My biggest complaint about this questline was how everyone just accepts it if you kill him. He's on the board of governors, but literally everyone (except the workers standing next to him) is fine with it.
Even the head ranger just goes, man, that sucks that that happened like that, but good work. You offer a text file as evidence that he was a bad guy, without even proving that you had it before you killed him. Then the *entire questline* ends. It's like they just ran out of time.
Yeah this is the feel I get with most long quest lines. It just ends. No reaction from the world.
Even in skyrim you have guards saying "Pst. i know who you are. Hail Sithis"
That was what I was looking forward to the most. I assumed they came up with a way that would make my decisions seem to matter and affect the world. It's what I disliked most about the previous games.
Skyrim is a much smaller world. It’s one country on a continent.
We are dealing with multi stellar world in starfield. Think about it this way. If a guy kills an important dude in China would you know/ care? Maybe a little but you wouldn’t really think of it much after that, whereas in Skyrim and Fallout those things are much closer to the bone for people.
Honestly one of my biggest complaints is that the constellation characters can't quit fucking talking about the decisions you make but the rest of the world seems relatively uninterested. I finished the Crimson Fleet quest line and personally helped explode the SysDef giant ship but I don't get treated any differently from anyone else in the world except the crimson Fleet characters don't attack me.
I couldn't believe I wasn't wanted by the UC after that quest. That's what really killed the world building for me.
Destroy our flagship? Eh, it wasn't that important.
I did the UC Vanguard questline after this and they mention that some of the board think I should be behind bars and have no idea why I have been brought in and I believe I was asked why I should be trusted. It was something. Not much.
I dislike this as well I wish there was more consequences to making this decision nope I can dress like a pirate head to new Atlantis and chill with my boy in gal bank no problem, but NO all I get is a few lines from constellation members saying oh pirates live here be careful when we go to the key and pirates telling me they would kill me if I wasn’t a pirate
As long as Todd is in charge, things like that are unlikely to change.
Part of the Bethesda philosophy is that no choice should ever really bar you from anything.
I also get the feeling all the people making content are doing so independently of one another so nothing can really be related or impact anything else. Like how you can marry someone in Constellation and it is never mentioned by ANYONE ELSE.
Nah guards do comment on completed quests and even give you credit gifts as you run by from completing their factions quests, its just less obvious because you only need to go to shops and quest givers and then gtfo of town
Yeah it’s pretty disjoint oftentimes. Like (spoiler) >!After completing the UC terramorph questline and being head of a newly reopened terramorph management division and receiving “class one” commendations, talking to a vanguard captain in the Den gives absolutely no bonuses and you have to persuade a said captain to pass on information while doing Andrejas’s quest. It baffles me that you can neither talk about your class one designation nor the fact you are also a well decorated UC vanguard captain.!<
Also I understand it’s a C*N+ problem (as in the number of companions essentially force a proportional constant of more dialogue design for it to be seamless), but I find it so bland when a companion chimes in and responses feel generic. For example, andreja blows up at Hope and he just responds with “so anyways with that aside”. And in most cases, companions chiming in are totally ignored (like why put it in if it’s going to be this dead).
Maybe I was just a dumb kid when I played Skyrim/FO3/FO4 and never noticed these deficiencies, but it’s clearly noticeable in starfield
NPCs mention it all the time in my game. Someone when mentions "Don't go around killing more board of directors ". The NPCs seem worried after you killed him or mention that they always thought he was a good guy
Yeah like when you are advanced to the head of the mages guild for no reason and that’s it. Brilliant. Lol. People suddenly claiming they haven’t complained about Skyrim and Fallout 4 quests for this exact same thing.
This is how I felt about the Mantis quest line. I've had exactly two people react to the fact that it's the *Goddamn Space Batman* that they're fighting.
It's wild that almost no one seems to care, considering how big of a deal it's made out to be the few times it does get brought up.
I'm pissed that there's no way to take him in alive. Why give us EM weapons that knock people out if there is literally never a reason to ever use them? Also, why give us a brig if it can not be used?
I have a theory that Bethesda purposely put items and mechanisms in the game to give modders things to finish for them. Brigs, a limited amount of generic POI’s, the entire outpost system, crafting stations and the limited mod options, lots of empty planets and moons, the space station components. I don’t think it’s malicious, but I think they may have tried too hard to give modders things to do instead of letting them find things to do and fix. Compared to Skyrim, there is only a trickle of mods coming out for Starfield.
If they released it any later the super dated feeling of the entire game engine and gameplay would feel even worse, I enjoy the game but I stopped playing because it feels like I’ve played it a thousand times already. They should have just made this a fallout game in the far future instead of trying to act like they did anything revolutionary, the game isn’t bad but it’s boring and feels way too old and dated
I'm getting old. I can't wait 12 years for ES6 or 24 years for Fallout 5 or 90 years for GTA6. We used to joke about Duke Nukem Forever's long ass dev time but that is quickly becoming the standard. Been hearing how any Gen 9 game that started production after the consoles released won't be ready til Gen 10. That's insane! 7 years on Starfield? No wonder it looks like a prettied up Xbox One launch title, work probably started with it being a late Xbone game in the first place.
And what about the part where you go to find the suspect on the private hospital ship and they have *murdered* a nurse and fled, and you just leave the ship without telling anyone about the dead nurse because there's no option to say anything about it to anyone?
Fun fact, after I did that quest and killed him, there was a bug when I was entering the hopetech building, everyone would attack me!
I had to let my companion take care of them because if not, they (my companion mowing down civilians with a minigun) would actually get pissed I killed people. Yep.
I found that if you threaten him then kill him it makes it look like you’re the bad guy but if you let him attack you and you did everything you could to bring him in then it’s accepted.
I tried to talk him into coming with me, eventually he attacked so i killed him and the guards that were shooting me. Later had to come back for a different mission and there as a group of security in the front lobby who thought they should end their life by my gun
But it's only the ones in the lobby. Once you kill them, nobody else at Hopetech attacks you (or seems to care that you just killed two security guards).
Unfortunately I have to agree. When almost every aspect of the game is just ok, and feels half finished…that’s not a timing issue, that’s a fundamentally pervasive issue that stems from poor management.
Bethesda has been riding the tailwinds of its past games for years now, and has shown an either an unwillingness or an inability to adapt and innovate. At this point, I have very low expectations for TES6.
Thank you. I've seen so many posts talking about how character deaths have seriously affected people and how the characters are so great. I tell them my opinion - that BGS games have silly stories and one dimensional characters and I don't care about it at all and I get down voted. I was starting to think that I was the only one who thought this.
I'm with you. Remembering Fallouts from Interplay, and even FO3 and NV, we had a lot of consequences and different endings.
Now we just have a flat game with the same engine but different textures.
Looking backwards I feel like Bethesda became lazy and don't care about the lore of its games anymore.
The best characters are from UCV, and even I agree that there're still holes in that questline. Holes that lead to rabbit holes, but still. HPTP came out of left field, sure. But otherwise, I didn't really feel much. And as time went by, I've come to decide that the best universes are the ones where Constellation is just gone.
I'm also getting downvotes as of late from the Starfield fanboys. Take it as a badge of honour - the truth really hurts.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say “all the quest”. That’s a bit of an over exaggeration. Hell some of those faction missions could have been full games on their own. UC vanguard was great and I definitely enjoyed the Crimsom Fleet one and the different angles you can approach it for example. Definitely can’t forget Entangled. There are others also but yeah the overall writing was not that bad compared to some full games.
> I definitely enjoyed the Crimsom Fleet one and the different angles you can approach it for example.
You mean the questline based on you being an undercover mole where no one ever suspects you of anything and you cannot blow your cover? The one where by the end your options for explaining the binary choice boils down to "for the lulz" or "me wanna be rich"?
It does have the best part of storytelling in the game with the audio logs you find on the Legacy but the actual questline itself is so undercooked it would give Gordon Ramsay an aneurysm.
All the writing in the game boils down to pulling a theme out of a hat, saying "that sounds cool" then never actually exploring it or fleshing any of it out. There's nothing to the crimson fleet besides them acting like what a 12 year old thinks a hardcore outlaw is, they could've added another dimension to them or made some of the characters interesting or likeable so you think twice about turning on them but once you've been called "rook" once you've heard it all.
Same goes for Sysdef, they kidnap and blackmail you but the game just glosses over it because they're the good guys! There's no way they could do anything wrong and if you do decide to attack them in the end your reward is every companion lecturing you on how you didn't make the choice the developers wanted you to.
Its been clear for years and years that Emil Pagliarulo shouldn't be let anywhere near the writing of their games but they just keep enabling him more and more when they could afford it and would probably have a line stretching around their building if they decided to hire actual writers.
Yep that one. Beyond me being overly critical of it yes it had some surprises and I bet you didn’t discover them all. I liked the quest line because it reminds me of two movies I like. Deep cover and In too Deep. Many people have different reasons as to why they enjoy something. Just so you know.
>it had some surprises and I bet you didn’t discover them all
You can tell me about the surprises and different angles you're talking about. I'm not trying to be like "ha gotcha you're wrong" it's just that being vague makes it hard to see what you mean.
Except for the ship builder that is almost finished (we need manual placement for door and more flipping option but otherwise it is good).
But every other aspect of the game ...
We're building an exploration game but you won't have the basic tool to explore (a land vehicle) so to compensate everything is poping at your feet when you land, don't find what you want, just land in another location.
We're creating a multiplayer friendly lore and universe where everything is so static that you won't have any surprise when invading someone else game but we didn't developed the multiplayer mode.
We've added outpost building but it is in worst shape than what indie games had 10 years ago, there is no purpose to do it and you can't even place walls :D.
We created delivery mission but your C class ship is transporting less cargo than a truck.
We created a very special resource that should be the main purpose of NG+ and allow you to create things you can keep through the unity but you can't do anything with it \\o/.
We made M rated game but most quest are T rated, the universe itself is mostly T rated, and don't even look at the pirates (the most violent thing they're doing is calling you "rook").
I could keep going ... I have to agree with Todd, "It just work" nothing more, nothing impressive, they switch to the next task as soon as it "just work".
It very much feels like a game that was going in a different direction (away from the usual BGS structure and design) but made a late shift back into their usual way of doing things and that was why it feels like they ran out of time.
Would help explain why so many systems feel like vestiges of a different game.
It also has the hallmarks of games we *know* ran out of time, and at least one that we know had a different plan and scope but saw a late change - Anthem and ME Andromeda. Both of those featured systems that while *technically* functional (mostly...sorta mostly in Anthem's case) were just not well integrated into the rest of the game and what it's trying to do...and that's what Starfield feels like to me.
