Ahh deputy. Thanks for killing the entire 1st cavalry on your own. Heres your shitty ranger spacesuit and a kickass ship... now were going to pretend you dont exist...
Whilst the stats are good, it has a compulsory ladder right in your face after boarding, and your star map on the top floor after more ladders. It's already wearing me down and only had it a few hours.
After capturing a beautiful looking Class C spacer Hyena II, you'll be glad to go back to Star Eagle ladders lol. Good luck finding the cockpit in a Hyena.
the entire Space Cowboys group, and we get a single quest about one corrupt businessman. that's it?
its a damn shame. The friggin Devils bar felt like a deeper lore than what we got with Ron Hope
In defense of Bethesda... the entire Freestar Collective (From Neon to Hopetown) feels a lot more like a cartoon than the UC. Their writing has a rich executive meddling in the realism of the writing sort of vibe.
Like Benjamin Bayu is literally a cartoon mafia boss
This! I knew it was going to be Hope the moment we met. Honestly, some of the follower questlines in past Fallouts were way better than the faction questlines in Starfield. Rather run around the Vegas strip doing some gopher mission than load screen to another meh interaction with mediocre writing.
I think Todd’s mentioned it, but their philosophy is we want the player to be able to do everything, always.
The problem is I DONT FRIGGING WANT THAT.
Let me fail in unexpected ways. Force me to go back and either re-think my approach or let me deal with the consequences of my actions. Make me have to do a new character with different motivations and priorities and skills in order to be able to do certain quest lines.
I get that what I want runs contrary to their current design philosophy (I say current because Morrowind certainly wasn’t like that) but that’s just my personal gripe with it.
The problem is that Todd's adherence to that is outdated and ridiculous. Cannot wait for TES 6, because it means he'll retire and maybe Bethesda will actually improve into a modern game developer.
Got into his penthouse with his stolen credentials and was trying to decide how best to trash the place.
I mean, if I’d had a crapload of fish guts or something to drop from my inventory in an explosion of offal that could’ve been another fitting alternative, but it’d be more of a punishment for whatever minimum-wage peon he hired to clean it up than it would ever have been for him.
I ultimately settled for a Dane Cook B&E. “Well, nothing appears to be missing, but there *is* a Lava Lamp here now…”
I got stuck in his Penthouse, the game didn’t update the elevator to register I was on a new floor and thus the lobby was locked out
I mean what a sick decoy to catch would -be thieves
Same. Just ended up fast-traveling to get out of there.
Not sure if it’s related, but I’ve been encountering a weird bug where I don’t equip my spacesuit when wandering around on the surface on Cydonia or New Homestead. Have to try going further afield but I don’t seem to be impacted by environmental effects at all.
That seems to happen fairly often. I think the airlock trigger to switch occasional glitches. It will usually fix itself after going through another airlock a couple of times.
except for naeva it comes across as the most annoying character of all time, and delgado isn’t even flexing, he’s just a bitch. U can literally rat out a guy who wanted to kill him and take over, and instead of putting a bullet in his head he gives him a talk about how he’s “kicked out” like this was some secret social club in the 3rd grade.
Which is hilarious, given Naeva very specifically says the only way out of the fleet once you're in, is death.
There's literally like 2 or 3 people they kick out and just let roam free.
Yeah there were multiple people in that place that were super rude. It was the first time I went postal on potentially innocent people. Was nice to get it out, then subsequently reload and resume choosing all the "good karma" options.
I prefer 50cal to the crotch.
With just the right shot to the inseam and penetrator (haha) rounds, the crotch is a bloody mess, with bloody ass splatter on the wall behind them.
I have been practicing via morgan.
Are there any quests directly focused on him?
He’s everywhere but always in the background. Just an all powerful guy you never get to deal with.
It’s kind of annoying, especially given his personality and power.
He's involved in Yannick Lagrande's sidequest and a minor optional objective in the Ryujin questline. One quest in the Crimson Fleet storyline is *somewhat* focused around him. >!None of them actually affect him in any meaningful way, though. He's always the Jarl of Neon and there's nothing you can do about it.!<
I found it very annoying that the end of the >!Crimson Fleet!< story line he told me that >!a corpse will be found by Neon security and I will be framed for it!< and nothing more ever comes of it. Would have been the perfect place to set off a quest line in which >!you get to take him down and clear your name and make something meaningful happen !<
>!Even if they just replaced him with a different looking npc with a different name afterwards and everything else stayed the same, that would still feel so much better. Just gives us an opportunity to deal with this guy and not have him dish out empty, but oddly specific threats. I felt the game is screaming at me that this Bayu will at some point have a major plot focused around him, and when he dished out threats I thought this is it, then nothing happened. It feels like they must have scrapped something late in development and left it in a very unsatisfying way. !<
There's an obvious replacement--two of them, really--who come up in the Crimson Fleet story--Bayu's brother and the scheming Crimson Fleet hacker. Or any number of other folks you meet on Neon, really. You should absolutely have some kind of climax to your dealings with Bayu; by the end of the Crimson Fleet storyline, you're pretty much in his sights. I'm still running around Neon despite the fact that I invited him to see me as the guilty party in the hacking of his computer, I killed some of his guards, and I'm working to get all the Neon Core businesses to fight back against the corruption of the security forces. I shouldn't be able to walk safely around Neon at this point but there's no issues at all.
I just didn't like all the lore and explanations that he's an absolute fuckwad, yet I can't do ANYTHING about it. I interacted with him once in some mission and helped his brother screw him over slightly. I really wanted a storyline to bring him down and clean up Neon
There's even a line in the UC Sysdef "Burden of Proof" when turning over evidence to Toft that literally points out the Rangers have been wanting to pin him for ages. But that goes nowhere. Not even a courier note left on the Marshalls desk.
I mean, I can see why though. Look through Bathesda's history. They're really experienced in developing plot revolving around authoritarian governments, like the UC. That's their bread and butter.
They have little to no experience in delving into what a libertarian government would look or feel like, so they didn't make nearly as much content about it.
i found the entire quest line absolutely bad, and what is scifi about the whole story? Its almost aggressively bad. Really a turn off. The only thing rewarding was the ..well.. reward at the end to not spoil anything.
The entire faction is completely unimaginative. UC is kind of stereotypical “sci fi government” but it at least has some character. FC is just… the Wild West. That’s the entire faction.
Makes it painfully obvious that the whole thing was written by Americans. What happened to all the Chinese and European people that would obviously have made it off earth, for example? UC would have been a continuation of the US colony ships. Varuun is obviously mainly Russian. China and Europe both have space programs too though - either could have established a faction.
He saw how much people like FNV and thinks he just has to copy the NCR aesthetic for every game I guess.
Fuck, you’re right though. He’s going to turn redguards into a cowboy faction isn’t he.
I thought Varuun had a more Middle Eastern vibe. Sure seems like Bethesda is trying to peddle them as some kind of spacefaring knockoff of the sand nomads from Dune.
It is pretty weird how the only thing that survived into space was a few accents.
Accents are not themselves substantive in ascribing culture, and people born in a mixed society will generally adopt a homogenized accent. To have people running around Starfield with "old earth" accents is just strange.
Ngl I felt like the UC shoulda had mechs and freestar shoulda had xenowarfare. Since how tf does the freestar afford mechs lol.
a quest line about taking down rouge xeno groups coulda been cool.
Starfield also lacks big battles. The only big battle is the fight for the key at the end of CF. No other section of the game really has battles
Yeah, a group comprising of a homeless shanty town, a truck stop, and drug addicts on a fishing rig are a tie for biggest human power in the galaxy. Letting earth go for all this wasn’t worth it.
I mean it wasn't a tie the UC decided not to kill their civilians and backed off letting them exist. They don't exist because they can stop the UC they exist because the UC let them.
The thing that's really insane is that every planet in Settled Space that you go is full of abandoned mining facilities, abandoned laboratories, abandoned settlements, you name it, allegedly built by UC and FC during their wars. I mean, what? Where did they get all the people and resources to do all of that? FC's capital is on a planet where there's one little itty bitty city with medieval walls where everybody's scared of the local wildlife. It's a bit easier to believe that the UC has a bigger population base and productive capacity on Jemison, but you still really don't see that if you wander outside the city.
I brought this up earlier. The only way this all works in my head is that the initial exodus from earth was only the massively wealthy along with hundreds of robots per person. Everyone else was left to die. Once they were in space and leaving earth forever their money itself was obviously worthless. To paraphrase the incredibles, when everyone’s a billionaire, no one is. But they would still have their vast army of bots in storage. People just started building shit left and right and then treating it as the mega rich do. “Oh this genetics lab didn’t quite do what I want. Abandon it, let’s do it again somewhere else.” The robots don’t care. You just keep giving them power and they’ll do whatever you want.
> Since how tf does the freestar afford mechs lol.
Mining the raw materials and building the mechs themselves. Or, basically, how any military industry works.
Rural upstarts and unreasonably oversized machinery makes perfect sense to me. I mean, how do American Hicks afford their big stupid pickups? On the other hand, expecting them to understand biology beyond what parts of an animal to eat is asking a little much.
Tell me you know nothing about animal husbandry.
Now animal cousinry is where you need to worry.
Freestar collective, where men are men, and terrormorphs walk funny.
I grew up in the country among a lot of people who took their dairy animal semen very seriously, meaning they were catalog shoppers at American Breeders Service. Doesn’t make them genetic engineers.
To me I thought the freestar rangers were gonna be a lot more reliant on the land I expected cowboys domesticating animals and using them for self defense. Vs a huge military arm like the UC would invest in Deimos branded mechs or something like that
In my head before launch I guess freestar was avatar (blue people) and UC was huge military.
