August 23, 2024 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Side quests this time on Starfield. I grabbed a couple Infinite Quests from after finishing the Vanguard storyline, both were "go to this place and murder this entity". One was a demon creature that went down easily, the other was just some random person who happened to be in a base full of hostile space snake enthusiasts that were the real combat threat.
The former quest was on Gagarin, where I also decided to look at the established town there since I hadn't had any reason to before, and apparently they made mechs before those unfortunately became illegal. I also found more sidequests there. The first was finding fancy booze for a bartender on a ship that was full of space pirates and also kept constantly turning its gravity on and off. Since I'm already a space pirate they didn't bother with my poking and floating around. The second was tracking down someone who hadn't delivered a package, and that of course became finding the package as well as the culprit in a base full of mostly low-level enemies.
I also decided to check off a quest that had been on my list for a while, one about a secret outpost for a vigilante that had also been filled with space raiders. One of them tried to help me, but was generally not helpful and ended up exploding, not even by my hand. Eventually I found the spacesuit and spaceship for the Mantis so naturally I upgraded to the spacesuit but kept the Stargle as my main ship for the sake of it just being that good. And only recently I'd switched to the beast slayer armor I'd gotten late in the Vanguard quest. So I've only just recently found armor twice to surpass the suit I'd swiped through a crack via a classic exploit that I believe is long since patched back at the Constellation base.
Crafting mods to fix up the armor and weapons I've got into something ideally OP as hell, at least until the bullet sponges catch up, is of course annoying as it always has been, given the fact that it involves unlocking perks, then researching things unlocked by those perks, then finally making the things, plus mods can't be transferred for whatever reason. Fortunately I've gotten a fuckload of cash over time to buy out resources to just run through the tech trees, so the only concern left is the perks themselves, which requires XP, which I've managed to tilt a bit in my favor by messing with the difficulty settings and also reducing some of the more annoying bits in the process, and then just finding random or desired things to make to advance the tasks to get the next level of the perk even unlockable in the first place.
Long story short the whole mods/perks system really needed to not be that whole tangle of unlocking the ability to unlock unlocks. There's a lot more that could be done to make the game in general more appealing, but it's all been said in overly long video essays padded even further by the usual Ballshaver sponsors or whoever, and sometimes I'm just easily sucked into the loop for these kinds of games even with all the nonsense attached. If you asked me about "cozy games" I'd probably mention the usual Bethesda format, as it doesn't all have to be cutesy business simulators. I feel like if I did decide to bother with Fallout 76 I might get stuck in it for a bit, but it's also attached to so many of the things I don't like about modern gaming so that makes it easier to stay out. At least this game is singleplayer. And now has a car. Though it does also have microtransactions out the space ass.