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I think the gameplay is fine, but the story is really underbaked for some reason. The faction questlines are much more interesting. It would have been more interesting if the central mystery of the game was finding alien artifacts from actual aliens instead of alternate/future humans or whatever you want to call the Starborn. The devs just overextended themselves with too many things. It should have been like 30 well developed star systems instead of like 10 that are, and another 80 that are just either devoid of much to do or have a lot of repeat settlements on them.
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Oct 30, 2023 00:38
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As opposed to all those well thought out main quests in the other Bethesda games
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Oct 30, 2023 01:15
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Azhais posted:As opposed to all those well thought out main quests in the other Bethesda games Dude the dead woman in the coffin that speaks scared me.
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Oct 30, 2023 01:26
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jaegerx posted:Dude the dead woman in the coffin that speaks scared me. Making it an objective to get in the coffin with her at one point was brilliant, easily the creepiest part in a game filled with tombs and abandoned ruins
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Oct 30, 2023 01:29
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The Morrowind main quest was actually pretty interesting the one time I actually did it start to finish and didn't just make my own goal and ending. Arrive in tutorial town that probably has more going on in it choice wise than some whole later games, sent off to work for some moon sugar addict secret agent, free some slaves, sabotage some jerks, delve ancient ruins, get a horrible ancient disease, cure disease with the world's last living dwarf who is a weirdo spiderbot man, infiltrate some castles, prove yourself to a tribe through their rituals and challenges, find out the terrible secret of God, raid hell fortresses, break into my doom to fight god and wear his face like a mask.
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Oct 30, 2023 01:36
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jaegerx posted:Dude the dead woman in the coffin that speaks scared me. That was a side quest tho
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Oct 30, 2023 01:36
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FuzzySlippers posted:Their universe is just really underwritten. It's about the same level of vague terrible world building that Bethesda did in their original stuff in FO3/4 as the interesting details were from the old Interplay games. It's the same situation with TES where the interesting lore is from old writers who setup everything in TES1-3 while the newer ones don't seem to know how to put together an interesting and coherent world. They get by on the work done in earlier games while in Starfield they don't have that luxury. The writers just shrug or handwave away most of the universe's details. it's probably just insanely difficult to actually flesh out a space-based civilization in a satisfying way without resorting to procgen that feels samey. sci-fi has always struggled to properly convey a sense of scale that actual spacefaring civilizations would be (trillions, if not quadrillions of people in a single solar system let alone interstellar scales)
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Oct 30, 2023 01:46
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So after slugging through like five hours of Sarah Morgan dissing every single thing I did, I unlocked her personal quest, and that entire sequence is hilarious if you don't like her. We kidnapped a wild child, when we visit the Lodge later Sarah hasn't even bothered to get her non-hobo clothes, then Sarah takes me to a romantic waterfall, goes into a whole spiel about how she unintentionally destroys everything she touches, and I get to mash the heck out of the friendzone prompt. Then I removed her from my party, and the next time I visited the Lodge I found her curled up alone in bed with a sextant. I don't know why, but that entire sequence made me crack the heck up.
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Oct 30, 2023 01:55
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I'm angling for vasco
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Oct 30, 2023 02:07
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Morrowind sure has been carrying a lot of weight for Bethesda. After 21 years, it must be exhausted; thank god it can legally drink now.
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Oct 30, 2023 02:08
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Inspector Hound posted:I'm angling for vasco I tried, we'll have to wait for mods.
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Oct 30, 2023 02:10
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Haven't been in this thread to avoid spoilers but I've hit an annoying bug and I want to know if people have figured out a fix for it or if I'm boned and need to wait for Bethesda to fix it or start NG+. Sorry if this has been talked about before. New Atlantis is missing a lot of ground textures for me and the trade kiosk by the ship technician has gone missing. I don't think anything else important is missing so as of right now it's just inconvenient as opposed to game-breaking. I'm not sure when it happened. Reddit says it probably has something to do with getting/stealing a new ship and that triggering the bug somehow but I haven't stolen anything in a while and I didn't think anything weird happened when I got my most recent free ships the Kepler R & the Razorleaf. Is anyone aware of a current fix?