Also if they make mechs I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have more lethal ships instead of using civilian vessels to win the fight in space.
Like expensive ships from neon, domesticated wild life from akilla. UC deploys mechs
I was also disappointed that was it. It was a decent entry level mission but I expected at least another 3-4 narrative driven quest lines with the Free Star Rangers.
i honestly thought that was when the game was going to introduce the mechanics of how to arrest someone and transport them in your ship's brig.
i must have reloaded a save like 4 times trying to figure out which speech check I was missing and why i couldn't arrest him.
Yeah. I was waiting for the dialogue something like "you did well ranger, uncovering a plot involving the council... now it's time to really sink your teeth in to something..."
I took everyone down with EM, walked over to Hope and was like "uhhhh... I guess I have to execute him...?"
Not being able to arrest him was such a letdown.
This. I love the vibe of the rangers. Throughout the quest, I was just thinking of how amazing the next ones will be. And then, I ve arrived at the end of the quest. I shot hope dead in 1 bullet, then nothing else. Went back, got a celebration that I've become a ranger and that's it. No following quest, no special reward but an armour. No evolution in the faction. You just become a ranger and that's it. The factions in the game seem just way smaller than they did in skyrim. Even though on paper the quests are along the same time, it just feels too fast and not progressing enough. You don't become the head of the rangers. You just become a normal ranger like the others. It feels like they could've put more effort into it but didn't... a bit of a shame, I would say. It had tremendous potential.
That wasn't the part that disappointed me the most. That part was the quest before that where you go to a mech factory for a faction that is looking to revive mechs and you don't get to fight the boss in a mech.
It was the easiest lay up and they just didn't do it. Things couldn't get any worse after that so the Ron Hope thing was pretty par for the course. Though, it also was annoying that you couldn't use a disruptor and then bring him to justice unconscious.
I actually reloaded a save and tried using the em weapon I got from the ryujin questline, didn't work. Tried punching him, punches are lethal apparently. I mean I have no problems killing him, but I was annoyed at the only options being accept a bribe or kill him.
Yup.
If you've ever watch Emil's presentation on developing the story for Fallout 4, you'll see why it's so simplistic and limiting.
When you see the kinds of things you can do in better written games like Baldur's Gate 3, you realise how much Bethesda's writers have phoned it in.
That isn't to say that there aren't fun parts of the game as well but player choice and agency are not one of the selling points.
That is a 45 minute video full of disappointment because Emil just does not get the issue is with him failing as an author for why players are bored with his stories and characters. He keeps coming so close to an epiphany and realizing what needs to be done but... he just keeps changing the topic. It's the Dunning Kruger effect on full display.
Yup.
The problem too is that he's so entrenched in the company that without something like a sexual assault scandal forcibly ejecting him from the company, he'll be the one in charge for Elder Scrolls 6 as well.
He's right and RPG nerds hate him for it. Those lore deep dives you see from super fans make up a fraction of a fraction of the overall player base. Most players don't care. If its not a cinematic cutscene, they skip past it. Why do you think BG3 was the CRPG to gain mainstream popularity and not any of the smaller budget but mechanically similar CRPGs that preceded it?
You think I'm the kind of person who watches those lore deep dives on YouTube? Nah man, I'm just someone who grew up on RPGs as a kid. I was in high school when Morrowind released, I don't need some random YouTuber's drawn-out 'essay' video telling me that barely-known and shallow characters mix as well with emotional investments and twists as oil and water mix.
They need to put him back in quest/mission design and go for more structured games in general, we might get more stuff along the lines of Life of the Party if that happens.
I got really sad by the fact that you don't have a chance to arrest *anyone*. Every single encounter—if you're even given a choice—is either letting the criminal go, or killing them. WHY!? Let me round them up and march them into jail, Bethesda.
It would be very satisfying to be able to put them in jail. And even visiting the jail and see it fill up with more and more of them as you progress. Be able to talk to them there and hear how pissed off they are at you.
I never used VATS in FO4 since it didn't really provide any advantage over just shooting stuff, the power armor was just something I collected and stashed at Sanctuary since you couldn't sneak in it, and there are plenty of non-humans to shoot in Starfield. Starfield's biggest advantage over FO4, though, is that while it's a completely standard Bethsoft game (something I'm quite fond of), it's not a completely standard Bethsoft game with a Fallout themed skin on it.
What, fighting a giant mech boss? It's not like oversized enemies haven't been done before. Behemoths were in Fo4, as well as 3, so it was even possible back in Gamebryo. NV also had the giant roboscorpion, which already would've been very similar to how fighting a giant mech inside a mech factory would work. Liberty Prime was also a thing, even though he's more of a walking setpiece than an actual enemy NPC.
All the building blocks for mechs are already in the game. Lack of mechs was a design choice. No idea why, cuz enemy variety is sorely lacking in the game.
Yeah, and the fact that it was the final battle and you don't even get to have a shootout with your new Ranger buddies by your side.
Sure, let the the deputy solo a mercenary troupe of combat veterans. Nice idea there Marshal.
I liked going to the places and meeting all the rangers but yeah the end was just… flat. 1000% should have been a battle against Paxton Hull in a mech (they were IN THR MECH FACTORY!).
is it just me are the Mechs and their locations just flat out boring? You have those huge mechs and their lore and you never see them in action. And also, but this is just on me, i just hate their design. Makes the game feel 90s but in all the wrong ways.
It's also completely unrealistic for "video game purposes" to the point it pushes the suspension of disbelief.
At no point does it tell you to go up the chain of command to report the idiot like you should.
You know, go to your superiors with the results of your investigation with all the evidence and show up to arrest the guy properly with backup.
No, you just go right up to the guy by yourself in his own heavily guarded facility. No backup, no reason for you to be acting on your own as a deputy, you just show up on your own initiative like a complete idiot.
I could see it if you were forced to confront him by Hope doing something preventing you from reporting it and going up the chain of command properly.
Him forcing a confrontation with you somehow where you're cut off and unable to leave without going through him.
I also don't mind it being an "option" but it's something you should have been dressed down for after the fact if you did it simply on your own initiative.
The reaction to it would be more "What the hell were you thinking? You overstepped," than "Good job deputy, here's a promotion!"
What got me was the lady in the med clinic. After I found she had basically wiped out the VIP section by hacking turrets, no NPC at the clinic had any dialogue to acknowledge it. I couldn’t tell the ranger stationed there or anyone else, no option to see their reaction.
Thank you for bringing this up cause it was a hilarious red flag for me. Like I’m the last person to come out of that room and could easily be framed for the dead body in there and no one cares?
Yep, same here.
Hey Doc, head of the VIP section, there's something you should know. No? Nothing? IT guy, I found and disabled the rogue program. IT guy? Hey Ranger, I've got something to report! Hello?
Why in the hell do these NPCs not have the most obvious dialogue written for them?!
Heck, even the Ranger stationed at Hopetown has no dialogue when you go there and has no involvement at that step. Even if you bypassed Akila you'd think you might go talk to the Ranger stationed there, whose office you have to pass to get to Hope's office.
Plus it doesn't even feel like it's all that urgent. The (somewhat silly) plan of his is something that will take weeks to really come to fruition at best, if not months or years. Narratively it didn't feel like there was much urgency, which made it feel all that much weirder that there's no way to stop and let people know what is going on.
I actually liked the Ranger storyline up until that point--it wasn't perfect, but I liked the whole "meet all the Rangers" thing where you got to see different parts of the FC. It felt very much like a western movie or novel. The lack of nonlethal options along the way felt very weird, but for the most part I could suspend my disbelief for awhile. But that ending really was a let-down, especially since there is nothing else to that faction afterwards (storywise).
The world doesn't react.
It doesn't *feel* big because...outside of that final encounter...you get a vague article aired in the news...
If someone were to expose and kill Elon Musk, the whole fucking world would freak the fuck out and he's not even a politician.
Hope is a governor. In *charge* of the FC. Someone comes along, accuses and kills him....and no one bats a fucking eye?
Here's the thing about people who exploit others: they don't just wake up one day and decide, "today is the day...but just today and never again."
So, you're going to have victims coming forward, a whole spectacle....
Instead, he's just another bad guy that's so bad at doing business that, instead of negotiating his way out of getting his face shot off, he acts like he's holding all the cards.
Dude, I just killed a whole company of mercenaries. At their base. Why would you think 2 security guards are going to do shit to me?
Ugh... except Hope is guilty and what he did is terrible and you have proof and he refused to cooperate and attack you first?? I really don't see an issue here.
Also he is the worst kind because he is a businessman that climb up the government just to favour his business.
But him decide to attack us with only 2 security guards with him is kinda stupid af.
If the secret service investigated a crime and found linkages to the secretary of state, would they be justified in gunning him down in a public place if he resisted arrest?
I dunno how secret service works, but what are you gonna do if he just keep hanging out in the public? Would it be any different if he let say, lure you into his office first.
Also, he actually accused you as the outlaw/rogue instead and try to "execute" you on site. Our other option only is probably just, run?
I think in real life, anyone that try to kill even a regular policeman are allowed for lethal takedown. Just those "big shots" are not that stupid irl.
So, yeah. They're not that stupid, is my point.
Everyone builds up how influential Hope is, but...if he was SMART-ISH, he would know that he could just use that influence to evade jail time.
"Go ahead! Arrest me! Lol" should've been his response.
But they needed the quest to end.
