September 5, 2024 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Finished up the Crimson Fleet (a.k.a. space pirates) sidequest chain in Starfield, details and spoilers for the last parts of that follow.
I went out to the electromagnetic gas giant the lost pirate treasure was at. I don't know why I was thinking the game would suggest landing on the gas giant but it turns out it was just accessing a floating shipwreck in the slow damage-over-time field. I swear these big ship dungeons are bigger on the inside than their space model shows. As well as the space stations. Long story short, the way they represent digital money physically is also weird. There's the usual stick things, then there's apparently "credtanks" which are the size of a vending machine but don't hold a ton more, then there's whatever the heck happened near the end of the quest where I stuck some big lantern-shaped thing that filled up with holographic blades as it drained a warehouse full of cyber boxes.
Then the ship started exploding dramatically. Apparently because having to shift the power around to move the money around pulled it from every other system that was keeping the ship from exploding in the damage-over-time field. It was a bit hard to find the way out with everything being all red and cloudy and explody but fortunately quest markers are a constrasting cyan.
It was not long after that I was pulled into what is probably the biggest space battle programmed into this game, likely among the largest scale battles in terms of active NPCs in a Bethesda game in general. Having already determined my pirate allegiance, I took out a few groups of ships at places before returning to the main space station to fight off a whole fleet with whoever allied NPCs were around, so there may have been a couple dozen ships around total. It went better as more enemy ships went down so I wasn't taking all of the damage at once.
After that was a long segment fighting through the big flagship through pretty much every room and meeting up with the various pirate allies I'd made along the way, before showing up at the command center I'd reported to many times before the game bugged out and forced my choice early. I was also able to defuse the situation to keep the flagship from self-destructing by being a bounty hunter and threatening to torture any remaining crew, never mind the dozens the team had already blown apart. I even have the tags off their many corpses to prove it was at least that many, though I don't know there's a place to turn things like those in for a reward like in Bethesda's Fallout games.
There was a big pirate meeting after that, which I put off to handle my leveling to unlock more weapon mods, but I soon attended and got my share, coming out to 250K credits, putting me over a million at this point. I wasn't exactly hurting for cash as it seems but good to know that the endgame reward is still pretty generous. Especially since the massive amount of loot I typically dump onto merchants all at once ends up meaning I trade more for ammo than actual money.
It's also amusing how in all these major sidequest chains I keep ending up making choices that Constellation disagrees with, since they bring up conversations after finishing a chain or other milestones. And not just the members, I mean Constellation as a whole, because they generally seem to share opinions. And not just the obvious choices like "oh no you joined the pirates" and "oh no you unleashed mind control" but odd ones like "oh no you chose to repopulate worlds with skin flap parrot giraffes instead of unleashing germ warfare". I forget exactly what they thought about the space cowboy questline but I think they were actually relatively okay with that outcome even though the violent option ended up being taken. All in a day's work of screwing over and around the galaxy. I guess unless I find potentially interesting sidequests elsewhere I'll probably finally get around to the main quest.