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Oct 30, 2023 03:47
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marktheando posted:(main quest ending talk) In the unity you can ask yourself who created the artefacts and you respond by saying it was the creators and gives no actual information about them. That's because nobody actually knows who or what they are, or even if they exist. If the Starborn would be legends to regular people then the Creators are legends to the Starborn. All the Starborn know is that someone, likely the "Creators," created the Unity... but they don't know that for sure, either.
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Oct 30, 2023 04:19
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Shipon posted:it's probably just insanely difficult to actually flesh out a space-based civilization in a satisfying way without resorting to procgen that feels samey. sci-fi has always struggled to properly convey a sense of scale that actual spacefaring civilizations would be (trillions, if not quadrillions of people in a single solar system let alone interstellar scales) Well for one just the actual background lore, so nothing about what is depicted in game, is pretty bad in SF and doesn't make a lot of sense. I think even a pretty basic Kindle Unlimited hack writer could do better (or possibly the writers did alright work and project leads just stomped all over and rewrote their content to suck). As far as trying to convey scale I think actually just making insanely big and detailed planets isn't necessary. You can much more easily do it with a lot of non-interactive stuff for flavor. Make space around stations/planets busy with ships going everywhere just chatting on coms to other npcs with no connection to the player. Do not let players free roam cities or large stations and have some establishing vistas or shots and then have smaller focused areas for interaction. Privateer 1 with just detailed animated menus conveyed a lot more mood than infinite empty 3D areas. An in-game news network with canned lore and little updates from player quests would add a lot. SF doesn't even have lore books and uses mostly free project gutenberg stuff. There's just not much in the game that focuses on establishing mood without being part of some quest. There are tons of ways to increase the sense of a breathing universe within a scifi game that have nothing to do with trying to actually make giant interactive cities on the scale of a real space faring civilization. It's like the overtly literal Star Citizen idea of making space 'big' by literally tracking giant gameplay spaces with high precision double vector positioning so you can have entities a bazillion meters away from each other without trickery. That kind of technical literal detail doesn't sell a sense of scale to players at all. Infinite proc gen can actually make in game spaces feel small with repetition, so it isn't a simple solution to the problem either. Privateer's map felt dramatically bigger than NMS because in Privateer you actually became anchored to certain locations and traveling away from them underscored the distance you are traveling. Having a connection to locations made the distances more significant. In NMS traveling in random directions across random systems that breeze past you doesn't feel like traveling at all. I think games can do interesting things with proc gen to help enhance a sense of scale, but it's just one tool of many to do so and isn't the goal.
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Oct 30, 2023 04:29
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Omi no Kami posted:So after slugging through like five hours of Sarah Morgan dissing every single thing I did, I unlocked her personal quest, and that entire sequence is hilarious if you don't like her. We kidnapped a wild child, when we visit the Lodge later Sarah hasn't even bothered to get her non-hobo clothes, then Sarah takes me to a romantic waterfall, goes into a whole spiel about how she unintentionally destroys everything she touches, and I get to mash the heck out of the friendzone prompt. That quest is bonkers. Just horrible writing start to finish. Why did Bethesda create the quest reward of adopt a feral child and treat it with the exact same weight and further plot development as a gun quest reward.
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Oct 30, 2023 05:05
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A mod that, for every hour your tolerate Sarah in your party, you get a bonus 50% exp "Because you'll get judged with every move you make, you get 50% XP bonus for 1 hr [of dealing with it]"
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Oct 30, 2023 06:02
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BULBASAUR posted:A mod that, for every hour your tolerate Sarah in your party, you get a bonus 50% exp cheffkiss. also. how to be utterly wrong online : https://www.polygon.com/starfield-guide/23847212/best-side-quests-missions they start off with the most frustrating and idiotic mission: first contact. of course. like, "this is what we consider fun in this game, get used to it" Khanstant posted:The Morrowind main quest was actually pretty interesting the one time I actually did it start to finish and didn't just make my own goal and ending. Arrive in tutorial town that probably has more going on in it choice wise than some whole later games, sent off to work for some moon sugar addict secret agent, free some slaves, sabotage some jerks, delve ancient ruins, get a horrible ancient disease, cure disease with the world's last living dwarf who is a weirdo spiderbot man, infiltrate some castles, prove yourself to a tribe through their rituals and challenges, find out the terrible secret of God, raid hell fortresses, break into my doom to fight god and wear his face like a mask. I dunno, while I think getting a writing team locked in a dungeon in the middle of nowhere and feeding them a steady diet of drugs might just give us something better than the slop we ended up with in SF, it might not be legal or ethical. If they did however, I'd be in my element. "Morrowind was Crafted" is a phrase that people chuck about all the time, it holds up, Vvardenfel is pretty small compared to the newer games, but its absolutely packed with charm, rascism, character and more rascism. its full of janky poo poo that got smoothed out by later games, but nothing later approches its giddy depths. Sadly quite broken at the moment, https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/6139 the first instance of the classic : "Any Mod Any Weapon" I'll be keeping an eye on it incase they fix it and mobs can spawn with randomised crazy stuff. staberind fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 07:58
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staberind posted:"Morrowind was Crafted" is a phrase that people chuck about all the time, it holds up, Vvardenfel is pretty small compared to the newer games, but its absolutely packed with charm, rascism, character and more rascism.
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Oct 30, 2023 08:30
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BULBASAUR posted:A mod that, for every hour your tolerate Sarah in your party, you get a bonus 50% exp I kinda feel bad for the voice actress. I played the new, unfortunate Saints Row game last month and she was one of the Boss voices in it and I ultimately used some other voice, but she was fine. She must have been quite excited to play a companion in a big RPG, that's usually a pretty good gig. Look at what's happening to the actors who did BG3's companions, they're frolicking in the attention.
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Oct 30, 2023 10:35
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Hell, especially the narrator.
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Oct 30, 2023 10:52
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FFT posted:Is this etymologically related to "irascibility"? I dunno, whats Is this etymologically related to "irascibility" with you? https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/6114 This is going to be wild. swaps npc faces in NG+ staberind fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 10:56
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staberind posted:I dunno, whats Is this etymologically related to "irascibility" with you? Would the Adoring Fan work better as the Emissary, or as the Hunter?
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Oct 30, 2023 11:19
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isndl posted:Would the Adoring Fan work better as the Emissary, or as the Hunter?
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Oct 30, 2023 11:39
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Yeah, an Adoring ITS A MULTIVERSE SO : BOTH OF THEEEEEM would be terrifying.
staberind fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 12:12
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I bring Sarah everywhere and she'll make the occasional remark about "haven't seen a locked pick like that since blank" or "hmm are you sure that's yours?" I left her behind for some Ryujin stuff because it made sense, but overall I'm not playing a bad guy or rear end in a top hat or whatever and if I was I simply wouldn't bring Sarah along as a companion. Gamers are weird.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:25
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I went without a companion for most of the Ryujin quest because I felt like my companions would not be happy
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Oct 30, 2023 16:27
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Omi no Kami posted:So after slugging through like five hours of Sarah Morgan dissing every single thing I did, I unlocked her personal quest, and that entire sequence is hilarious if you don't like her. We kidnapped a wild child, when we visit the Lodge later Sarah hasn't even bothered to get her non-hobo clothes, then Sarah takes me to a romantic waterfall, goes into a whole spiel about how she unintentionally destroys everything she touches, and I get to mash the heck out of the friendzone prompt. That quest has the worst writting I've ever seen in a Bethesda game yet. And that's saying something. It's unreal.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:37
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FlamingLiberal posted:I went without a companion for most of the Ryujin quest because I felt like my companions would not be happy She was surprisingly chill for most of it as long as you don't make the unethical choice at the end. She didn't really care about any of the corporate sabotage at all, which I thought was funny.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:42
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She's getting real mad and shoots you if your corporate espionage involves killing some CEOs.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:46
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Even in 2330 we have corporate bootlickers? In an explorer's guild of sorts? Lol ok
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Oct 30, 2023 16:47
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Khanstant posted:She's getting real mad and shoots you if your corporate espionage involves killing some CEOs. Never had to kill a CEO in that questline, but she helped me kill Ron Hope with no issues. I talked my way out of everything doing the Ryujin stuff but solved my problems with bullets when I played the Ranger questline. 
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Oct 30, 2023 16:55
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oh the quest never asks you to kill any CEOs I was just trying to play as a good person
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Oct 30, 2023 17:11
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Professor Beetus posted:Never had to kill a CEO in that questline, but she helped me kill Ron Hope with no issues. I talked my way out of everything doing the Ryujin stuff but solved my problems with bullets when I played the Ranger questline. Annoyingly, you're not allowed to solve your problems any other way in the Ranger questline. You can't even take the targets down nonlethally and hogtie them while they're unconscious. I feel like that's one of the biggest missed opportunities in the game - there's simultaneously too much and not enough content. There's a lot of little vignettes spread across a fairly vast universe (especially when you consider how much space there is on planets), but the vast, overwhelming majority of the space is devoid of anything interesting. And because there's so much space, the designers tried to put as much as they could in it, but that meant not focusing on and refining the quests, so each quest is a specific experience that you are expected to deal with in one way. And then a lot of the filler quests are just radiant repeatable quests with no narrative interest or choice involved. Contrast Skyrim or New Vegas with Starfield. In Skyrim and New Vegas, there's always something around the corner. Skyrim has location markers, and each location has something going on. It might not be much, or it might be related to a single quest somewhere, or might even just be an endpoint for a radiant quest, but it's something. New Vegas similarly has locations dotted around the map, often with unique landmarks that draw your eye from a distance, like the lights of New Vegas, or the giant dinosaur in Novac, etc. Starfield just... doesn't have that. You don't know if a system will be interesting until you show up. Planets have little outposts and things on them, but again, you have absolutely no idea if they're worth visiting, and you can't even tell they're there until you go 2-3 layers deep in a menu and twirl a planet around. And the empty space would be great if this were a game like Dyson Sphere Project, but the outpost building is so anemic and the core conceit of the main quest is to jump to a NG+ that wipes out any effort you put into your outposts, so the empty space is interesting for a very brief period of time before the player begins to ignore it entirely (and the fact that it's procedurally generated with copy/pasted points of interest really doesn't help matters). As much as the game would have lost some of its expansive appeal, I feel like if they had reduced the scope of the game massively to maybe 1-3 systems and a handful of planets, the ability to pack more content into a smaller space would have made things a hell of a lot more interesting.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:14
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If they were gonna make all those drat planet spaces then the whole game should've been multiplayer so you could stumble into player constructions and poo poo and start to make the place feel populated if only by goobers willing to play "house" for no reason besides chance to be seen.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:21
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Dirk the Average posted:Annoyingly, you're not allowed to solve your problems any other way in the Ranger questline. You can't even take the targets down nonlethally and hogtie them while they're unconscious. The Ryujin stuff did offer a lot of opportunities to talk people down or do things more sneakily, but ultimately the only difference in the outcome is that you get yelled at more by your bosses and you get less money. Which is pretty lame. I am also just coming off of Baldur's Gate 3 which has some of the best reactivity I've seen in an RPG before. It's night and day.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:22
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Professor Beetus posted:
It's even night and day here; remember when Morrowind would let you murder important NPCs and basically just tell you "well congrats fuckhead, now the story can't continue! Good Job" Can't even kill essential NPCs anymore, they just gotta take a short break. They made actual plot armor a thing
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Oct 30, 2023 17:31
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The First Contact quest is annoying you're options are blow up the space ship, have them become indentured servants, or pay out of pocket for a grav drive. How about I kill the shithead executives and let the colonists take the planet. Edit: welp, time to become a drug dealer: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/5997 Gorgolflox fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 17:48
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That's another thing that's kind of souring me on Starfield. There are so many really unsatisfying dialogue choices and outcomes to quests. Like, hey, if there's only two outcomes, that's fine, but give me like 3 dialogue options for each so I can actually role play a little instead of just picking "saint" "sociopath" or "nihilist"
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Oct 30, 2023 18:15
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Professor Beetus posted:That's another thing that's kind of souring me on Starfield. There are so many really unsatisfying dialogue choices and outcomes to quests. Like, hey, if there's only two outcomes, that's fine, but give me like 3 dialogue options for each so I can actually role play a little instead of just picking "saint" "sociopath" or "nihilist" Bethesda RP:
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Oct 30, 2023 18:31
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Professor Beetus posted:The Ryujin stuff did offer a lot of opportunities to talk people down or do things more sneakily, but ultimately the only difference in the outcome is that you get yelled at more by your bosses and you get less money. Which is pretty lame. Yeah. I murdered everyone I could see in the last two Ryujin missions and the end result is a shrug and a paycheck all the same. You can literally sell out everyone possible in the Fleet and tell them so to their faces but you're also the one who brought in the megabucks so who cares? