I could get a dim underground apartment that's still bigger than a typical one here. Apparently the reason he didn't bring this magic secret up before during the war was that there were too many spies. Either way this was the other big choice at the end of the questline, to either mention that this Vae Victus guy was still alive in a secret room or just pin it on the accomplice alone. Also I'd been getting prompts to tell the cloned daughter I'd been working with about him being alive throughout the later quests so I feel like the game really wanted me to go with that option.
Naturally I decided to keep the secret guy around because he's another source of Infinite Quests, and the reason I supposedly covered our tracks by blowing up that ship was for XP anyway, so it all makes sense. Also I went with the space giraffe plan over the deadly virus plan, just because space giraffes. Then it turned out the group, myself included, got upgraded citizenships and free Friends-sized apartments with multiple bathrooms. We got rent control for doing pest control essentially.
Next up would be the space pirate quests if I keep playing this, just because I wanted to put off the main quest as long as possible. And I only have about a month left before my Game Pass runs out, so we'll see what I do end up playing whether or not it's this. I do have a number of other games to check out both from Game Pass and back when Games With Gold was a thing, since any games granted through that for Xbone and up are only accessible with an active subscription. Thankfully all the 360 and back ones I got through that stick around without any subscription, as much as a usual digital game would.