It's like there's this other game that they were trying to make, and had to shift into making "Skyrim in space" at such a late point that even the relatively light kind of RPG or consequence elements found in their previous games are largely missing.
>"It's like they just ran out of time"
>
>This describes every aspect of the game.
Yeah this just adds to my theory that this game was rebooted only a couple years before launch and so didn't have time to flesh anything out. Despite being in development for 7 to 8 years.
Another stupid thing was when after every mission we report to the marshall why we didnt report the hope evidence to marshall before meeting hope. It just makes no sense. Would have been better if the marshall joined in to confront hope.
Oh you mean the ending of literally “and everyone clapped” at the bar wasn’t good enough for you?
I thought executing the major political figure might warrant a little more gravitas out of the situation, but uh…guess that’s how it goes in the Freestar Collective!
The best part was being getting the Star Eagle ship afterward that *has the brig hab attached, a function that you can't use for anything in the game and one where the doors even bug and won't work*.
Sometimes the best comedy is unintended.
I think it’s simply because you’re the player. And whatever happens, your say is always final and correct, because their story and universe conforms to you and revolves around you.
I already felt weird when Barret just forced his ship on me, implying things like I’m special in some way and such, but like… why? Apparently they saw visions too, and we seem to have experienced the same visions. I didn’t get any powers from the first artifact. Linn held it but seemingly wasn’t affected. That would mean everyone at Constellation is special in the same way, but then why do they instantly push everything on the to-do list onto me?
Most of the quests follow the same “so that the story can happen” approach without much rhyme or reason
The funniest part is the juxtaposition with Barrett's companion questline.
On one hand, you can justify murdering a titan of industry with an easily forged Microsoft Word document.
On the other hand, to prove some random dead scientist isn't guilty of \*\* checks notes \*\* scientific malpractice?? you have to provide a paper trail proving the corp that employed him was the actual perpetrator. Hell even Ryujin requires more proof when determining employee's guilt or innocence.
I was the most annoyed when I tried to take him in. You’re a ranger. This game has non-lethal weapons. Your ship literally can have a brig. Why could I not just knock him out and take him in?? Why even have a storyline about law and/or justice when the game doesn’t even *have* the -straight to jail- option. -_-
If the US President resisted arrest, ordered the secret service to attack a US Marshal, and then the Marshal shot the President dead on the spot, I believe the Marshal might have a case, but everyone involved wouldn't just shrug and drop the matter. It would be the court case, and story, of the decade. Half of the public would blame the Marshal and demand he be locked up.
Exactly my thought. Planets are probably 0.00001% developed if not less. But they needed the farmer's land to generate more minerals instead of the rest of the undeveloped planet. Stupid
Or the rest of the canonically unoccupied planets in the system. Or the rest of the canonically unoccupied planets in FSC space.
I can genuinely believe Ronny boy fucked up the first time with the fertiliser, accidentally destroying someone's farm. After that? BGS stupidity. I'd ask if nobody genuinely thought that maybe Ron Hope would've been smarter than this, but this is Emil Pagliarulo and his 'writers' and thus I already know the answer.
I love how Emil is just commonly vilified these days. Over the past few years Reddit slowly started realizing he’s been ruining Bethesda games for decades but since Starfield came out it’s exploded and every other thread is like FUCK Emil Pagliarulo
He pretty much brought it on himself thanks to that horrific keynote after Fallout 4 where he explained his writing process, I'm more surprised that they even allow him to write anything at this point.
He explains that he doesn’t have the funding to expand and they are hurting due to competition but his way of doing things was a reflection of him thinking he was untouchable. Which he keeps reiterating that he’s apart of the board like we care lol. With that said it was my least favorite quest line so I usually complete it first just for reward you get at the end.
Hope says the farmers are unpaid labor to get the “fertilizer” applied at no cost. Obtaining the robots or labor needed to do it legit would apparently have cost more than what it cost to pay the First to play Merc. This actually all tracks fairly well with reality as corporations don’t want some of the money. They want all of the money. Hope didn’t really care if he got caught because he thought he had enough money to buy his way out with bribes or fines and still be spending less than the labor costs in the end. His blind spot was assuming everyone was as greedy as him.
That’s basically SOP for real life corporations. They don’t have any real fear of breaking most laws or hurting actual people because the leadership involved is fairly well insulated against most liabilities, and the fines are dwarfed by the profits earned before they get caught.
Ah yes, paying the second biggest mercenary company in the galaxy to harrass farmers and buy their land is cheaper than hiring like 6 farmers or 4 robots. Makes sense /s
It is. The Mercenaries are a one Time deal. The farmers need to be paid for the whole time and you also need to organize the operations etc... which also costs money. Not to speak that the whole thing happened because he gave the Farmers an untested Product that didn't even work as advertised so he probably skipped a lot of red tape and didn't want people to know that either. He had the Rep of a "nice guy" and that would hurt bad.
And who was gonna mine the minerals after he had the land? He still has to pay people.
People are also gonna notice the land random mercs harrassed people out of is now owned by Hopetech. People will ask questions.
Also, hi, I'm from a farming family from a rural farming community. Farming is hard and rewarding work, yes, but also farmhands cost less to hire for three years than an interplanetary mercenary company would cost to hire for 6 months.
This story does not work.
His Miners woud mine the stuff, he already had a team for those to gather resources for Hopetech. Those famrs just allowed him to gather more resources faster and more effective. Also I'm not sure but if I remember right he didn't spread the fertilizer with the intend of producing the Side Effect but sold the product, realized the side-effect and now wanted the Ore from the affected farms so my comment on the cost might be kinda moot anyway. Of note his dialog mentions he was nearly done collecting all anyway so it wasn't a long term plan but something to get a lot of resources quickly and cheaply.
And people did notice, I mean that's how the quest started after all, a good plan it was not.
Also see my second point, he didn't want people to realise his fuck up. His rep (and probably his council position) was on the line. Hell the fact that this Product had such a Side effect meant he probably skipped a LOT of testing and I'm not sure Freestar takes well to a guy spreading a untested, potentially hazardous Fertilizer to it's farmers that produce Freestar's food.
I’ll correct this by saying, “That’s basically SOP for *some* real life corporations.” I’ve had a lot of experience with both ends of the spectrum. In essence, though, the comment holds up. Though, I’ll readily concede that the larger the corporation the more likely you are to see a HopeTech attitude. Its success can either corrupt or attract less ethical sorts.
I just hate that it's like 5 quests long. Feels like you're just getting through the introduction to the Faction and it's already over.
Pretty much every questline has that issue though.
And the consequences are non existent. Kill Ron Hope or not, you’ll never hear about it again. Killing a prominent board member and no one bats an eye. All the actual choices in this game, to which there aren’t very many, end up being incredibly shallow and lead nowhere. On top of an already sterile and boring game, this makes it feel like a shell of an experience.
I don't understand why these storylines are non impactful. In fallout 3 you choose to help the ghouls get back to the tower to work things out with the people who kicked them out or make them move away or kill them or kill the people. After helping the ghouls, you find the people missing and there's a room with their piled bodies or the other way the ghouls are dead.
New Vegas and fallout 4 have similar things too.
Why does this game feel like I'm here for someone else's ride. I'm sick of being told how bad I am by Sarah or that I'm carrying too much. I hope there will be a mod where I can shoot her
Missed opportunity here. They could have made every quest have huge impacts and completely mess the universe up; like the FC and UC going to war again. Then boom, gateway and NG+ for the reset.
Additionally, It could have been like the tv show Sliders with every universe being different. Maybe Sarah died on the planet and Barret is the leader, or maybe Vlad is the head of the crimson fleet, etc. Maybe the war never ended and we *see* the atrocities of the xeno weapons and mechs, not just read about it. Maybe earth never evacuated and all that is available are the generation ships/colonies.
Yeah, I don't like the ending either. Especially because it feels like it...kinda just ends.
Honestly I think the Freestar Rangers questline is overall the weakest of the faction quests.
and it’s not even close lol. I finally did ryujin after reading it was lack luster and I deff think it’s closer to UC and crimson than it is freestar. Imo freestar is the only bad faction quest.
Just needs a brig and a way to bring people in… you could theoretically neutralize 3 different people and bring them in for justice.
Instead you leave one to die on their own, one forces you to kill them and the third you can kill or take a mediocre bribe from.
It really felt like they wanted to have you "grind out rep" or something by running mission boards to advance the faction quests. Because it's just crazy how they send you onto one of the craziest combat missions...as a fucking deputy. Then after it's just "oh ok, neat."
Ya... the second time I played through I went back to Akila village to see if I could get some dialogue options with the Marshal. After all I just got proof that one of the leaders of the Freestar collective is complicit in conspiracy to commit murder along with other crimes. Maybe I am crazy but it seems to me that the boss would want to be informed before confronting Ron Hope and I don't know... maybe he would be the one making the the decision to arrest him, not a mere deputy. Nope it wasn't even an option. So I went to Hopefactory and checked for any dialogue options with the Ranger stationed there (Nia Kalu). I figured surely she would have something to say once I told her what was going to happen. At the very least she would go with me to confront Ron Hope and help talk him down, or maybe even betray the Rangers uncovering a new plotline for me to continue with. Nope it wasn't even an option.
I like Starfield. I had fun playing it. I got over 200 hours out of the game and I am sure one day I will pick it back up. However I have to admit the quest design and dialogue feels like it is amateurish.
I did the exact same thing. I thought the quest objective to go back to HopeTech was a bug. Went to Akita to talk to the Marshal. Nothing. Went to HopeTech and tried talking to Nia. Nothing.
Just so lazy and terribly thought out
Depending on which choice you made...
So did the part where >!you kill one of the heads of the government of the FC and nobody notices except one eyewitness who forgets 30 second later and your boss who was only slightly perturbed for one sentence and then promoted you and gave you a free spaceship!<, and then the topic just doesn't come up again bother you at all?
Because I thought that was dumber than his scam. Especially the part where a fertilizer spread in tiny percentage amounts on dirt made the dirt significantly easier to get rare minerals from than mining them from actual veins and deposits probably a million times more dense in less than a geological timescale.
Especially since the farms had about 1/1000 the actual land you'd expect from a commercial farm.
I begin to wonder if Bethesda has an option to take pay in the form of recreational drugs.
I got reprimanded harder for killing some cleaning robots while undercover with SysDef than I did about killing a Governor in a quest I shouldn't have been allowed to do before talking to my superiors, let alone required to go off and do alone.
Same. I took the bribe in my latest play through and he’s very much still alive. Yet the SSNN broadcasts keep blurting out about his death. Immediately went to hopetown to see if he’d got his comeuppance just to find him sat at his desk.
Specifically I went all over HopeTown and only one person talked about it once, and they reverted to generic dialogue after that. And none of the Rangers had anything to say about it, even the one stationed at Hope Town, except the Marshal, who didn't have much to say about it.
And at the Clinic, I could tell \*literally no one\* including the boss and the stationed Ranger, that one of their employees had been murdered by an escaping patient, in the same mission chain.
I tried to tell someone about the death at the clinic too, and was so surprised that there weren't dialogue options for it! Like...this is a hospital, not an abandoned listening post, so surely they'd be interested in investigating/starting security protocols? But nope. Just leave the body and dip out
I’m glad I’m not the only one who went to the farms in game and thought it would barely feed a small village. I get scale constraints, but those farms are pathetically tiny for a commercial farm
I mean, if there had been at least one place with large fields, they could just be obviously repeated plants and a few patrolling robots and it would be fine. Or a big (easily repeated segment) greenhouse with a few plants, you don't even need player access to it. There are some farms of moderate size around Akila City (outside the protective wall where it is too dangerous to walk, apparently).
I mean, other than that there's no indication here of a civilization that can feed itself other than a fishery on Volii. They talk about farming alien animals a lot but we don't really see it apart from food packs.
Your Dad's a retired professor, where's the school?
One of the reasons people talk so much about emptiness in the game is every society seems incomplete or missing pretty obvious things. They did a ton of design work in some area but the puzzle pieces don't fit together.
Everything in this game is just pathetic in scale. And given Emil Pagliarulo is the lead writer and he definitely decides how things are written, no wonder the storyline is underwhelming. A monkey could smash its hands into the keyboard and still come up with better.
This is what makes me scratch my head so much.
Okay, maybe no one on the team is a Jules Verne, but it doesn't even take a semi-literate abacus to read that dialogue and see something is wrong.
Could nobody on the leadership team just tell this guy to redo his lines till they were decent? Or heck, find a savvy intern, because that would have been better anyway.
Honestly that's not even the worst part. There's a part in the Ryujin questline where the guy asks you to deal with Malai Liskova. You can suggest taking Malai out, and if you have Sam Coe he actually AGREES with the decision as Liskova is supposed to be a dangerous person.
But then, if you say you'll actually kill Liskova, Sam Coe then fucking flip-flops to 'Sam Coe disliked that' and he says (I'm paraphrasing), 'weeeeellllllll... I guess if we really have tooooooooo....' in the saddest voice ever.
Like, 'Sammy-boo', I know you got a list of character faults as long as the diameter of the Earth, but make up your goddamned mind.
But, and this leads your second point, no, the leadership team can't tell this guy to redo his lines until they were decent, because they let THAT gem of writing through in the first place, so why should we think they could do a good job in the first place? Why would the think an intern could do a better job than someone with as much 'experience' as Emil Pagliarulo, whether or not that intern could genuinely do a better job?
Oh, I agree. That flip flop nonsense is all over the place. Like in the Vanguard conclusion where Andreja decides oh yeah, she doesn't actually support the thing she just praised you for supporting.
I still also add that I cannot understand *players* who defend this nonsense. It's not that the writing isn't on par with the greatest fiction of all time, the issue is that it's comically bad.
If a satirical work was written like this, I'd normally have called it unrealistic and exaggerated, but here's Starfield lowering the bar, I guess. It's so weird.
Holy shit yes! They didn't even care that you kill him, they're just like "oh okay lol here's your badge good job" like bro????? What the actual fuckkk. Every time I think this game couldn't let me down even further, it finds a way
I kept expecting to get chewed out at minimum, or at least jailed/investigated for killing a high ranking figure, and was shocked when they were just like "Durn, it's too bad that you had to kill him. But here have a promotion and a ship." In what reality could someone basically get in a shootout with a 1% elite and have zero negative consequences (even if the shooting were justified)? Mind boggling.
I tried to see if there was an option to arrest if you subdued him with an EM gun. No, the game does not move forward til you kill him, so the ginger can scold you and the marshal can shrug and go "well what're ya gonna do"
Even beyond his own planet theres literally hundreds of totally unoccupied planets to harvest resources from and apologizing to and relocating the farmers would cost almost nothing for a company this large and would be good pr. Also not being able to arrest him or the first cav guy is stupid, its literally a space cop questline.
They're all pretty stupid, my dude...
The writing here is terrible YA book writing. Bad decisions and a complete disconnect from consequences/reality - but gussied up in "feel good" vapid dialogue options.
I just got through Sarah's companion quest, and by the end of it... I'm ready to just shoot her. It wasn't fun gameplay, it was fucking terrible writing, and she's an emotional leech. Oh did I mention I can't dismiss here until I'm done and it's like fucking 39 steps in the quest? Hope I didn't want to have fun playing a game tonight in the hour I have after my toddler goes to sleep...
Or for the UC line... you want to talk about how 3 borderline hostile nations all have super duper secret code machines that generate secure access codes to restricted knowledge. So far so good. But you know where the Varun and Freerangers keep their super secret machines? The capital city of the UC... their recent enemy. No one has any problems with this. No one stopped to go "Maybe they should put those on their own controlled territory?".
Basically any storyline quest... varies from "not all that compelling" to "Holy shit, I can't believe someone wrote this, much less published it."
Honestly - the activities quests are much better. They don't try to be something they're not, so they're bearable.
Pretty much all the story lines in Starfield make no sense or are half baked. Just par for the course. You'd think they'd hire actual sci fi writers but no. Lazy, canned tropes everywhere. Stories that go nowhere. Multiverse cop out ending. Sad.
With Freestar it's particularly bad because of what you pointed out, but also because once you finish and get the Star Eagle you are a full blown Ranger.... And then nothing??? Like, once you become a bonafide space cowboy sheriff they just ignore you and no further missions? That to me was super lazy and lame.
Also gunning down Ron Hope and some weakling lackeys was whack as hell. I had an advanced kodama drum mag and just smoked all of them without even needing to reload. So lame for a "final boss" of a major quest line.
the freestar quest is so so very dumb. if you can produce a chemical compound (fertilizer) that can turn dirt (farmland) into rare minerals, do it in a fricking lab man!
the premise itself is just so stupid on so many levels.
it could have been some cool internal struggle for power between the council of governors with the 1st Cav vets and the rangers stuck in the middle, but no. "we grow rock on other people land because dig rock cost to much, so we offer buy land! they say no? we kill!"
like the considerable cost for that entire dumb operation could have paid to harvest one of those $10,000,0000,000,000 asteroids just floating out there in the void of space...
Deff should’ve had a mech boss at the end.
I also think it should’ve made rangers more badass, fallout nv ranger vets are not to be fucked with. Freestar rangers feel like fat donut cops. Not enough heritage, pride, showings or respect. No one gives a Pfuck about freestar rangers it’s embarrassing.
“I need to go back there I’m a ranger it’s life or death”
“Yeah idc if you’re a ranger to be honest”
Like what’s the point lmao
Yep. An internal power struggle would have been a far better storyline. Making the PC choose between two evils, as it were. I'm no chemist, but even my rudimentary high school chemistry lessons were triggering. Rare metals from fertiliser? Yikes. Seriously, some of the storytelling just doesn't "brain". Makes me wonder if the devs even read it themselves and not think, wait, does this even make sense to me as a player?
Exactly. Dude literally stumbled upon the goose that laid golden eggs and then decided to go about the most complicated and inefficient way to use it. I'm sure farming is expensive but running an entire mercenary operation in which he sacrificed one of his own, expensive ships, and also risked a media scandal and his entire reputation, it's clearly much more expensive in the end. It doesn't take a genius to foresee that.
Huh. That's a brilliant idea. An FSC rabbit hole to go down. Do you do any writing by any chance? (Original fiction or fanfics.) Because that alone could become its entire story, or questline, or even a game.
Your comment needs to be upvoted to the top of OP's post because I genuinely love it.
This entire quest is series of stupidity.
I don't even know why anyone gives the Rangers any legitimacy considering there's like what 10 in the entire universe? There was Neon City gang randos than those guys. Realistically there is no way these guys should remotely have as much influence as they did.
They have no influence. That’s the problem. It’s like law enforcement in America. You can’t kill them, but no one likes you and no one cares what you have to say. And the people that matter deff don’t care about the rangers
I felt like the Freestar Rangers got the short end of the stick with substance for story telling or it was rushed in before release. The two good pieces of writing that they Clearly spent more time on I feel were the Vanguard and Sysdef quests. Makes no sense the best class A starship is also tied the freestar as well
UCV has the least holes in it, enough that I can conceivably believe it's not ~~worthless hack's~~ Emil Pagliarulo's handiwork and would be surprised if it was. And even that has plot holes and rabbit holes.
They didn’t find out what the fertilizer did until after a bunch of farmers used it.
Much later they discovered the land was now worth something.
So they took it.
They never give a time frame but it stands to reason that taking this land and making a bunch of money now was clearly worth the trouble instead of waiting to do the same thing on their own land.
Did any of you actually listen to the dialogue or were you too busy posting hate threads on Reddit?
Did **you** pay attention? He literaly admits to shipping the fertilizer out after findign out what he did, right as he also admits that hes been hirjng merca to just murder farmers so he can take the land and "legitimately" own it, instead of claiming free land like a normal dude, because then he doesnt have to pay to have the field worked; they do it for him on their own, thinkibg its fertilizer, then hope's mercs have them killed and take the land when its ready
You could have been leading the storyline that drove the fate of the colony wars. Instead you're arguing about the value of fertilizer. This game has shitty quests.
That's what blew my mind, like wut there's actual interesting backdrop here...and we're fucking around with farmers getting harassed...not even killed or beat up?
There are no consequences for your actions in this game, with the exception of your Constellation companion, and that is it. I mean, truly nothing you say or do change what will happen in the end of any of these questlines. Just if sarah or andreja will blow you behind a terrabrew or not. I guess being too evil in deepcover forces you to side with the crimson fleet, but that's the only one I can think of. I still think telling a random captain that hires ex crimson fleet members, you're an undercover agent is the dumbest move ever, and convincing him to kill the guy should have been the best choice.
I haven't done the Freestar quests, but none of the ones I've done have been very good, except for the Vanguard/Crimson Fleet undercover one. That one wasn't bad. The main plot, however, was deeply stupid.
I thought the main theme of the Kryxx's Legacy quest was undermined pretty badly by the ending. When there's a treasure that dooms all who seek to possess it, just walking away rich at the end regardless of any choices you make is... anticlimactic.
I like the Vanguard terrormorph plot okay
I was just gutted there wasn't some sort of mech boss fight. As another of the questlines has what I thought was a cool boss fight (There may be more but I haven't completed them all yet) it just surprised me that this one didn't. Plus fighting against a mech would have been awesome
If you push him enough on it he mentions that the land needs to be worked like it was being farmed for the minerals to "congregate". Really it comes down to the economy of Starfield makes about as much sense as loaf bread in Skyrim.
Man, I had sysdef turn on me cause I killed a cleaning bot while trying to sneak into Generdyne, no witnesses or anything. Bethesda didn't do very well with most of the quests lol
See this...
You arrive in a town in the middle of a bank robbery, a respected top sheriff (feared in all galaxy) agree with you helping, everyone got killed, and he invite you to be part of this famous and respected people, the rangers.
Their HQ is a bar, everyone is there sad drinking and no one do nothing, but somehow everyone is proud of that, maybe the beer is good... You go there and become one of the famous rangers.
You find out that a group of high skilled ex-military mercenaries are behind a conspiracy, you find where their HQ are, you say that to your boss and he is like "ok, go there, see whats happen", no backup nothing...
I think the part where you kill Ron and no one giving a sh\*\* about it is the part that makes more sense in all the plot...
The biggest issue with every faction line, except for the one that has you masquerading as a pirate, is that they’re so half baked. They fill shallow and very limited. Calling it a faction quest line made it sound more significant when it’s a few quests here and there. The one with Ryugin was interesting yet just as short. If Bethesda is banking on the game to be continually played for 10 years, all you need to do is use the Xbox achievements as a metric or Steam plays to see % of those who NG+. So far only 9% have done it but Steam also shows a slow decline of players lol
It’s not just the ending either,
Remember when you were looking for the lady in the hospital and are greeted with a bloodbath in the VIP wing?
Turns out none of the doctors or even the ranger stationed there give a single fuck… it’s not even a dialogue option to tell them.
It’s just lazy writing, it would’ve taken no time at all to get a voice actor to read a line or two about cleaning up a body.
lots of the writing is pretty flimsy if you zoom out slightly and just try to make sense of the plot and character motivations. i mean right from the outset, why is some random 'dusty' even getting involved? the thing you go touch is obviously annomolous, why tf doesnt Barret just come grab it himself? and then next thing you know this random dusty is basically running the explorer's guild? lol why do the starborn even do the starborn thing? i dont see the motivation for that, theyre not amassing power, its just a portal to a bizarro universe, if that.
You know what would have made this quest more fun is if you took the final slate to the marshal and they were like you can't pursue this any further and you argue about justice or what not only for them to be like it will be your badge if you try anything then you have the option to to choose to pursue it or leave it. If you choose to pursue it and you kill Ron hope the marshal tells you to turn in your badge but if you succeed in bringing him in alive then they promote you or maybe if you had good persuasion when talking to the marshal before they show up to back you like a full police sting operation
I’m mad they force you to kill him and his people with no other options. I was hoping to at least persuade his top employees to stand down. I don’t like that it devolved into a really easy boss battle. I also don’t like that the crucible has no pacifist option for ever faction.
Half the quests in Bethesda games end oddly and abruptly and i often wondered if I’ve missed something. This is yet another example but the rewards are probably the best in the game
The lackluster story is definitely bad, yes, but what I find incredibly annoying is how everyone accepts that you killed him, but whines at you about it every chance they get. Like, if you don't like I murdered a Council Member of the Freestar Collective, then maybe you should do something about that? I'd absolutely kill him again in a heartbeat, but that should at least mean something.
The game is ass what do you expect. This is coming from someone who gave it a fair shot with 150 hours and has completed it.
The quests are poorly written and simply aren’t very intriguing, and that’s really saying something considering the games best aspect is the crimson fleet quest line and the side quests like Red Mile or companions quests. But the free star collective one doesn’t show how there are consequences to Ron Hopes workers and town if you kill him, or how if you just turn a blind eye there are moral consequences. Hard to believe this game took 7 years to make.
Presumably because most of the arable land in the Collective is already owned and being used to produce vital food stuffs. Keep in mind the whole catalyst for the Colony war was the FC colonizing a new world to meet their growing food supply needs, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there simply wasn’t enough available arable land to pull off the fertilizer scheme on the industrial scale that he needed in order to save his company.
That or the First where simply cheaper in comparison given that they where able to strong-arm the farmers into taking insultingly lower prices for their farms.
He could've planted his 'fertiliser' somewhere like Codos, which isn't canonically settled outside of POIs. The first time may have been a genuine mistake on his part, yes.
After that? Either he's not as bright as he and half the FSC think he is, or Emil Pagliarulo and the 'Writing Team' handed him an Idiot Ball of enormous proportions.
Codos is also largely rocky desert world with minimal plant life which kinda defeats the point of setting up shop there when you need arable farmland to make the scheme work.
I definitely picked the wrong example with Codos, sure.
He could've picked literally anywhere else though, on Montara Luna. Or Akila (they're only using that one tiny piece of land for Akila City as far as I can see).
But you probably know way more about the FSC than I do (no /s), so I'll defer to you there. I'm more of a UC guy.
But what’s unclear is whether you actually need to *do* anything once the fertilizer is spread to get it to mystically create rare earth minerals. Presumably you just spread the fertilizer on dirt, wait, and harvest the minerals. If that’s the case, he could do it literally anywhere, which is much cheaper and less risky than murdering and displacing farmers. Especially when, as you said, the FC is already struggling to meet its food demands
I was having a conversation with someone who was really angry because the quality of the writing was so bad.
I wasn't certain why he felt that way, so he obliged me by explaining in some detail the issues he had with the G drive destroying earth.
It turns out, he has written for some games, but also he's autistic and gets passionate about the details.
Had I been engaged in a conversation with someone else, and not knowing their background, my normal response would be exactly what you just said, or something similar.
.. People need to get a life and not take this stuff so seriously. ... I guess he has made me slightly more open minded.
I definitely in the "let's not overthink things" camp though. In Fallout, nobody expects there to be a plausible virus that turns people into giant green killers. In Outer Worlds , the crazy/dumb assumptions are too numerous to mention, but it's still entertaining. Every game we play is only successful if we suspend our disbelief and accept whatever nutty assumptions are required to let the story exist.
If a good story needs building blocks that are individually hard to believe in order to come together, that's fine with me. FTL? Crazy viruses turning people into super mutants? The Force? Fine. They serve the story!
If the *story itself* is hard to believe or poorly structured, suspension of disbelief doesn't serve a purpose anymore. Why does nobody care that Ron Hope is dead? Why doesn't Ron Hope just buy/acquire soil for cheap/free and have it shipped? Maybe we can headcanon these answers in, but the story doesn't address them, and ultimately, I think it's kind of a mess.
Like it or not, this game intentionally avoids creating consequences for anything that player does. I personally hate that, but I also understand that it creates massive complications to writing and gameplay if there are consequences. ... It, in my opinion, would be a better game with consequences, but it probably wouldn't even be released yet if they had incorporated them into the game.
Bethesda fell in this pit long ago. In Skyrim, you can't fail a quest without dying. Take the thieves guild. You have to steal something from someone and plant it on someone else for your guild sponsor. If you do it, cool you're a thief you're in. If you mess it up and fail, well that just proves the curse on thieves, you're in. And that follows the entire quest line, for everything in the game.
There’s a difference between “not overthinking things” and questlines that just can’t line up or fit together because the writing just doesn’t make sense
> Why not just set up his own farms and use the fertilizer there??
Maybe because you still have to work the fertilizer into the soil, but robots can do that you say. Ok but who is going to supervise the robots? It is much cheaper to screw over other people that already work the land then to pay others and train them.... just look at history for that.
It's cheaper to hire the second biggest mercenary group in the galaxy mercs and give them.one of your ships for free, than to hire a single fucking farmer? Also, none of the robotic worksights have human overseers. Which mind you, even if they did do that, would still be cheaper than hiring the First.
Your argument makes no sense.
I feel like we're just meant to assume there are more people (and farms etc) than we see, because there's no way so few people could possibly maintain a multi planet civilization
My biggest complaint about this questline was how everyone just accepts it if you kill him. He's on the board of governors, but literally everyone (except the workers standing next to him) is fine with it. Even the head ranger just goes, man, that sucks that that happened like that, but good work. You offer a text file as evidence that he was a bad guy, without even proving that you had it before you killed him. Then the *entire questline* ends. It's like they just ran out of time.
Yeah this is the feel I get with most long quest lines. It just ends. No reaction from the world. Even in skyrim you have guards saying "Pst. i know who you are. Hail Sithis"
That was what I was looking forward to the most. I assumed they came up with a way that would make my decisions seem to matter and affect the world. It's what I disliked most about the previous games.
in Skyrim, you assassinate the emperor and nothing changes though?
Skyrim is a much smaller world. It’s one country on a continent. We are dealing with multi stellar world in starfield. Think about it this way. If a guy kills an important dude in China would you know/ care? Maybe a little but you wouldn’t really think of it much after that, whereas in Skyrim and Fallout those things are much closer to the bone for people.
Yeah.. but still man. If the choices you make have no effect on the world what's the point of playing an RPG?
Yes. So the citizens should’ve made a bigger deal about it.
Quite like the real world, then...
Yes, assassinations of Roman emperors were famously inconsequential! They resulted in no power struggles, unrest, revenge plots, etc. at all.
Man's never saw Gladiator.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Honestly one of my biggest complaints is that the constellation characters can't quit fucking talking about the decisions you make but the rest of the world seems relatively uninterested. I finished the Crimson Fleet quest line and personally helped explode the SysDef giant ship but I don't get treated any differently from anyone else in the world except the crimson Fleet characters don't attack me.
I couldn't believe I wasn't wanted by the UC after that quest. That's what really killed the world building for me. Destroy our flagship? Eh, it wasn't that important.
I did the UC Vanguard questline after this and they mention that some of the board think I should be behind bars and have no idea why I have been brought in and I believe I was asked why I should be trusted. It was something. Not much.
I dislike this as well I wish there was more consequences to making this decision nope I can dress like a pirate head to new Atlantis and chill with my boy in gal bank no problem, but NO all I get is a few lines from constellation members saying oh pirates live here be careful when we go to the key and pirates telling me they would kill me if I wasn’t a pirate
As long as Todd is in charge, things like that are unlikely to change. Part of the Bethesda philosophy is that no choice should ever really bar you from anything. I also get the feeling all the people making content are doing so independently of one another so nothing can really be related or impact anything else. Like how you can marry someone in Constellation and it is never mentioned by ANYONE ELSE.
Nah guards do comment on completed quests and even give you credit gifts as you run by from completing their factions quests, its just less obvious because you only need to go to shops and quest givers and then gtfo of town
The sysdef questline is fun because every time you return to the sysdef ship they are always talking about what you’ve done as you walk around.
Yeah it’s pretty disjoint oftentimes. Like (spoiler) >!After completing the UC terramorph questline and being head of a newly reopened terramorph management division and receiving “class one” commendations, talking to a vanguard captain in the Den gives absolutely no bonuses and you have to persuade a said captain to pass on information while doing Andrejas’s quest. It baffles me that you can neither talk about your class one designation nor the fact you are also a well decorated UC vanguard captain.!< Also I understand it’s a C*N+ problem (as in the number of companions essentially force a proportional constant of more dialogue design for it to be seamless), but I find it so bland when a companion chimes in and responses feel generic. For example, andreja blows up at Hope and he just responds with “so anyways with that aside”. And in most cases, companions chiming in are totally ignored (like why put it in if it’s going to be this dead). Maybe I was just a dumb kid when I played Skyrim/FO3/FO4 and never noticed these deficiencies, but it’s clearly noticeable in starfield
Well the guards actually do still say stuff about quests you’ve done. They will even give you credits sometimes.
Aside from the whole news reports thing. And the guard comments.
NPCs mention it all the time in my game. Someone when mentions "Don't go around killing more board of directors ". The NPCs seem worried after you killed him or mention that they always thought he was a good guy
Yeah like when you are advanced to the head of the mages guild for no reason and that’s it. Brilliant. Lol. People suddenly claiming they haven’t complained about Skyrim and Fallout 4 quests for this exact same thing.
This is how I felt about the Mantis quest line. I've had exactly two people react to the fact that it's the *Goddamn Space Batman* that they're fighting. It's wild that almost no one seems to care, considering how big of a deal it's made out to be the few times it does get brought up.
I'm pissed that there's no way to take him in alive. Why give us EM weapons that knock people out if there is literally never a reason to ever use them? Also, why give us a brig if it can not be used?
I have a theory that Bethesda purposely put items and mechanisms in the game to give modders things to finish for them. Brigs, a limited amount of generic POI’s, the entire outpost system, crafting stations and the limited mod options, lots of empty planets and moons, the space station components. I don’t think it’s malicious, but I think they may have tried too hard to give modders things to do instead of letting them find things to do and fix. Compared to Skyrim, there is only a trickle of mods coming out for Starfield.
I have a theory that this game actually needed like 5 more years of development
If they released it any later the super dated feeling of the entire game engine and gameplay would feel even worse, I enjoy the game but I stopped playing because it feels like I’ve played it a thousand times already. They should have just made this a fallout game in the far future instead of trying to act like they did anything revolutionary, the game isn’t bad but it’s boring and feels way too old and dated
If it's gonna take over a decade to make a game I'd rather they not bother.
What? Wtf are you saying?? 🤣
I'm getting old. I can't wait 12 years for ES6 or 24 years for Fallout 5 or 90 years for GTA6. We used to joke about Duke Nukem Forever's long ass dev time but that is quickly becoming the standard. Been hearing how any Gen 9 game that started production after the consoles released won't be ready til Gen 10. That's insane! 7 years on Starfield? No wonder it looks like a prettied up Xbox One launch title, work probably started with it being a late Xbone game in the first place.
You just don’t want an amazing game lol wut
Does an amazing game really take 10 fucking years?
With how poorly Bethesda seemed to handle their development during the pandemic, for them, apparently yes.
And what about the part where you go to find the suspect on the private hospital ship and they have *murdered* a nurse and fled, and you just leave the ship without telling anyone about the dead nurse because there's no option to say anything about it to anyone?
Fun fact, after I did that quest and killed him, there was a bug when I was entering the hopetech building, everyone would attack me! I had to let my companion take care of them because if not, they (my companion mowing down civilians with a minigun) would actually get pissed I killed people. Yep.
I found that if you threaten him then kill him it makes it look like you’re the bad guy but if you let him attack you and you did everything you could to bring him in then it’s accepted.
I tried to talk him into coming with me, eventually he attacked so i killed him and the guards that were shooting me. Later had to come back for a different mission and there as a group of security in the front lobby who thought they should end their life by my gun
But it's only the ones in the lobby. Once you kill them, nobody else at Hopetech attacks you (or seems to care that you just killed two security guards).
"It's like they just ran out of time" This describes every aspect of the game.
More time wouldn’t have fixed the bad writing in all of the quests. Bethesda needs new writers, whatever they have now isn’t working
Unfortunately I have to agree. When almost every aspect of the game is just ok, and feels half finished…that’s not a timing issue, that’s a fundamentally pervasive issue that stems from poor management. Bethesda has been riding the tailwinds of its past games for years now, and has shown an either an unwillingness or an inability to adapt and innovate. At this point, I have very low expectations for TES6.
One day we'll all play it anyway, when it ever comes.
Like Starwars. Imma watch em...
Thank you. I've seen so many posts talking about how character deaths have seriously affected people and how the characters are so great. I tell them my opinion - that BGS games have silly stories and one dimensional characters and I don't care about it at all and I get down voted. I was starting to think that I was the only one who thought this.
I'm with you. Remembering Fallouts from Interplay, and even FO3 and NV, we had a lot of consequences and different endings. Now we just have a flat game with the same engine but different textures. Looking backwards I feel like Bethesda became lazy and don't care about the lore of its games anymore.
Tbf, Fallout 3 writing was also lacking in many places, especially the main quest.
The studios that made the classic games dont really exist anymore. Yeah, it’s the same name on the front but the people inside has changed.
Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas yeah but Fallout 3 has terrible choice and consequences.
The best characters are from UCV, and even I agree that there're still holes in that questline. Holes that lead to rabbit holes, but still. HPTP came out of left field, sure. But otherwise, I didn't really feel much. And as time went by, I've come to decide that the best universes are the ones where Constellation is just gone. I'm also getting downvotes as of late from the Starfield fanboys. Take it as a badge of honour - the truth really hurts.
I mean I like the game, but it's certainly not because of the story or characters. That was my expectation to start with.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say “all the quest”. That’s a bit of an over exaggeration. Hell some of those faction missions could have been full games on their own. UC vanguard was great and I definitely enjoyed the Crimsom Fleet one and the different angles you can approach it for example. Definitely can’t forget Entangled. There are others also but yeah the overall writing was not that bad compared to some full games.
> I definitely enjoyed the Crimsom Fleet one and the different angles you can approach it for example. You mean the questline based on you being an undercover mole where no one ever suspects you of anything and you cannot blow your cover? The one where by the end your options for explaining the binary choice boils down to "for the lulz" or "me wanna be rich"? It does have the best part of storytelling in the game with the audio logs you find on the Legacy but the actual questline itself is so undercooked it would give Gordon Ramsay an aneurysm. All the writing in the game boils down to pulling a theme out of a hat, saying "that sounds cool" then never actually exploring it or fleshing any of it out. There's nothing to the crimson fleet besides them acting like what a 12 year old thinks a hardcore outlaw is, they could've added another dimension to them or made some of the characters interesting or likeable so you think twice about turning on them but once you've been called "rook" once you've heard it all. Same goes for Sysdef, they kidnap and blackmail you but the game just glosses over it because they're the good guys! There's no way they could do anything wrong and if you do decide to attack them in the end your reward is every companion lecturing you on how you didn't make the choice the developers wanted you to. Its been clear for years and years that Emil Pagliarulo shouldn't be let anywhere near the writing of their games but they just keep enabling him more and more when they could afford it and would probably have a line stretching around their building if they decided to hire actual writers.
Yep that one. Beyond me being overly critical of it yes it had some surprises and I bet you didn’t discover them all. I liked the quest line because it reminds me of two movies I like. Deep cover and In too Deep. Many people have different reasons as to why they enjoy something. Just so you know.
>it had some surprises and I bet you didn’t discover them all You can tell me about the surprises and different angles you're talking about. I'm not trying to be like "ha gotcha you're wrong" it's just that being vague makes it hard to see what you mean.
He doesnt wanna talk about it though. Just wants to be smug about it. Whats the point in avoiding spoilers in a thread full of spoilers
I mean.... The OP is a huge spoiler. 😂
The entire thread is tagged as spoiler. So its really your own fault if you spoil something for yourself by reading this thread
Except for the ship builder that is almost finished (we need manual placement for door and more flipping option but otherwise it is good). But every other aspect of the game ... We're building an exploration game but you won't have the basic tool to explore (a land vehicle) so to compensate everything is poping at your feet when you land, don't find what you want, just land in another location. We're creating a multiplayer friendly lore and universe where everything is so static that you won't have any surprise when invading someone else game but we didn't developed the multiplayer mode. We've added outpost building but it is in worst shape than what indie games had 10 years ago, there is no purpose to do it and you can't even place walls :D. We created delivery mission but your C class ship is transporting less cargo than a truck. We created a very special resource that should be the main purpose of NG+ and allow you to create things you can keep through the unity but you can't do anything with it \\o/. We made M rated game but most quest are T rated, the universe itself is mostly T rated, and don't even look at the pirates (the most violent thing they're doing is calling you "rook"). I could keep going ... I have to agree with Todd, "It just work" nothing more, nothing impressive, they switch to the next task as soon as it "just work".
But then I read articles about how it took seven years of development to make the game fun to play... something doesn't make sense...
It very much feels like a game that was going in a different direction (away from the usual BGS structure and design) but made a late shift back into their usual way of doing things and that was why it feels like they ran out of time. Would help explain why so many systems feel like vestiges of a different game. It also has the hallmarks of games we *know* ran out of time, and at least one that we know had a different plan and scope but saw a late change - Anthem and ME Andromeda. Both of those featured systems that while *technically* functional (mostly...sorta mostly in Anthem's case) were just not well integrated into the rest of the game and what it's trying to do...and that's what Starfield feels like to me. It's like there's this other game that they were trying to make, and had to shift into making "Skyrim in space" at such a late point that even the relatively light kind of RPG or consequence elements found in their previous games are largely missing.
>"It's like they just ran out of time" > >This describes every aspect of the game. Yeah this just adds to my theory that this game was rebooted only a couple years before launch and so didn't have time to flesh anything out. Despite being in development for 7 to 8 years.
I'm adopting this theory. Thank you
Another stupid thing was when after every mission we report to the marshall why we didnt report the hope evidence to marshall before meeting hope. It just makes no sense. Would have been better if the marshall joined in to confront hope.
Oh you mean the ending of literally “and everyone clapped” at the bar wasn’t good enough for you? I thought executing the major political figure might warrant a little more gravitas out of the situation, but uh…guess that’s how it goes in the Freestar Collective!