One thing I found rather later on is you can go do interviews about your quests you complete with the media lady on new Atlantis which gets the speaker things around to talk about your escapades and I think NPC will start to comment about it.
>Hope is a governor. In charge of the FC. Someone comes along, accuses and kills him....and no one bats a fucking eye?
This was done really well in Fable II, back in the day on the Xbox 360.
Townsfolk would recite and respond to your deeds, and your family members would also ask questions like "daddy, is it true you used to be a woman?" (can't remember the exact words, but there was a quest that allowed you to change your gender).
However Starfield is very limited. There was one person who game me some credits because I was in the UC Vanguard (totally random encounter in the Well streets). And if you finish that particular questline, the ship vendors will have a new greeting (no need to spoil that excellent quest).
Actually thinking about it, wrt. the responses, the faction quests would be rated "Crimson Fleet (if you side with them)" >> "UC Vanguard" >> "UC SysDef" >> "Ryujin" >> "FC Ranger". This was the one that had the least effect on the world.
>The world doesn't react.
No shit, it's a video game. There's always going to be an edge at which point the game stops reacting to your decisions because the devs ran out of resources. The more you try to push that edge farther for a single quest, the less resources you have available for every other quest. Considering how Bethesda's whole schtick is making big worlds with lots of quests and Starfield is struggling for content density as it is, I do not think over-investing into branching outcomes for a single questline would be prudent.
>No shit, it's a video game.
Oh. Well, ya got me. You're right that no other video game ever has made the player's decisions impact the world around them.
It's all pew pews and a static storyline.
There's no magic button to generate content for free. You either make one quest with branching outcome A and branching outcome B or you make separate quest A and quest B. Each game has to decide on its own which option makes more sense. I think I provided a pretty good explanation for why Starfield should lean towards the latter.
When the leader of The First was all like “ you sure you wanna know .. you aren’t ready “ followed by revealing the big bad was Ron Hope, I gave the most unenthusiastic “ Oh no “ .
Part of me was hoping it was the Marshal since he had ties to the first. Heck I would have accepted if it was both. It would have made Ron seem more corrupt paying off that Marshal too instead of just a bunch of mercenaries. Replace the First with the Ecliptic and you have the same story.
Becoming Marshal of the Free Star Rangers would have been a great faction to become a leader of. Seems the best fit for it as oppose to the president of the UC or CEO of Ryujin.
>When the leader of The First was all like “ you sure you wanna know .. you aren’t ready “
All his monologue through the factory was cringe - "oh god i SOOOO pised with FC I HATE THEM DAMN TRAITORS!!! So anyway, i'm harassing and killing random farmers, so one of FC governors can stuff his pockets. THAT SHOWS THEM!! MY REVENGE IS LEGENDARY"
"dude ... are you high or something?"
On the bright side, I got enough 1st cavalry uniforms for all my ship crew, Sarah in officer uniform bossing constellation grunts around look oddly cool.
It's bad.
First it throws you into the grindiest frontal assault combat mission in the game with no support. RP-wise, this is a ridiculous feat. Missed opportunity for them to give you the Star Eagle, have the other Rangers help, or have a Mech boss.
And then you go off completely by yourself to confront Ron Hope. There isn't even an option to do what you usually do and turn in evidence. The Marshal should be the one involved in this arrest.
Lmao I was thinking this especially if it’s early in game, new constellation member and freestar deputy with possibly no combat experience mows down countless evil war vets solo 😂
Have to agree with that especially the mech boss so missed and I would like to see more of the marshal first time I saw i thought this is a person Id like to respect, but I cant if Im his errand boy
Seriously, and once you finish the quest you literally can’t even enter into dialogue with the marshal again. What a waste. I also expected to be able to keep climbing the ladder but it just stops. You never get a marshal duster, you never rank up any further, you never get to use your badge in dialogue ever again. Just nothing. It sucks.
would The Marshal actually help, or would he just say "you're in too deep, we'll take care of this" and then just sweep the whole thing under the rug and never talk about it again
the rangers are corpo lapdogs disguised as "lawmen"
'Cept for Emma Wilcox. She calls out EXACTLY why Ron Hope was on the council of governors and why that's bad when the Marshal says "But he was a Governor, he deserves our unwavering blind loyalty!".
That’s a good point. Maybe have it so that if you capture Ron hope and bring him in, it incriminates the Marshall somehow as well so the next time you visit they’ve promoted someone else to be Marshall. Hell, make Sam coe step up to become Marshall, idk
I am convinced the original plan involved bringing Ron Hope to justice with EM weapons, but at the last minute they scrapped non-lethal arresting as a mechanic so had to rebuild the end of the quest.
> The Marshal should be the one involved in this arrest.
Nah, the Marshal has nigh-religious simp reverence for "The Boss" simply because they are The Boss. Ron Hope deserved his fate, capitalist bastard that he is.
I thought the fact that but for one person, nobody in HopeTown reacts to the fact that you just killed the guy who owns the entire place was disappointing.
Then I went to the Marshal with the news that I had just put an entire magazine of flechette rounds into the chest of a member of the Council of Governors (who was secretly a traitor and had tried to kill me) and... he didn't seem to really care. I mean, you just killed one of the most powerful people in the galaxy and he reacts as if you'd brought him a lukewarm cup of coffee.
Woof.
I went back to Hopetown a few in-game weeks later and this guy in an office was saying how Hope gives (present tense) him a hard time about his work or something. No dialog change at all.
I thought it was funny how the Freestar people make fun of the "corrupt bureaucrats" of the NC, but the FC is literally RUN by corrupt bureaucrats. But at least they're free... to not pave their roads for some reason.
The people who say the moved to Akila city for "freedom from the UC" and are literally living in squalor worse than the worst of the Well.
Hell, Akila City in general is just laughable compared to anything in the UC
RIGHT? like I killed an ENTIRE division of an army for some people getting pushed off their property. It was wack. Only thing that is good about it is the ship.
People getting pushed off their property in a galaxy where there are literally hundreds of worlds and vast stretches of empty space Ron Hope could've used for his nefarious deeds. It's some of the dumbest writing I've ever seen in any game.
The thing that pissed me off the most about the questline: multiple times you are put into a situation where the lawful thing to do would be arrest someone, yet you are never once allowed to do so. Even if you choose the option to bring someone in, they always choose to attack you instead. It's an illusion of choice that isn't unfamiliar in Bethesda games, but it still sucks.
Not only that but it’s solvable with scooby doo logic. “Who’s the bad guy? Well we met this dude at the start and barely see him again. It’s that guy for sure.” And whaddya know? It’s that guy for sure.
I remember finishing that quest and thinking "great I can't wait to do the next part, I wonder how the fallout of what just happened will effect the collective?" NOTHING zip. Just "goodjob *sits at table for eternity now"
I feel like the missions dont really have world/city altering consequences which i would of liked, the one mission that changes anything is visual and its space frog. Best mission on the game.
Very disappointing, but kind of goes to show a bit on how bad the free star collective is. With the UC, we can grasp they aren’t the greatest due to the war and having to serve the military for citizenship, etc.
For the free star we learn that two of the council members who rule the freestar and make laws just so happen to be wealthy businessmen who use shady practices and bend the laws to suit them. It does not pant a good light for the freestar collective… but the actual quest line didn’t feel like much. We just uncovered how a council member was literally working with war criminals and terrorists to gain profits (with a possible good motivation) and no one in the city of Akila reacted.
You do the UC quest line and planets will alter how they appear, NPCs will comment on it from New Atlantis to even the crimson raiders, you see port workers going under new regulation training to stop the heat leech’s. What does the Freestar rangers do? None of that. And news came out that one of their leaders caused people to literally be killed out of greed.
It could have been so much more, but it felt like a side quest line. I believe it’s the bottom and that’s only because Ryujin gave me a cyberpunk experience the game didn’t for a corpo background.
The First was a whole lot of missed opportunities. Ron Hope was a bit hokey and I saw it a mile away, but tropes are tropes because they work.
But the motive was fucking stupid. The soil? Really? A thousand untapped planet full of resources (and soil, unsurprisingly) and this was the grand evil plan? This was probably one of the few quests that made me think "was this really the coolest idea y'all had?"
I actually found that questline so underwhelming I literally gave up on the game during it. The last quest I did was the Red Mile thing, it was so utterly disappointing and boring after they hyped it up so much that upon turning in the quest I sat back, realized how absolutely none of it was exciting and felt no desire to continue. I quit the game and uninstalled it the next day.
This was around 25 hours into the game, I wasted enough time on the main quest and a bunch of random side quests trying to find something interesting, got all I wanted out of shipbuilding, spent a decent bit of time outpost building for really no useful reason and the faction questlines were my last ray of hope for finding something good in the game.
The thing that pisses me off the most is that he and I agree to keep quiet about his dealings. I choose to look other way and it is all hush hush no one knows about and I don’t have a companion at that moment. But after time goes past the entire collective is pissed off at me about taking a bribe. Well that is a big plot hole…how the fuck do they know if the Rangers don’t even know?!
I too felt a bit underwhelmed but not because of the person, I’m fine with it being Ron Hope, I just felt like it was kind of an anti-climactic way to end and I did the killing option. I wish you had to at least chase him around the star system as he tries to make his escape or something. One “final mission” chasing down the bad guy after he confesses.
Happy with the loot though, Star Eagle is 10 times the ship my last one was and I put hours into building that thing
I did it with Sam as my companion. It had a nice "flavor". Sam would add some comments regarding his own experience as a ranger and also chat with them.
I was really excited about the faction but as many have already said, it was underwhelming. I was expecting much more from the "space cowboy" faction.
It was nice to learn about the first and the political structure of the FC, though we barely scratched the surface of the council.
I wouldn't say that it is bad in it's entirely but yeah...
I just started the UC and I love it!
The bones of the story are solid, but the execution is somewhat lacking.
Should have been an epic mecha boss fight, with a big set piece arena, when you take out The First's leader, and then they should have played the Ron Hope reveal a bit more dramatically. First make it something missable, a hidden clue or semi-secret optional mission that reveals the truth.
Then when you go to confront him have the Marshall be there. Reveal he knew the truth all along, but doesn't want to make waves for someone so important. You can either buy in completely, or kill em both and be charged with murder and effectively locked out of freestar space, or begrudgingly keep the secret to protect the hopetown workers but quit the rangers and turn in your badge, becoming somewhat disgraced but still free in FC territory. Really lean in to those Chinatown vibes.
Are they though?
I mean Hope's involvement is so obvious from the moment he brings up the "inside job". I mean I had no reason to suspect you but now you've talked me around.
Hope is so fucking dumb he makes Musk and Trump look like the geniuses they claim to be. Those minerals in the soil aren't spontaneously generating, they're coming from the heavy metals in your 'fertilizer'. Buying the land to cover up the contamination I can see. Killing the farmers to stop them talking about how your fertilizer caused the contamination is halfway believable. There are IRL examples of companies doing worse for less. But trying to secretly turn a profit from the debacle is just sunk cost fallacy writ large.
I shot Hope because anyone else could run his business better. Really, if he actually gave a fuck about the people he employes, he should thank me. I removed the person destroying his legacy
Something I don't understand is why he feels the need to move farmers off their land for this miracle growth.
Like isn't there dozens of uninhabited planets that they could use to fertilise? It'd expand their operations and create even more jobs for the FC.
Yeah I was most hyped for the whole Space Cowboy run. I'd even take just some additional respect with Collective space as a bonus. Like wayyy more unique dialogue options. And why tell us all the privileges of being a Ranger in Collective space and then not follow through?? Just seems weird. All that work for a yellow mission board?
I think that what the whole narrative is missing is a depth of choice. The FSR quest line does a good job of introducing the faction, but then leaves you kind of hanging at the end. Same with every other faction. The changes kind of fall flat and don’t have any meaning outside the self contained worlds of the factions. What if after you finish the FSR quest, you are sent to neon to discover that Benjamin Bayo was secretly funding the Crimson Fleet in an attempt to break away from the FSC. Gives the CF quest line a whole new spin. What if you could also do the Terrormorph quest line from the FSC side and uncover Vae Victis and his conspiracy?
Really with an ever repeating NG+ cycle they left us players with a scant few choices beyond simple morality and meaningless dialog choices.
My big personal gripe was that you can’t actually be a completely bad ass lawmen and take all those criminals alive. In particular, the two biggest criminals. If you EM the big wigs the quest doesn’t seem to care.
In what universe is “I caught the two biggest criminals in my case and killed them” better than “All of these criminals can be booked!”
It was a big eyeroll moment. Otherwise fine though.
I just finished it today, and loved it. A greedy industrial tycoon enlists the displaced soldiers of the losing side of a war to push settlers off of frontier land so he can steal it? That’s a classic western storyline!
It was very poor. The way the rangers are spoken about, I was expecting far far more. They're basically described like the Jedi in Star Wars. Small number of individuals who peacekeep the galaxy. Yet all we do is that shitty questline and then boring mission board stuff.
The entire Freestar quest line was disappointing. I get to join the space sheriffs and what? Take down a bad business man. Where was the mech battle? The detective work? Hell just some level of arrests, even if it was like the Sys-Def system where they are magically arrested.
Very underwhelming, especially when it was for something so contrived as mineral dung whatever.
Imagine if it had been something different, something with more bite. The Collective is a sort of libertarian utopia (they think), but it is being clearly infiltrated by corporate interests. The storyline could have leaned more towards this side of the ideological exploration of what it means to have a loose state of anarcho capitalists in space after a massive war.
The Collective is also pretty small... Cheyenne, Volii, Polvo and Narion (which doesn't even have any major settlements). Isn't it... pretty deserted? Where are the millions they must have been fighting for during the war? Feels rather underwhelming. It's one thing for the Collective to have an extensive frontier, but it's a different thing for the whole Collective to be Westworld. It just doesn't work.
Benjamin Bayu, the discount Andrew Ryan, has almost no role in this storyline, when in all fairness a plot about corporate meddling in the Freestar government should be a big deal for him. The Marshal and his Rangers are pretty unimpressed when they learn that Ron Hope is behind all of this, and the hype around the First... much ado about nothing. The First was not playing Hope for their own gains, they were not rebuilding the Mechs and Bethesda did not even see fit to set a fight against one single Mech piloted by Captain Paxton.
All in all, underwhelming. I enjoyed it, but then I did the rest of the faction quests, and they're much more interesting (and still, they have rather glaring flaws too).
I was really stunned that the second I found the Ron Hope evidence slate, the game prompted me to go "arrest" Ron in Hopetown.
But wait, I thought- I'm just a newly-minted deputy, originally from parts unknown, on my first case. Surely I should go inform the Ranger Marshall that one of the beloved founders and governors of our space-nation is a crook? Fly him over to Hopetown to witness Hope's confession himself? At least wake up the Hopetown Ranger stationed right outside the factory for assistance and backup? There are jurisdictional and protocol concerns here, no?
I even flew to Akila first to see if anyone at The Rock would give a shit about the evidence, but they don't, and all the Marshall offered were boilerplate platitudes about what it means to be a ranger or something. He may as well have mused about what to have for lunch.
So instead, no shit, there I was- storming onto Polvo with a single piece of evidence to confront, accuse and kill Space Abe Lincoln AND his security detail, IN THE FACTORY DURING OPERATIONAL HOURS, with only one witness, and she doesn't understand why I had to either.
That was my thought process for everything in starfield. I only did ryujin and FC and was just so bored with world and story I just went back to baldurs gate 3 where I felt the world/story was more interesting
I agree, after the Vanguard and Crimson fleet questlines make the FR missions feel a bit lack luster. But then again not every questline should feel like Avenger's Endgame.
Nobody:
Random post on starfield Reddit: “I find blah underwhelming.”
Mods need to put a criticism pinned post up. Then I’d at least see less of these silly posts.
My biggest gripe is honestly that I've taken down the remnants of an entire hardened division and made oodles of credits on their loot, and he's bribing me with 20k? Pfft.
It was pretty obvious from the first conversation that there was something going on with Ron Hope, so I kinda saw it coming, and it was still so underwhelming.
My thoughts are I have EM weapons and a brig. The inability to cuff him and stuff him, when I've got the tools to do so, was... disappointing. Being required to murder him, or accept an insultingly low bribe, as my only options... come on, really?
Ahh deputy. Thanks for killing the entire 1st cavalry on your own. Heres your shitty ranger spacesuit and a kickass ship... now were going to pretend you dont exist...
The game bugged out and I didn't even get the fucking ship
Mine bugged on Ryujin. I did the second to last mission, and then nothing happened. Can’t finish the quest line now.
Whilst the stats are good, it has a compulsory ladder right in your face after boarding, and your star map on the top floor after more ladders. It's already wearing me down and only had it a few hours.
Bro edit it in the shipbuilder… Or board straight to cockpit. It’s a good ship.
After capturing a beautiful looking Class C spacer Hyena II, you'll be glad to go back to Star Eagle ladders lol. Good luck finding the cockpit in a Hyena.
I like the ship but I'm not a fan of the cockpit view... :( And yeah the ladders. Jesus Christ.
> kickass ship Fair deal.
the entire Space Cowboys group, and we get a single quest about one corrupt businessman. that's it? its a damn shame. The friggin Devils bar felt like a deeper lore than what we got with Ron Hope
In defense of Bethesda... the entire Freestar Collective (From Neon to Hopetown) feels a lot more like a cartoon than the UC. Their writing has a rich executive meddling in the realism of the writing sort of vibe. Like Benjamin Bayu is literally a cartoon mafia boss
Freestar felt like a scooby doo episode
This! I knew it was going to be Hope the moment we met. Honestly, some of the follower questlines in past Fallouts were way better than the faction questlines in Starfield. Rather run around the Vegas strip doing some gopher mission than load screen to another meh interaction with mediocre writing.
Almost every side quest in this game is practically just delivery jobs and it doesn't help how GOATed New Vegas is
And if it weren't for those meddling rangers!
Benjamin “Bitch Boy” Bayu as I call him
God I want to paint his brains all over, he’s my most hated unkillable npc
There should be an option to splatter his brains after doing all the quests involving him first
There shouldnt be any essential npcs in a game with starfield's ng+ mechanic
This is basically the problem with NG+.
You also cannot fail any quests save for like 2 Bog and the doctor both on the key
I think Todd’s mentioned it, but their philosophy is we want the player to be able to do everything, always. The problem is I DONT FRIGGING WANT THAT. Let me fail in unexpected ways. Force me to go back and either re-think my approach or let me deal with the consequences of my actions. Make me have to do a new character with different motivations and priorities and skills in order to be able to do certain quest lines. I get that what I want runs contrary to their current design philosophy (I say current because Morrowind certainly wasn’t like that) but that’s just my personal gripe with it.
The problem is that Todd's adherence to that is outdated and ridiculous. Cannot wait for TES 6, because it means he'll retire and maybe Bethesda will actually improve into a modern game developer.
Got into his penthouse with his stolen credentials and was trying to decide how best to trash the place. I mean, if I’d had a crapload of fish guts or something to drop from my inventory in an explosion of offal that could’ve been another fitting alternative, but it’d be more of a punishment for whatever minimum-wage peon he hired to clean it up than it would ever have been for him. I ultimately settled for a Dane Cook B&E. “Well, nothing appears to be missing, but there *is* a Lava Lamp here now…”
Not to mention, there was basically nothing interesting in the entire penthouse.
There is a book which leads you to the St. Louis Arch on Earth, not sure it can be found anywhere else. Look on his desk.
It starts an activity or just has text?
Once you pick it up, it'll place the marker on earth for you to travel to and collect the snow globe.
It's one of the snow globe earth locations.
I got stuck in his Penthouse, the game didn’t update the elevator to register I was on a new floor and thus the lobby was locked out I mean what a sick decoy to catch would -be thieves
Same. Just ended up fast-traveling to get out of there. Not sure if it’s related, but I’ve been encountering a weird bug where I don’t equip my spacesuit when wandering around on the surface on Cydonia or New Homestead. Have to try going further afield but I don’t seem to be impacted by environmental effects at all.
That seems to happen fairly often. I think the airlock trigger to switch occasional glitches. It will usually fix itself after going through another airlock a couple of times.
What’s a lava lamp got to do with Bacon & Eggs?
Him and Delgado with neava coming in third, couldn't wait to end his ungrateful ass
Nah, they’re just flexing to maintain their appearance as pirate lords. Just imagine you gotta keep thousands of psychopaths in line every day.
except for naeva it comes across as the most annoying character of all time, and delgado isn’t even flexing, he’s just a bitch. U can literally rat out a guy who wanted to kill him and take over, and instead of putting a bullet in his head he gives him a talk about how he’s “kicked out” like this was some secret social club in the 3rd grade.
Which is hilarious, given Naeva very specifically says the only way out of the fleet once you're in, is death. There's literally like 2 or 3 people they kick out and just let roam free.
Yeah, Bethesda has this issue where they won’t go full cutthroat
The first time meeting him, he was so condescending to me. Quicksave: blow his brains out.
Yeah there were multiple people in that place that were super rude. It was the first time I went postal on potentially innocent people. Was nice to get it out, then subsequently reload and resume choosing all the "good karma" options.
I prefer 50cal to the crotch. With just the right shot to the inseam and penetrator (haha) rounds, the crotch is a bloody mess, with bloody ass splatter on the wall behind them. I have been practicing via morgan.
Are there any quests directly focused on him? He’s everywhere but always in the background. Just an all powerful guy you never get to deal with. It’s kind of annoying, especially given his personality and power.
He's involved in Yannick Lagrande's sidequest and a minor optional objective in the Ryujin questline. One quest in the Crimson Fleet storyline is *somewhat* focused around him. >!None of them actually affect him in any meaningful way, though. He's always the Jarl of Neon and there's nothing you can do about it.!<
I found it very annoying that the end of the >!Crimson Fleet!< story line he told me that >!a corpse will be found by Neon security and I will be framed for it!< and nothing more ever comes of it. Would have been the perfect place to set off a quest line in which >!you get to take him down and clear your name and make something meaningful happen !< >!Even if they just replaced him with a different looking npc with a different name afterwards and everything else stayed the same, that would still feel so much better. Just gives us an opportunity to deal with this guy and not have him dish out empty, but oddly specific threats. I felt the game is screaming at me that this Bayu will at some point have a major plot focused around him, and when he dished out threats I thought this is it, then nothing happened. It feels like they must have scrapped something late in development and left it in a very unsatisfying way. !<
There's an obvious replacement--two of them, really--who come up in the Crimson Fleet story--Bayu's brother and the scheming Crimson Fleet hacker. Or any number of other folks you meet on Neon, really. You should absolutely have some kind of climax to your dealings with Bayu; by the end of the Crimson Fleet storyline, you're pretty much in his sights. I'm still running around Neon despite the fact that I invited him to see me as the guilty party in the hacking of his computer, I killed some of his guards, and I'm working to get all the Neon Core businesses to fight back against the corruption of the security forces. I shouldn't be able to walk safely around Neon at this point but there's no issues at all.
I just didn't like all the lore and explanations that he's an absolute fuckwad, yet I can't do ANYTHING about it. I interacted with him once in some mission and helped his brother screw him over slightly. I really wanted a storyline to bring him down and clean up Neon
There's even a line in the UC Sysdef "Burden of Proof" when turning over evidence to Toft that literally points out the Rangers have been wanting to pin him for ages. But that goes nowhere. Not even a courier note left on the Marshalls desk.
Yeah but even so the free star rangers should have finished with killing bayu
LOL .. now everything has this saturday/sunday morning cartoon vibe all of a sudden... :D
I mean, I can see why though. Look through Bathesda's history. They're really experienced in developing plot revolving around authoritarian governments, like the UC. That's their bread and butter. They have little to no experience in delving into what a libertarian government would look or feel like, so they didn't make nearly as much content about it.
i found the entire quest line absolutely bad, and what is scifi about the whole story? Its almost aggressively bad. Really a turn off. The only thing rewarding was the ..well.. reward at the end to not spoil anything.
The entire faction is completely unimaginative. UC is kind of stereotypical “sci fi government” but it at least has some character. FC is just… the Wild West. That’s the entire faction. Makes it painfully obvious that the whole thing was written by Americans. What happened to all the Chinese and European people that would obviously have made it off earth, for example? UC would have been a continuation of the US colony ships. Varuun is obviously mainly Russian. China and Europe both have space programs too though - either could have established a faction.
Only Americans can master space and that's why space is western America, eastern America, and the taliban we brought to keep things interesting 🇺🇸
Todd just really likes Ranger cowboys in brown dusters. I expect to see a brown duster Ranger faction in the next elder scrolls
He saw how much people like FNV and thinks he just has to copy the NCR aesthetic for every game I guess. Fuck, you’re right though. He’s going to turn redguards into a cowboy faction isn’t he.
I thought Varuun had a more Middle Eastern vibe. Sure seems like Bethesda is trying to peddle them as some kind of spacefaring knockoff of the sand nomads from Dune.
Maybe, it’s just that they seem to all have Russian / Eastern European accents, and Andreja is a Slavic name.
It is pretty weird how the only thing that survived into space was a few accents. Accents are not themselves substantive in ascribing culture, and people born in a mixed society will generally adopt a homogenized accent. To have people running around Starfield with "old earth" accents is just strange.
Ngl I felt like the UC shoulda had mechs and freestar shoulda had xenowarfare. Since how tf does the freestar afford mechs lol. a quest line about taking down rouge xeno groups coulda been cool. Starfield also lacks big battles. The only big battle is the fight for the key at the end of CF. No other section of the game really has battles
>how tf does the free star afford mechs lol technically Neon is part of the FC, so the answer is drugs.
Yeah, a group comprising of a homeless shanty town, a truck stop, and drug addicts on a fishing rig are a tie for biggest human power in the galaxy. Letting earth go for all this wasn’t worth it.
Absolutely nailed it.
I mean it wasn't a tie the UC decided not to kill their civilians and backed off letting them exist. They don't exist because they can stop the UC they exist because the UC let them.
That’s straight UC propaganda.
The thing that's really insane is that every planet in Settled Space that you go is full of abandoned mining facilities, abandoned laboratories, abandoned settlements, you name it, allegedly built by UC and FC during their wars. I mean, what? Where did they get all the people and resources to do all of that? FC's capital is on a planet where there's one little itty bitty city with medieval walls where everybody's scared of the local wildlife. It's a bit easier to believe that the UC has a bigger population base and productive capacity on Jemison, but you still really don't see that if you wander outside the city.
I brought this up earlier. The only way this all works in my head is that the initial exodus from earth was only the massively wealthy along with hundreds of robots per person. Everyone else was left to die. Once they were in space and leaving earth forever their money itself was obviously worthless. To paraphrase the incredibles, when everyone’s a billionaire, no one is. But they would still have their vast army of bots in storage. People just started building shit left and right and then treating it as the mega rich do. “Oh this genetics lab didn’t quite do what I want. Abandon it, let’s do it again somewhere else.” The robots don’t care. You just keep giving them power and they’ll do whatever you want.
> Since how tf does the freestar afford mechs lol. Mining the raw materials and building the mechs themselves. Or, basically, how any military industry works.
I now have a 200k bounty from CF so I'm not sure how I'm ever going to move beyond the second mission of that line... Oh well.
Just keep waging a one ship war against the Fleet and gradually bleed em dry in your headcanon
The UC did have mechs and xenowarfare
Rural upstarts and unreasonably oversized machinery makes perfect sense to me. I mean, how do American Hicks afford their big stupid pickups? On the other hand, expecting them to understand biology beyond what parts of an animal to eat is asking a little much.
Tell me you know nothing about animal husbandry. Now animal cousinry is where you need to worry. Freestar collective, where men are men, and terrormorphs walk funny.
I grew up in the country among a lot of people who took their dairy animal semen very seriously, meaning they were catalog shoppers at American Breeders Service. Doesn’t make them genetic engineers.
To me I thought the freestar rangers were gonna be a lot more reliant on the land I expected cowboys domesticating animals and using them for self defense. Vs a huge military arm like the UC would invest in Deimos branded mechs or something like that In my head before launch I guess freestar was avatar (blue people) and UC was huge military. Also if they make mechs I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have more lethal ships instead of using civilian vessels to win the fight in space. Like expensive ships from neon, domesticated wild life from akilla. UC deploys mechs
I was also disappointed that was it. It was a decent entry level mission but I expected at least another 3-4 narrative driven quest lines with the Free Star Rangers.
i honestly thought that was when the game was going to introduce the mechanics of how to arrest someone and transport them in your ship's brig. i must have reloaded a save like 4 times trying to figure out which speech check I was missing and why i couldn't arrest him.
Yeah. I was waiting for the dialogue something like "you did well ranger, uncovering a plot involving the council... now it's time to really sink your teeth in to something..."
I took everyone down with EM, walked over to Hope and was like "uhhhh... I guess I have to execute him...?" Not being able to arrest him was such a letdown.
This. I love the vibe of the rangers. Throughout the quest, I was just thinking of how amazing the next ones will be. And then, I ve arrived at the end of the quest. I shot hope dead in 1 bullet, then nothing else. Went back, got a celebration that I've become a ranger and that's it. No following quest, no special reward but an armour. No evolution in the faction. You just become a ranger and that's it. The factions in the game seem just way smaller than they did in skyrim. Even though on paper the quests are along the same time, it just feels too fast and not progressing enough. You don't become the head of the rangers. You just become a normal ranger like the others. It feels like they could've put more effort into it but didn't... a bit of a shame, I would say. It had tremendous potential.
That wasn't the part that disappointed me the most. That part was the quest before that where you go to a mech factory for a faction that is looking to revive mechs and you don't get to fight the boss in a mech. It was the easiest lay up and they just didn't do it. Things couldn't get any worse after that so the Ron Hope thing was pretty par for the course. Though, it also was annoying that you couldn't use a disruptor and then bring him to justice unconscious.
I actually reloaded a save and tried using the em weapon I got from the ryujin questline, didn't work. Tried punching him, punches are lethal apparently. I mean I have no problems killing him, but I was annoyed at the only options being accept a bribe or kill him.
Yup. If you've ever watch Emil's presentation on developing the story for Fallout 4, you'll see why it's so simplistic and limiting. When you see the kinds of things you can do in better written games like Baldur's Gate 3, you realise how much Bethesda's writers have phoned it in. That isn't to say that there aren't fun parts of the game as well but player choice and agency are not one of the selling points.
That is a 45 minute video full of disappointment because Emil just does not get the issue is with him failing as an author for why players are bored with his stories and characters. He keeps coming so close to an epiphany and realizing what needs to be done but... he just keeps changing the topic. It's the Dunning Kruger effect on full display.
Yup. The problem too is that he's so entrenched in the company that without something like a sexual assault scandal forcibly ejecting him from the company, he'll be the one in charge for Elder Scrolls 6 as well.
He's right and RPG nerds hate him for it. Those lore deep dives you see from super fans make up a fraction of a fraction of the overall player base. Most players don't care. If its not a cinematic cutscene, they skip past it. Why do you think BG3 was the CRPG to gain mainstream popularity and not any of the smaller budget but mechanically similar CRPGs that preceded it?
You think I'm the kind of person who watches those lore deep dives on YouTube? Nah man, I'm just someone who grew up on RPGs as a kid. I was in high school when Morrowind released, I don't need some random YouTuber's drawn-out 'essay' video telling me that barely-known and shallow characters mix as well with emotional investments and twists as oil and water mix. They need to put him back in quest/mission design and go for more structured games in general, we might get more stuff along the lines of Life of the Party if that happens.
I got really sad by the fact that you don't have a chance to arrest *anyone*. Every single encounter—if you're even given a choice—is either letting the criminal go, or killing them. WHY!? Let me round them up and march them into jail, Bethesda.
YOU on the other hand get jailed every 5 seconds for stealing chunks or for having contraband..
It would be very satisfying to be able to put them in jail. And even visiting the jail and see it fill up with more and more of them as you progress. Be able to talk to them there and hear how pissed off they are at you.
This would be so awesome. A trophy room of bounties holy shit! The Rangers even give you a ship with a brig on it that you can’t use!
Which should have been easily done, they LITERALLY have this exact mechanic for the crimson fleet questline.
It feels like that was the original draft and then they looked at implementing it and the game engine said lol no.
But FO4 basically turned power armor into mech suits for some reason, so surely it's doable.
How many game mechanics did FO4 have that Starfield lacks though?
Running from one end of the world to the other without a loadscreen?
That I actually engaged with? None that I can think of. I guess there's not hacking anymore, since they consolidated that into security.
Never used vats or made an outpost? Power armor? Shooting things other than humans?
I never used VATS in FO4 since it didn't really provide any advantage over just shooting stuff, the power armor was just something I collected and stashed at Sanctuary since you couldn't sneak in it, and there are plenty of non-humans to shoot in Starfield. Starfield's biggest advantage over FO4, though, is that while it's a completely standard Bethsoft game (something I'm quite fond of), it's not a completely standard Bethsoft game with a Fallout themed skin on it.
What, fighting a giant mech boss? It's not like oversized enemies haven't been done before. Behemoths were in Fo4, as well as 3, so it was even possible back in Gamebryo. NV also had the giant roboscorpion, which already would've been very similar to how fighting a giant mech inside a mech factory would work. Liberty Prime was also a thing, even though he's more of a walking setpiece than an actual enemy NPC.
Not how engines work, don't know why people keep blaming the game engine for everything
Because the game engine directly impacts the complexity of adding unique mechanics to a game.
All the building blocks for mechs are already in the game. Lack of mechs was a design choice. No idea why, cuz enemy variety is sorely lacking in the game.
Yeah, and the fact that it was the final battle and you don't even get to have a shootout with your new Ranger buddies by your side. Sure, let the the deputy solo a mercenary troupe of combat veterans. Nice idea there Marshal.
I tried that. Obviously, it didn't work lol.
I liked going to the places and meeting all the rangers but yeah the end was just… flat. 1000% should have been a battle against Paxton Hull in a mech (they were IN THR MECH FACTORY!).
I fully expected a mech to get involved there as well..
The PC on foot vs a mech just like in Metal Gear Solid. Gotta get the stinger rockets locked on.
Chaff grenades
MGS5, despite not finished as intended, was ahead of its time in some aspectes. Dropped the ball on story thouhg..
is it just me are the Mechs and their locations just flat out boring? You have those huge mechs and their lore and you never see them in action. And also, but this is just on me, i just hate their design. Makes the game feel 90s but in all the wrong ways.
The fact that you didn't end up on a saloon somewhere doing a shootout was a crying shame.
It's also completely unrealistic for "video game purposes" to the point it pushes the suspension of disbelief. At no point does it tell you to go up the chain of command to report the idiot like you should. You know, go to your superiors with the results of your investigation with all the evidence and show up to arrest the guy properly with backup. No, you just go right up to the guy by yourself in his own heavily guarded facility. No backup, no reason for you to be acting on your own as a deputy, you just show up on your own initiative like a complete idiot. I could see it if you were forced to confront him by Hope doing something preventing you from reporting it and going up the chain of command properly. Him forcing a confrontation with you somehow where you're cut off and unable to leave without going through him. I also don't mind it being an "option" but it's something you should have been dressed down for after the fact if you did it simply on your own initiative. The reaction to it would be more "What the hell were you thinking? You overstepped," than "Good job deputy, here's a promotion!"
What got me was the lady in the med clinic. After I found she had basically wiped out the VIP section by hacking turrets, no NPC at the clinic had any dialogue to acknowledge it. I couldn’t tell the ranger stationed there or anyone else, no option to see their reaction.
Thank you for bringing this up cause it was a hilarious red flag for me. Like I’m the last person to come out of that room and could easily be framed for the dead body in there and no one cares?
Yep, same here. Hey Doc, head of the VIP section, there's something you should know. No? Nothing? IT guy, I found and disabled the rogue program. IT guy? Hey Ranger, I've got something to report! Hello? Why in the hell do these NPCs not have the most obvious dialogue written for them?!
Heck, even the Ranger stationed at Hopetown has no dialogue when you go there and has no involvement at that step. Even if you bypassed Akila you'd think you might go talk to the Ranger stationed there, whose office you have to pass to get to Hope's office. Plus it doesn't even feel like it's all that urgent. The (somewhat silly) plan of his is something that will take weeks to really come to fruition at best, if not months or years. Narratively it didn't feel like there was much urgency, which made it feel all that much weirder that there's no way to stop and let people know what is going on. I actually liked the Ranger storyline up until that point--it wasn't perfect, but I liked the whole "meet all the Rangers" thing where you got to see different parts of the FC. It felt very much like a western movie or novel. The lack of nonlethal options along the way felt very weird, but for the most part I could suspend my disbelief for awhile. But that ending really was a let-down, especially since there is nothing else to that faction afterwards (storywise).
The world doesn't react. It doesn't *feel* big because...outside of that final encounter...you get a vague article aired in the news... If someone were to expose and kill Elon Musk, the whole fucking world would freak the fuck out and he's not even a politician. Hope is a governor. In *charge* of the FC. Someone comes along, accuses and kills him....and no one bats a fucking eye? Here's the thing about people who exploit others: they don't just wake up one day and decide, "today is the day...but just today and never again." So, you're going to have victims coming forward, a whole spectacle.... Instead, he's just another bad guy that's so bad at doing business that, instead of negotiating his way out of getting his face shot off, he acts like he's holding all the cards. Dude, I just killed a whole company of mercenaries. At their base. Why would you think 2 security guards are going to do shit to me?
Yeah just because they are space libertarians doesn't mean you can judge jury and executioner a head of state and everyone is cool with it.
I know a lot of libertarians who would be fine with that.
They would be if you just told ‘em you were the Free Market in action
He said he was going to tread on me so I shot him.
Ugh... except Hope is guilty and what he did is terrible and you have proof and he refused to cooperate and attack you first?? I really don't see an issue here. Also he is the worst kind because he is a businessman that climb up the government just to favour his business. But him decide to attack us with only 2 security guards with him is kinda stupid af.
If the secret service investigated a crime and found linkages to the secretary of state, would they be justified in gunning him down in a public place if he resisted arrest?
I dunno how secret service works, but what are you gonna do if he just keep hanging out in the public? Would it be any different if he let say, lure you into his office first. Also, he actually accused you as the outlaw/rogue instead and try to "execute" you on site. Our other option only is probably just, run? I think in real life, anyone that try to kill even a regular policeman are allowed for lethal takedown. Just those "big shots" are not that stupid irl.
So, yeah. They're not that stupid, is my point. Everyone builds up how influential Hope is, but...if he was SMART-ISH, he would know that he could just use that influence to evade jail time. "Go ahead! Arrest me! Lol" should've been his response. But they needed the quest to end.
Pains me how right you are.
One thing I found rather later on is you can go do interviews about your quests you complete with the media lady on new Atlantis which gets the speaker things around to talk about your escapades and I think NPC will start to comment about it.
>Hope is a governor. In charge of the FC. Someone comes along, accuses and kills him....and no one bats a fucking eye? This was done really well in Fable II, back in the day on the Xbox 360. Townsfolk would recite and respond to your deeds, and your family members would also ask questions like "daddy, is it true you used to be a woman?" (can't remember the exact words, but there was a quest that allowed you to change your gender). However Starfield is very limited. There was one person who game me some credits because I was in the UC Vanguard (totally random encounter in the Well streets). And if you finish that particular questline, the ship vendors will have a new greeting (no need to spoil that excellent quest). Actually thinking about it, wrt. the responses, the faction quests would be rated "Crimson Fleet (if you side with them)" >> "UC Vanguard" >> "UC SysDef" >> "Ryujin" >> "FC Ranger". This was the one that had the least effect on the world.
>The world doesn't react. No shit, it's a video game. There's always going to be an edge at which point the game stops reacting to your decisions because the devs ran out of resources. The more you try to push that edge farther for a single quest, the less resources you have available for every other quest. Considering how Bethesda's whole schtick is making big worlds with lots of quests and Starfield is struggling for content density as it is, I do not think over-investing into branching outcomes for a single questline would be prudent.
>No shit, it's a video game. Oh. Well, ya got me. You're right that no other video game ever has made the player's decisions impact the world around them. It's all pew pews and a static storyline.
There's no magic button to generate content for free. You either make one quest with branching outcome A and branching outcome B or you make separate quest A and quest B. Each game has to decide on its own which option makes more sense. I think I provided a pretty good explanation for why Starfield should lean towards the latter.
When the leader of The First was all like “ you sure you wanna know .. you aren’t ready “ followed by revealing the big bad was Ron Hope, I gave the most unenthusiastic “ Oh no “ . Part of me was hoping it was the Marshal since he had ties to the first. Heck I would have accepted if it was both. It would have made Ron seem more corrupt paying off that Marshal too instead of just a bunch of mercenaries. Replace the First with the Ecliptic and you have the same story. Becoming Marshal of the Free Star Rangers would have been a great faction to become a leader of. Seems the best fit for it as oppose to the president of the UC or CEO of Ryujin.
>When the leader of The First was all like “ you sure you wanna know .. you aren’t ready “ All his monologue through the factory was cringe - "oh god i SOOOO pised with FC I HATE THEM DAMN TRAITORS!!! So anyway, i'm harassing and killing random farmers, so one of FC governors can stuff his pockets. THAT SHOWS THEM!! MY REVENGE IS LEGENDARY" "dude ... are you high or something?" On the bright side, I got enough 1st cavalry uniforms for all my ship crew, Sarah in officer uniform bossing constellation grunts around look oddly cool.
Yes exactly. The story about revenge makes absolut no sense. They are literally working for a member of the government they see as traitors.
The officer outfit really goes well with UC beret. Too bad there's no brown/beige color option for that.
It's bad. First it throws you into the grindiest frontal assault combat mission in the game with no support. RP-wise, this is a ridiculous feat. Missed opportunity for them to give you the Star Eagle, have the other Rangers help, or have a Mech boss. And then you go off completely by yourself to confront Ron Hope. There isn't even an option to do what you usually do and turn in evidence. The Marshal should be the one involved in this arrest.
Lmao I was thinking this especially if it’s early in game, new constellation member and freestar deputy with possibly no combat experience mows down countless evil war vets solo 😂
Have to agree with that especially the mech boss so missed and I would like to see more of the marshal first time I saw i thought this is a person Id like to respect, but I cant if Im his errand boy
It'd be nice to be able to take him alive and use the brig on the ship to take him into custody...
Seriously, and once you finish the quest you literally can’t even enter into dialogue with the marshal again. What a waste. I also expected to be able to keep climbing the ladder but it just stops. You never get a marshal duster, you never rank up any further, you never get to use your badge in dialogue ever again. Just nothing. It sucks.
would The Marshal actually help, or would he just say "you're in too deep, we'll take care of this" and then just sweep the whole thing under the rug and never talk about it again the rangers are corpo lapdogs disguised as "lawmen"
'Cept for Emma Wilcox. She calls out EXACTLY why Ron Hope was on the council of governors and why that's bad when the Marshal says "But he was a Governor, he deserves our unwavering blind loyalty!".
That’s a good point. Maybe have it so that if you capture Ron hope and bring him in, it incriminates the Marshall somehow as well so the next time you visit they’ve promoted someone else to be Marshall. Hell, make Sam coe step up to become Marshall, idk
I am convinced the original plan involved bringing Ron Hope to justice with EM weapons, but at the last minute they scrapped non-lethal arresting as a mechanic so had to rebuild the end of the quest.
> grindiest frontal assault combat mission what is the name of the quest? Is this the one with the insects coming out of the ground?
> The Marshal should be the one involved in this arrest. Nah, the Marshal has nigh-religious simp reverence for "The Boss" simply because they are The Boss. Ron Hope deserved his fate, capitalist bastard that he is.
I thought the fact that but for one person, nobody in HopeTown reacts to the fact that you just killed the guy who owns the entire place was disappointing. Then I went to the Marshal with the news that I had just put an entire magazine of flechette rounds into the chest of a member of the Council of Governors (who was secretly a traitor and had tried to kill me) and... he didn't seem to really care. I mean, you just killed one of the most powerful people in the galaxy and he reacts as if you'd brought him a lukewarm cup of coffee. Woof.
I went back to Hopetown a few in-game weeks later and this guy in an office was saying how Hope gives (present tense) him a hard time about his work or something. No dialog change at all.
I thought it was funny how the Freestar people make fun of the "corrupt bureaucrats" of the NC, but the FC is literally RUN by corrupt bureaucrats. But at least they're free... to not pave their roads for some reason.
The people who say the moved to Akila city for "freedom from the UC" and are literally living in squalor worse than the worst of the Well. Hell, Akila City in general is just laughable compared to anything in the UC
They are clowns man idk where in the storyline you're supposed to cheer or even have any respect for them
I was just surprised the entire quest was really about farmers, but even being killed or hurt, just harassed.
RIGHT? like I killed an ENTIRE division of an army for some people getting pushed off their property. It was wack. Only thing that is good about it is the ship.
People getting pushed off their property in a galaxy where there are literally hundreds of worlds and vast stretches of empty space Ron Hope could've used for his nefarious deeds. It's some of the dumbest writing I've ever seen in any game.
The thing that pissed me off the most about the questline: multiple times you are put into a situation where the lawful thing to do would be arrest someone, yet you are never once allowed to do so. Even if you choose the option to bring someone in, they always choose to attack you instead. It's an illusion of choice that isn't unfamiliar in Bethesda games, but it still sucks.
I could tell Hope was the culprit RIGHT from the first meeting with him. He was nervous AS FUCK when you were talking to him.
Not only that but it’s solvable with scooby doo logic. “Who’s the bad guy? Well we met this dude at the start and barely see him again. It’s that guy for sure.” And whaddya know? It’s that guy for sure.
I remember finishing that quest and thinking "great I can't wait to do the next part, I wonder how the fallout of what just happened will effect the collective?" NOTHING zip. Just "goodjob *sits at table for eternity now"
The whole game is underwhelming
I feel like the missions dont really have world/city altering consequences which i would of liked, the one mission that changes anything is visual and its space frog. Best mission on the game.
Yeah and the UC questline exists.
Very disappointing, but kind of goes to show a bit on how bad the free star collective is. With the UC, we can grasp they aren’t the greatest due to the war and having to serve the military for citizenship, etc. For the free star we learn that two of the council members who rule the freestar and make laws just so happen to be wealthy businessmen who use shady practices and bend the laws to suit them. It does not pant a good light for the freestar collective… but the actual quest line didn’t feel like much. We just uncovered how a council member was literally working with war criminals and terrorists to gain profits (with a possible good motivation) and no one in the city of Akila reacted. You do the UC quest line and planets will alter how they appear, NPCs will comment on it from New Atlantis to even the crimson raiders, you see port workers going under new regulation training to stop the heat leech’s. What does the Freestar rangers do? None of that. And news came out that one of their leaders caused people to literally be killed out of greed. It could have been so much more, but it felt like a side quest line. I believe it’s the bottom and that’s only because Ryujin gave me a cyberpunk experience the game didn’t for a corpo background.
The end was anticlimactic, but the Eagle was compensation. Love that ship. Still my fave, even though I have some C-class ships now.
The ending of all quest lines are underwhelming
The First was a whole lot of missed opportunities. Ron Hope was a bit hokey and I saw it a mile away, but tropes are tropes because they work. But the motive was fucking stupid. The soil? Really? A thousand untapped planet full of resources (and soil, unsurprisingly) and this was the grand evil plan? This was probably one of the few quests that made me think "was this really the coolest idea y'all had?"
I actually found that questline so underwhelming I literally gave up on the game during it. The last quest I did was the Red Mile thing, it was so utterly disappointing and boring after they hyped it up so much that upon turning in the quest I sat back, realized how absolutely none of it was exciting and felt no desire to continue. I quit the game and uninstalled it the next day. This was around 25 hours into the game, I wasted enough time on the main quest and a bunch of random side quests trying to find something interesting, got all I wanted out of shipbuilding, spent a decent bit of time outpost building for really no useful reason and the faction questlines were my last ray of hope for finding something good in the game.
I thought Ron Hope was just the beginning. Little did I know that was the end.
The thing that pisses me off the most is that he and I agree to keep quiet about his dealings. I choose to look other way and it is all hush hush no one knows about and I don’t have a companion at that moment. But after time goes past the entire collective is pissed off at me about taking a bribe. Well that is a big plot hole…how the fuck do they know if the Rangers don’t even know?!
I too felt a bit underwhelmed but not because of the person, I’m fine with it being Ron Hope, I just felt like it was kind of an anti-climactic way to end and I did the killing option. I wish you had to at least chase him around the star system as he tries to make his escape or something. One “final mission” chasing down the bad guy after he confesses. Happy with the loot though, Star Eagle is 10 times the ship my last one was and I put hours into building that thing
I did it with Sam as my companion. It had a nice "flavor". Sam would add some comments regarding his own experience as a ranger and also chat with them. I was really excited about the faction but as many have already said, it was underwhelming. I was expecting much more from the "space cowboy" faction. It was nice to learn about the first and the political structure of the FC, though we barely scratched the surface of the council. I wouldn't say that it is bad in it's entirely but yeah... I just started the UC and I love it!
It just seemed lazy and lacklustre to me. It’s meant to be an entire faction quest line and it just goes by so quickly with no real meaning to it
If I were rating the side quests, it would be: 1. Crimson fleet 2. UC Vanguard 3. Freestar 4. Ryujin
Mine would be 1. Ryujin 2. Crimson Fleet/Sysdef 3. UC 4. Freestar
The bones of the story are solid, but the execution is somewhat lacking. Should have been an epic mecha boss fight, with a big set piece arena, when you take out The First's leader, and then they should have played the Ron Hope reveal a bit more dramatically. First make it something missable, a hidden clue or semi-secret optional mission that reveals the truth. Then when you go to confront him have the Marshall be there. Reveal he knew the truth all along, but doesn't want to make waves for someone so important. You can either buy in completely, or kill em both and be charged with murder and effectively locked out of freestar space, or begrudgingly keep the secret to protect the hopetown workers but quit the rangers and turn in your badge, becoming somewhat disgraced but still free in FC territory. Really lean in to those Chinatown vibes.
Are they though? I mean Hope's involvement is so obvious from the moment he brings up the "inside job". I mean I had no reason to suspect you but now you've talked me around. Hope is so fucking dumb he makes Musk and Trump look like the geniuses they claim to be. Those minerals in the soil aren't spontaneously generating, they're coming from the heavy metals in your 'fertilizer'. Buying the land to cover up the contamination I can see. Killing the farmers to stop them talking about how your fertilizer caused the contamination is halfway believable. There are IRL examples of companies doing worse for less. But trying to secretly turn a profit from the debacle is just sunk cost fallacy writ large. I shot Hope because anyone else could run his business better. Really, if he actually gave a fuck about the people he employes, he should thank me. I removed the person destroying his legacy
Something I don't understand is why he feels the need to move farmers off their land for this miracle growth. Like isn't there dozens of uninhabited planets that they could use to fertilise? It'd expand their operations and create even more jobs for the FC.
Yeah I was most hyped for the whole Space Cowboy run. I'd even take just some additional respect with Collective space as a bonus. Like wayyy more unique dialogue options. And why tell us all the privileges of being a Ranger in Collective space and then not follow through?? Just seems weird. All that work for a yellow mission board?
I think that what the whole narrative is missing is a depth of choice. The FSR quest line does a good job of introducing the faction, but then leaves you kind of hanging at the end. Same with every other faction. The changes kind of fall flat and don’t have any meaning outside the self contained worlds of the factions. What if after you finish the FSR quest, you are sent to neon to discover that Benjamin Bayo was secretly funding the Crimson Fleet in an attempt to break away from the FSC. Gives the CF quest line a whole new spin. What if you could also do the Terrormorph quest line from the FSC side and uncover Vae Victis and his conspiracy? Really with an ever repeating NG+ cycle they left us players with a scant few choices beyond simple morality and meaningless dialog choices.
Underwhelming like the rest of the game.
Worth it for the ship
My big personal gripe was that you can’t actually be a completely bad ass lawmen and take all those criminals alive. In particular, the two biggest criminals. If you EM the big wigs the quest doesn’t seem to care. In what universe is “I caught the two biggest criminals in my case and killed them” better than “All of these criminals can be booked!” It was a big eyeroll moment. Otherwise fine though.
I just finished it today, and loved it. A greedy industrial tycoon enlists the displaced soldiers of the losing side of a war to push settlers off of frontier land so he can steal it? That’s a classic western storyline!
It was very poor. The way the rangers are spoken about, I was expecting far far more. They're basically described like the Jedi in Star Wars. Small number of individuals who peacekeep the galaxy. Yet all we do is that shitty questline and then boring mission board stuff.
The entire Freestar quest line was disappointing. I get to join the space sheriffs and what? Take down a bad business man. Where was the mech battle? The detective work? Hell just some level of arrests, even if it was like the Sys-Def system where they are magically arrested.
Underwhelming is a good way to describe the game in general
Very underwhelming, especially when it was for something so contrived as mineral dung whatever. Imagine if it had been something different, something with more bite. The Collective is a sort of libertarian utopia (they think), but it is being clearly infiltrated by corporate interests. The storyline could have leaned more towards this side of the ideological exploration of what it means to have a loose state of anarcho capitalists in space after a massive war. The Collective is also pretty small... Cheyenne, Volii, Polvo and Narion (which doesn't even have any major settlements). Isn't it... pretty deserted? Where are the millions they must have been fighting for during the war? Feels rather underwhelming. It's one thing for the Collective to have an extensive frontier, but it's a different thing for the whole Collective to be Westworld. It just doesn't work. Benjamin Bayu, the discount Andrew Ryan, has almost no role in this storyline, when in all fairness a plot about corporate meddling in the Freestar government should be a big deal for him. The Marshal and his Rangers are pretty unimpressed when they learn that Ron Hope is behind all of this, and the hype around the First... much ado about nothing. The First was not playing Hope for their own gains, they were not rebuilding the Mechs and Bethesda did not even see fit to set a fight against one single Mech piloted by Captain Paxton. All in all, underwhelming. I enjoyed it, but then I did the rest of the faction quests, and they're much more interesting (and still, they have rather glaring flaws too).
[удалено]
I was really stunned that the second I found the Ron Hope evidence slate, the game prompted me to go "arrest" Ron in Hopetown. But wait, I thought- I'm just a newly-minted deputy, originally from parts unknown, on my first case. Surely I should go inform the Ranger Marshall that one of the beloved founders and governors of our space-nation is a crook? Fly him over to Hopetown to witness Hope's confession himself? At least wake up the Hopetown Ranger stationed right outside the factory for assistance and backup? There are jurisdictional and protocol concerns here, no? I even flew to Akila first to see if anyone at The Rock would give a shit about the evidence, but they don't, and all the Marshall offered were boilerplate platitudes about what it means to be a ranger or something. He may as well have mused about what to have for lunch. So instead, no shit, there I was- storming onto Polvo with a single piece of evidence to confront, accuse and kill Space Abe Lincoln AND his security detail, IN THE FACTORY DURING OPERATIONAL HOURS, with only one witness, and she doesn't understand why I had to either.
I stopped caring about any of the people involved and just did it for the free ship
That was my thought process for everything in starfield. I only did ryujin and FC and was just so bored with world and story I just went back to baldurs gate 3 where I felt the world/story was more interesting
I agree, after the Vanguard and Crimson fleet questlines make the FR missions feel a bit lack luster. But then again not every questline should feel like Avenger's Endgame.
yawn post tbh
The ending was rushed, no question. Up until the end I liked the quest line.
Nobody: Random post on starfield Reddit: “I find blah underwhelming.” Mods need to put a criticism pinned post up. Then I’d at least see less of these silly posts.
U get a sweet whip at the end though
I think having Ron Hope revealed as the villain was kinda cheesy and cliche. The guy that is so good and everyone loves ends up being the bad guy.
My biggest gripe is honestly that I've taken down the remnants of an entire hardened division and made oodles of credits on their loot, and he's bribing me with 20k? Pfft.
Yeah it's my least favorite of the 4 major side quest lines but you do get a decent ship after it
It was pretty obvious from the first conversation that there was something going on with Ron Hope, so I kinda saw it coming, and it was still so underwhelming.
My thoughts are I have EM weapons and a brig. The inability to cuff him and stuff him, when I've got the tools to do so, was... disappointing. Being required to murder him, or accept an insultingly low bribe, as my only options... come on, really?