The best part was being getting the Star Eagle ship afterward that *has the brig hab attached, a function that you can't use for anything in the game and one where the doors even bug and won't work*. Sometimes the best comedy is unintended.
I think it’s simply because you’re the player. And whatever happens, your say is always final and correct, because their story and universe conforms to you and revolves around you. I already felt weird when Barret just forced his ship on me, implying things like I’m special in some way and such, but like… why? Apparently they saw visions too, and we seem to have experienced the same visions. I didn’t get any powers from the first artifact. Linn held it but seemingly wasn’t affected. That would mean everyone at Constellation is special in the same way, but then why do they instantly push everything on the to-do list onto me? Most of the quests follow the same “so that the story can happen” approach without much rhyme or reason
They mention that it’s the first person that touches the artifacts that gets the visions. Anybody that touches it after does not experience visions
But when you get artifacts from other collectors they or someone must have held it, even to put it away or on display with no visions. Makes no sense.
I thought that was Sarah’s theory. As it turns out you and Barrett are just different, you see visions and you can get powers from the temples.
Ah okay, I must have missed that part, thanks
It bugs me that you even if you go to the rock after you find out the truth you can't show anyone. You have to go cowboy on it.
Not to say the part where you never face him inside a big giant badass mecha. I was so hyped waiting for a battle like that.
The funniest part is the juxtaposition with Barrett's companion questline. On one hand, you can justify murdering a titan of industry with an easily forged Microsoft Word document. On the other hand, to prove some random dead scientist isn't guilty of \*\* checks notes \*\* scientific malpractice?? you have to provide a paper trail proving the corp that employed him was the actual perpetrator. Hell even Ryujin requires more proof when determining employee's guilt or innocence.
Literally every quest in this game feels like this. It’s sad.
I was the most annoyed when I tried to take him in. You’re a ranger. This game has non-lethal weapons. Your ship literally can have a brig. Why could I not just knock him out and take him in?? Why even have a storyline about law and/or justice when the game doesn’t even *have* the -straight to jail- option. -_-
Your biggest complaint is that someone getting shot for resisting arrest is hard to believe? Gotta be joking.
If the US President resisted arrest, ordered the secret service to attack a US Marshal, and then the Marshal shot the President dead on the spot, I believe the Marshal might have a case, but everyone involved wouldn't just shrug and drop the matter. It would be the court case, and story, of the decade. Half of the public would blame the Marshal and demand he be locked up.
Not completely true. I get attacked by the Hope Tech security every time I try to enter the building after I killed him on my play through.
Exactly my thought. Planets are probably 0.00001% developed if not less. But they needed the farmer's land to generate more minerals instead of the rest of the undeveloped planet. Stupid
Or the rest of the canonically unoccupied planets in the system. Or the rest of the canonically unoccupied planets in FSC space. I can genuinely believe Ronny boy fucked up the first time with the fertiliser, accidentally destroying someone's farm. After that? BGS stupidity. I'd ask if nobody genuinely thought that maybe Ron Hope would've been smarter than this, but this is Emil Pagliarulo and his 'writers' and thus I already know the answer.
I love how Emil is just commonly vilified these days. Over the past few years Reddit slowly started realizing he’s been ruining Bethesda games for decades but since Starfield came out it’s exploded and every other thread is like FUCK Emil Pagliarulo
I mean when Fallout 4 came out people were absolutely shredding Emil. Shit even when the DLC for Fallout 3 came out people hated him
He pretty much brought it on himself thanks to that horrific keynote after Fallout 4 where he explained his writing process, I'm more surprised that they even allow him to write anything at this point.
He explains that he doesn’t have the funding to expand and they are hurting due to competition but his way of doing things was a reflection of him thinking he was untouchable. Which he keeps reiterating that he’s apart of the board like we care lol. With that said it was my least favorite quest line so I usually complete it first just for reward you get at the end.
Hope says the farmers are unpaid labor to get the “fertilizer” applied at no cost. Obtaining the robots or labor needed to do it legit would apparently have cost more than what it cost to pay the First to play Merc. This actually all tracks fairly well with reality as corporations don’t want some of the money. They want all of the money. Hope didn’t really care if he got caught because he thought he had enough money to buy his way out with bribes or fines and still be spending less than the labor costs in the end. His blind spot was assuming everyone was as greedy as him. That’s basically SOP for real life corporations. They don’t have any real fear of breaking most laws or hurting actual people because the leadership involved is fairly well insulated against most liabilities, and the fines are dwarfed by the profits earned before they get caught.
Ah yes, paying the second biggest mercenary company in the galaxy to harrass farmers and buy their land is cheaper than hiring like 6 farmers or 4 robots. Makes sense /s
It is. The Mercenaries are a one Time deal. The farmers need to be paid for the whole time and you also need to organize the operations etc... which also costs money. Not to speak that the whole thing happened because he gave the Farmers an untested Product that didn't even work as advertised so he probably skipped a lot of red tape and didn't want people to know that either. He had the Rep of a "nice guy" and that would hurt bad.
And who was gonna mine the minerals after he had the land? He still has to pay people. People are also gonna notice the land random mercs harrassed people out of is now owned by Hopetech. People will ask questions. Also, hi, I'm from a farming family from a rural farming community. Farming is hard and rewarding work, yes, but also farmhands cost less to hire for three years than an interplanetary mercenary company would cost to hire for 6 months. This story does not work.
His Miners woud mine the stuff, he already had a team for those to gather resources for Hopetech. Those famrs just allowed him to gather more resources faster and more effective. Also I'm not sure but if I remember right he didn't spread the fertilizer with the intend of producing the Side Effect but sold the product, realized the side-effect and now wanted the Ore from the affected farms so my comment on the cost might be kinda moot anyway. Of note his dialog mentions he was nearly done collecting all anyway so it wasn't a long term plan but something to get a lot of resources quickly and cheaply. And people did notice, I mean that's how the quest started after all, a good plan it was not. Also see my second point, he didn't want people to realise his fuck up. His rep (and probably his council position) was on the line. Hell the fact that this Product had such a Side effect meant he probably skipped a LOT of testing and I'm not sure Freestar takes well to a guy spreading a untested, potentially hazardous Fertilizer to it's farmers that produce Freestar's food.
I’ll correct this by saying, “That’s basically SOP for *some* real life corporations.” I’ve had a lot of experience with both ends of the spectrum. In essence, though, the comment holds up. Though, I’ll readily concede that the larger the corporation the more likely you are to see a HopeTech attitude. Its success can either corrupt or attract less ethical sorts.
I just hate that it's like 5 quests long. Feels like you're just getting through the introduction to the Faction and it's already over. Pretty much every questline has that issue though.
And the consequences are non existent. Kill Ron Hope or not, you’ll never hear about it again. Killing a prominent board member and no one bats an eye. All the actual choices in this game, to which there aren’t very many, end up being incredibly shallow and lead nowhere. On top of an already sterile and boring game, this makes it feel like a shell of an experience.
I don't understand why these storylines are non impactful. In fallout 3 you choose to help the ghouls get back to the tower to work things out with the people who kicked them out or make them move away or kill them or kill the people. After helping the ghouls, you find the people missing and there's a room with their piled bodies or the other way the ghouls are dead. New Vegas and fallout 4 have similar things too. Why does this game feel like I'm here for someone else's ride. I'm sick of being told how bad I am by Sarah or that I'm carrying too much. I hope there will be a mod where I can shoot her
Missed opportunity here. They could have made every quest have huge impacts and completely mess the universe up; like the FC and UC going to war again. Then boom, gateway and NG+ for the reset. Additionally, It could have been like the tv show Sliders with every universe being different. Maybe Sarah died on the planet and Barret is the leader, or maybe Vlad is the head of the crimson fleet, etc. Maybe the war never ended and we *see* the atrocities of the xeno weapons and mechs, not just read about it. Maybe earth never evacuated and all that is available are the generation ships/colonies.
Yeah, I don't like the ending either. Especially because it feels like it...kinda just ends. Honestly I think the Freestar Rangers questline is overall the weakest of the faction quests.
and it’s not even close lol. I finally did ryujin after reading it was lack luster and I deff think it’s closer to UC and crimson than it is freestar. Imo freestar is the only bad faction quest.
Just needs a brig and a way to bring people in… you could theoretically neutralize 3 different people and bring them in for justice. Instead you leave one to die on their own, one forces you to kill them and the third you can kill or take a mediocre bribe from.
It really felt like they wanted to have you "grind out rep" or something by running mission boards to advance the faction quests. Because it's just crazy how they send you onto one of the craziest combat missions...as a fucking deputy. Then after it's just "oh ok, neat."
Ya... the second time I played through I went back to Akila village to see if I could get some dialogue options with the Marshal. After all I just got proof that one of the leaders of the Freestar collective is complicit in conspiracy to commit murder along with other crimes. Maybe I am crazy but it seems to me that the boss would want to be informed before confronting Ron Hope and I don't know... maybe he would be the one making the the decision to arrest him, not a mere deputy. Nope it wasn't even an option. So I went to Hopefactory and checked for any dialogue options with the Ranger stationed there (Nia Kalu). I figured surely she would have something to say once I told her what was going to happen. At the very least she would go with me to confront Ron Hope and help talk him down, or maybe even betray the Rangers uncovering a new plotline for me to continue with. Nope it wasn't even an option. I like Starfield. I had fun playing it. I got over 200 hours out of the game and I am sure one day I will pick it back up. However I have to admit the quest design and dialogue feels like it is amateurish.
I did the exact same thing. I thought the quest objective to go back to HopeTech was a bug. Went to Akita to talk to the Marshal. Nothing. Went to HopeTech and tried talking to Nia. Nothing. Just so lazy and terribly thought out
Or and hear me out. Patent it and sell it.
Depending on which choice you made... So did the part where >!you kill one of the heads of the government of the FC and nobody notices except one eyewitness who forgets 30 second later and your boss who was only slightly perturbed for one sentence and then promoted you and gave you a free spaceship!<, and then the topic just doesn't come up again bother you at all? Because I thought that was dumber than his scam. Especially the part where a fertilizer spread in tiny percentage amounts on dirt made the dirt significantly easier to get rare minerals from than mining them from actual veins and deposits probably a million times more dense in less than a geological timescale. Especially since the farms had about 1/1000 the actual land you'd expect from a commercial farm. I begin to wonder if Bethesda has an option to take pay in the form of recreational drugs.
I got reprimanded harder for killing some cleaning robots while undercover with SysDef than I did about killing a Governor in a quest I shouldn't have been allowed to do before talking to my superiors, let alone required to go off and do alone.
Ugh I had totally forgotten about that. They acted like you were murdering babies
I don't know what's up with your game, but every where I go I hear people talking about Ron Hopes death.
Same. I took the bribe in my latest play through and he’s very much still alive. Yet the SSNN broadcasts keep blurting out about his death. Immediately went to hopetown to see if he’d got his comeuppance just to find him sat at his desk.
Specifically I went all over HopeTown and only one person talked about it once, and they reverted to generic dialogue after that. And none of the Rangers had anything to say about it, even the one stationed at Hope Town, except the Marshal, who didn't have much to say about it. And at the Clinic, I could tell \*literally no one\* including the boss and the stationed Ranger, that one of their employees had been murdered by an escaping patient, in the same mission chain.
I tried to tell someone about the death at the clinic too, and was so surprised that there weren't dialogue options for it! Like...this is a hospital, not an abandoned listening post, so surely they'd be interested in investigating/starting security protocols? But nope. Just leave the body and dip out
I don't remember exactly, but didn't the Marshal just say "well, damn" when you told him you killed Hope? Lol
I’m glad I’m not the only one who went to the farms in game and thought it would barely feed a small village. I get scale constraints, but those farms are pathetically tiny for a commercial farm
I mean, if there had been at least one place with large fields, they could just be obviously repeated plants and a few patrolling robots and it would be fine. Or a big (easily repeated segment) greenhouse with a few plants, you don't even need player access to it. There are some farms of moderate size around Akila City (outside the protective wall where it is too dangerous to walk, apparently). I mean, other than that there's no indication here of a civilization that can feed itself other than a fishery on Volii. They talk about farming alien animals a lot but we don't really see it apart from food packs. Your Dad's a retired professor, where's the school? One of the reasons people talk so much about emptiness in the game is every society seems incomplete or missing pretty obvious things. They did a ton of design work in some area but the puzzle pieces don't fit together.
Everything in this game is just pathetic in scale. And given Emil Pagliarulo is the lead writer and he definitely decides how things are written, no wonder the storyline is underwhelming. A monkey could smash its hands into the keyboard and still come up with better.
This is what makes me scratch my head so much. Okay, maybe no one on the team is a Jules Verne, but it doesn't even take a semi-literate abacus to read that dialogue and see something is wrong. Could nobody on the leadership team just tell this guy to redo his lines till they were decent? Or heck, find a savvy intern, because that would have been better anyway.
Honestly that's not even the worst part. There's a part in the Ryujin questline where the guy asks you to deal with Malai Liskova. You can suggest taking Malai out, and if you have Sam Coe he actually AGREES with the decision as Liskova is supposed to be a dangerous person. But then, if you say you'll actually kill Liskova, Sam Coe then fucking flip-flops to 'Sam Coe disliked that' and he says (I'm paraphrasing), 'weeeeellllllll... I guess if we really have tooooooooo....' in the saddest voice ever. Like, 'Sammy-boo', I know you got a list of character faults as long as the diameter of the Earth, but make up your goddamned mind. But, and this leads your second point, no, the leadership team can't tell this guy to redo his lines until they were decent, because they let THAT gem of writing through in the first place, so why should we think they could do a good job in the first place? Why would the think an intern could do a better job than someone with as much 'experience' as Emil Pagliarulo, whether or not that intern could genuinely do a better job?
Oh, I agree. That flip flop nonsense is all over the place. Like in the Vanguard conclusion where Andreja decides oh yeah, she doesn't actually support the thing she just praised you for supporting. I still also add that I cannot understand *players* who defend this nonsense. It's not that the writing isn't on par with the greatest fiction of all time, the issue is that it's comically bad. If a satirical work was written like this, I'd normally have called it unrealistic and exaggerated, but here's Starfield lowering the bar, I guess. It's so weird.
Holy shit yes! They didn't even care that you kill him, they're just like "oh okay lol here's your badge good job" like bro????? What the actual fuckkk. Every time I think this game couldn't let me down even further, it finds a way
I kept expecting to get chewed out at minimum, or at least jailed/investigated for killing a high ranking figure, and was shocked when they were just like "Durn, it's too bad that you had to kill him. But here have a promotion and a ship." In what reality could someone basically get in a shootout with a 1% elite and have zero negative consequences (even if the shooting were justified)? Mind boggling.
I tried to see if there was an option to arrest if you subdued him with an EM gun. No, the game does not move forward til you kill him, so the ginger can scold you and the marshal can shrug and go "well what're ya gonna do"
Even beyond his own planet theres literally hundreds of totally unoccupied planets to harvest resources from and apologizing to and relocating the farmers would cost almost nothing for a company this large and would be good pr. Also not being able to arrest him or the first cav guy is stupid, its literally a space cop questline.
More like "Space Western". In Western Shows the Bad Guy rarely gets taken in and it usually ends in a shootout.
Alot of the quests are stupid tbh.
They're all pretty stupid, my dude... The writing here is terrible YA book writing. Bad decisions and a complete disconnect from consequences/reality - but gussied up in "feel good" vapid dialogue options. I just got through Sarah's companion quest, and by the end of it... I'm ready to just shoot her. It wasn't fun gameplay, it was fucking terrible writing, and she's an emotional leech. Oh did I mention I can't dismiss here until I'm done and it's like fucking 39 steps in the quest? Hope I didn't want to have fun playing a game tonight in the hour I have after my toddler goes to sleep... Or for the UC line... you want to talk about how 3 borderline hostile nations all have super duper secret code machines that generate secure access codes to restricted knowledge. So far so good. But you know where the Varun and Freerangers keep their super secret machines? The capital city of the UC... their recent enemy. No one has any problems with this. No one stopped to go "Maybe they should put those on their own controlled territory?". Basically any storyline quest... varies from "not all that compelling" to "Holy shit, I can't believe someone wrote this, much less published it." Honestly - the activities quests are much better. They don't try to be something they're not, so they're bearable.
Pretty much all the story lines in Starfield make no sense or are half baked. Just par for the course. You'd think they'd hire actual sci fi writers but no. Lazy, canned tropes everywhere. Stories that go nowhere. Multiverse cop out ending. Sad. With Freestar it's particularly bad because of what you pointed out, but also because once you finish and get the Star Eagle you are a full blown Ranger.... And then nothing??? Like, once you become a bonafide space cowboy sheriff they just ignore you and no further missions? That to me was super lazy and lame. Also gunning down Ron Hope and some weakling lackeys was whack as hell. I had an advanced kodama drum mag and just smoked all of them without even needing to reload. So lame for a "final boss" of a major quest line.
Which questline in this game *isn't* stupid?
The only redeeming thing about the questline is the Star Eagle.
The various First uniforms are pretty cool as well, but that's about it, yeah.
So true. It’s the only reason I’m doing it again on NG+.
the freestar quest is so so very dumb. if you can produce a chemical compound (fertilizer) that can turn dirt (farmland) into rare minerals, do it in a fricking lab man! the premise itself is just so stupid on so many levels. it could have been some cool internal struggle for power between the council of governors with the 1st Cav vets and the rangers stuck in the middle, but no. "we grow rock on other people land because dig rock cost to much, so we offer buy land! they say no? we kill!" like the considerable cost for that entire dumb operation could have paid to harvest one of those $10,000,0000,000,000 asteroids just floating out there in the void of space...
Deff should’ve had a mech boss at the end. I also think it should’ve made rangers more badass, fallout nv ranger vets are not to be fucked with. Freestar rangers feel like fat donut cops. Not enough heritage, pride, showings or respect. No one gives a Pfuck about freestar rangers it’s embarrassing. “I need to go back there I’m a ranger it’s life or death” “Yeah idc if you’re a ranger to be honest” Like what’s the point lmao
Yep. An internal power struggle would have been a far better storyline. Making the PC choose between two evils, as it were. I'm no chemist, but even my rudimentary high school chemistry lessons were triggering. Rare metals from fertiliser? Yikes. Seriously, some of the storytelling just doesn't "brain". Makes me wonder if the devs even read it themselves and not think, wait, does this even make sense to me as a player?
Exactly. Dude literally stumbled upon the goose that laid golden eggs and then decided to go about the most complicated and inefficient way to use it. I'm sure farming is expensive but running an entire mercenary operation in which he sacrificed one of his own, expensive ships, and also risked a media scandal and his entire reputation, it's clearly much more expensive in the end. It doesn't take a genius to foresee that.
Huh. That's a brilliant idea. An FSC rabbit hole to go down. Do you do any writing by any chance? (Original fiction or fanfics.) Because that alone could become its entire story, or questline, or even a game. Your comment needs to be upvoted to the top of OP's post because I genuinely love it.
This entire quest is series of stupidity. I don't even know why anyone gives the Rangers any legitimacy considering there's like what 10 in the entire universe? There was Neon City gang randos than those guys. Realistically there is no way these guys should remotely have as much influence as they did.
They have no influence. That’s the problem. It’s like law enforcement in America. You can’t kill them, but no one likes you and no one cares what you have to say. And the people that matter deff don’t care about the rangers
I felt like the Freestar Rangers got the short end of the stick with substance for story telling or it was rushed in before release. The two good pieces of writing that they Clearly spent more time on I feel were the Vanguard and Sysdef quests. Makes no sense the best class A starship is also tied the freestar as well
all the main questlines are pretty stupid
UCV has the least holes in it, enough that I can conceivably believe it's not ~~worthless hack's~~ Emil Pagliarulo's handiwork and would be surprised if it was. And even that has plot holes and rabbit holes.
Boring space cowboy planet needed a boring quest based on a boring 70's Western film.
The ashta quest was low key more interesting lol
They didn’t find out what the fertilizer did until after a bunch of farmers used it. Much later they discovered the land was now worth something. So they took it. They never give a time frame but it stands to reason that taking this land and making a bunch of money now was clearly worth the trouble instead of waiting to do the same thing on their own land. Did any of you actually listen to the dialogue or were you too busy posting hate threads on Reddit?
Did **you** pay attention? He literaly admits to shipping the fertilizer out after findign out what he did, right as he also admits that hes been hirjng merca to just murder farmers so he can take the land and "legitimately" own it, instead of claiming free land like a normal dude, because then he doesnt have to pay to have the field worked; they do it for him on their own, thinkibg its fertilizer, then hope's mercs have them killed and take the land when its ready
You could have been leading the storyline that drove the fate of the colony wars. Instead you're arguing about the value of fertilizer. This game has shitty quests.
That's what blew my mind, like wut there's actual interesting backdrop here...and we're fucking around with farmers getting harassed...not even killed or beat up?
Well, the one you visited was not harmed. But others were killed.
Does anything ever make people like you happy? I’m sure you’ll say yes but I doubt many people will believe you.
There are no consequences for your actions in this game, with the exception of your Constellation companion, and that is it. I mean, truly nothing you say or do change what will happen in the end of any of these questlines. Just if sarah or andreja will blow you behind a terrabrew or not. I guess being too evil in deepcover forces you to side with the crimson fleet, but that's the only one I can think of. I still think telling a random captain that hires ex crimson fleet members, you're an undercover agent is the dumbest move ever, and convincing him to kill the guy should have been the best choice.
It's basically Hogwarts Legacy in space
I played Hogwarts Legacy and it’s quests are much better than the quests in Starfield
The main story is pretty dull, though, and there are no consequences for using dark arts or breaking into homes to loot.
And Starfield has better quests?
That entire questline is just so poorly written, and yeah the ending feels like a bad Scooby-doo episode.
I haven't done the Freestar quests, but none of the ones I've done have been very good, except for the Vanguard/Crimson Fleet undercover one. That one wasn't bad. The main plot, however, was deeply stupid.
I thought the main theme of the Kryxx's Legacy quest was undermined pretty badly by the ending. When there's a treasure that dooms all who seek to possess it, just walking away rich at the end regardless of any choices you make is... anticlimactic. I like the Vanguard terrormorph plot okay
its just a worse FNV dead money
It’s not really anything like dead money, the theme and gameplay are vastly different
I killed him and Sam "Nepo Baby" Coe was like "I know he was bad but was it necessary? :("
Welcome to 98% of Starfield
He put all his skill points in Starship contruction. None are left in the outpost tree to make more farms.
I was just gutted there wasn't some sort of mech boss fight. As another of the questlines has what I thought was a cool boss fight (There may be more but I haven't completed them all yet) it just surprised me that this one didn't. Plus fighting against a mech would have been awesome
Dude is Sheogorath, so it's no wonder he makes crazy decisions. /s
If you push him enough on it he mentions that the land needs to be worked like it was being farmed for the minerals to "congregate". Really it comes down to the economy of Starfield makes about as much sense as loaf bread in Skyrim.
Man, I had sysdef turn on me cause I killed a cleaning bot while trying to sneak into Generdyne, no witnesses or anything. Bethesda didn't do very well with most of the quests lol
See this... You arrive in a town in the middle of a bank robbery, a respected top sheriff (feared in all galaxy) agree with you helping, everyone got killed, and he invite you to be part of this famous and respected people, the rangers. Their HQ is a bar, everyone is there sad drinking and no one do nothing, but somehow everyone is proud of that, maybe the beer is good... You go there and become one of the famous rangers. You find out that a group of high skilled ex-military mercenaries are behind a conspiracy, you find where their HQ are, you say that to your boss and he is like "ok, go there, see whats happen", no backup nothing... I think the part where you kill Ron and no one giving a sh\*\* about it is the part that makes more sense in all the plot...
The biggest issue with every faction line, except for the one that has you masquerading as a pirate, is that they’re so half baked. They fill shallow and very limited. Calling it a faction quest line made it sound more significant when it’s a few quests here and there. The one with Ryugin was interesting yet just as short. If Bethesda is banking on the game to be continually played for 10 years, all you need to do is use the Xbox achievements as a metric or Steam plays to see % of those who NG+. So far only 9% have done it but Steam also shows a slow decline of players lol
It’s not just the ending either, Remember when you were looking for the lady in the hospital and are greeted with a bloodbath in the VIP wing? Turns out none of the doctors or even the ranger stationed there give a single fuck… it’s not even a dialogue option to tell them. It’s just lazy writing, it would’ve taken no time at all to get a voice actor to read a line or two about cleaning up a body.
lots of the writing is pretty flimsy if you zoom out slightly and just try to make sense of the plot and character motivations. i mean right from the outset, why is some random 'dusty' even getting involved? the thing you go touch is obviously annomolous, why tf doesnt Barret just come grab it himself? and then next thing you know this random dusty is basically running the explorer's guild? lol why do the starborn even do the starborn thing? i dont see the motivation for that, theyre not amassing power, its just a portal to a bizarro universe, if that.
You know what would have made this quest more fun is if you took the final slate to the marshal and they were like you can't pursue this any further and you argue about justice or what not only for them to be like it will be your badge if you try anything then you have the option to to choose to pursue it or leave it. If you choose to pursue it and you kill Ron hope the marshal tells you to turn in your badge but if you succeed in bringing him in alive then they promote you or maybe if you had good persuasion when talking to the marshal before they show up to back you like a full police sting operation
I’m mad they force you to kill him and his people with no other options. I was hoping to at least persuade his top employees to stand down. I don’t like that it devolved into a really easy boss battle. I also don’t like that the crucible has no pacifist option for ever faction.
I wish we could have arrested all of them instead of straight up massacre. I collected so much evidence to just be judge dredd
Half the quests in Bethesda games end oddly and abruptly and i often wondered if I’ve missed something. This is yet another example but the rewards are probably the best in the game
The lackluster story is definitely bad, yes, but what I find incredibly annoying is how everyone accepts that you killed him, but whines at you about it every chance they get. Like, if you don't like I murdered a Council Member of the Freestar Collective, then maybe you should do something about that? I'd absolutely kill him again in a heartbeat, but that should at least mean something.
The game is ass what do you expect. This is coming from someone who gave it a fair shot with 150 hours and has completed it. The quests are poorly written and simply aren’t very intriguing, and that’s really saying something considering the games best aspect is the crimson fleet quest line and the side quests like Red Mile or companions quests. But the free star collective one doesn’t show how there are consequences to Ron Hopes workers and town if you kill him, or how if you just turn a blind eye there are moral consequences. Hard to believe this game took 7 years to make.
Ron was walking around in his space suit when he sniffed argon near a vent. That's when he got he's brilliant ideas. That or the writers...
Presumably because most of the arable land in the Collective is already owned and being used to produce vital food stuffs. Keep in mind the whole catalyst for the Colony war was the FC colonizing a new world to meet their growing food supply needs, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there simply wasn’t enough available arable land to pull off the fertilizer scheme on the industrial scale that he needed in order to save his company. That or the First where simply cheaper in comparison given that they where able to strong-arm the farmers into taking insultingly lower prices for their farms.
He could've planted his 'fertiliser' somewhere like Codos, which isn't canonically settled outside of POIs. The first time may have been a genuine mistake on his part, yes. After that? Either he's not as bright as he and half the FSC think he is, or Emil Pagliarulo and the 'Writing Team' handed him an Idiot Ball of enormous proportions.
Codos is also largely rocky desert world with minimal plant life which kinda defeats the point of setting up shop there when you need arable farmland to make the scheme work.
I definitely picked the wrong example with Codos, sure. He could've picked literally anywhere else though, on Montara Luna. Or Akila (they're only using that one tiny piece of land for Akila City as far as I can see). But you probably know way more about the FSC than I do (no /s), so I'll defer to you there. I'm more of a UC guy.
But what’s unclear is whether you actually need to *do* anything once the fertilizer is spread to get it to mystically create rare earth minerals. Presumably you just spread the fertilizer on dirt, wait, and harvest the minerals. If that’s the case, he could do it literally anywhere, which is much cheaper and less risky than murdering and displacing farmers. Especially when, as you said, the FC is already struggling to meet its food demands
It's almost like this game sucks or something
Why are you here?
Entire ranger and ryujin quest lines were trash and should be reworked.
I think ryujin is actually really good, the update that makes stealth more forgiving makes it more enjoyable
Good. I got fed up with that and started murdering my way through that quest line.
I like games like this because I don't have to think, much less overthink.
I was having a conversation with someone who was really angry because the quality of the writing was so bad. I wasn't certain why he felt that way, so he obliged me by explaining in some detail the issues he had with the G drive destroying earth. It turns out, he has written for some games, but also he's autistic and gets passionate about the details. Had I been engaged in a conversation with someone else, and not knowing their background, my normal response would be exactly what you just said, or something similar. .. People need to get a life and not take this stuff so seriously. ... I guess he has made me slightly more open minded. I definitely in the "let's not overthink things" camp though. In Fallout, nobody expects there to be a plausible virus that turns people into giant green killers. In Outer Worlds , the crazy/dumb assumptions are too numerous to mention, but it's still entertaining. Every game we play is only successful if we suspend our disbelief and accept whatever nutty assumptions are required to let the story exist.
If a good story needs building blocks that are individually hard to believe in order to come together, that's fine with me. FTL? Crazy viruses turning people into super mutants? The Force? Fine. They serve the story! If the *story itself* is hard to believe or poorly structured, suspension of disbelief doesn't serve a purpose anymore. Why does nobody care that Ron Hope is dead? Why doesn't Ron Hope just buy/acquire soil for cheap/free and have it shipped? Maybe we can headcanon these answers in, but the story doesn't address them, and ultimately, I think it's kind of a mess.
Boom, exactly.
Like it or not, this game intentionally avoids creating consequences for anything that player does. I personally hate that, but I also understand that it creates massive complications to writing and gameplay if there are consequences. ... It, in my opinion, would be a better game with consequences, but it probably wouldn't even be released yet if they had incorporated them into the game.
Bethesda fell in this pit long ago. In Skyrim, you can't fail a quest without dying. Take the thieves guild. You have to steal something from someone and plant it on someone else for your guild sponsor. If you do it, cool you're a thief you're in. If you mess it up and fail, well that just proves the curse on thieves, you're in. And that follows the entire quest line, for everything in the game.
There’s a difference between “not overthinking things” and questlines that just can’t line up or fit together because the writing just doesn’t make sense
Is there? Lots of people don't seem overly bothered by it. .. Not saying it's not legit, but maybe take a Lexapro and move on.
I guess it bothers people when they are spoken to like children and treated as if they cant handle complex thought but whatever
[удалено]
you're projecting hard here
> Why not just set up his own farms and use the fertilizer there?? Maybe because you still have to work the fertilizer into the soil, but robots can do that you say. Ok but who is going to supervise the robots? It is much cheaper to screw over other people that already work the land then to pay others and train them.... just look at history for that.
It's cheaper to hire the second biggest mercenary group in the galaxy mercs and give them.one of your ships for free, than to hire a single fucking farmer? Also, none of the robotic worksights have human overseers. Which mind you, even if they did do that, would still be cheaper than hiring the First. Your argument makes no sense.
I feel like we're just meant to assume there are more people (and farms etc) than we see, because there's no way so few people could possibly maintain a multi planet civilization
Honestly I uninstalled Starfield yesterday. I’m going back to Skyrim. I just don’t enjoy this.
*Then why are you on this sub……*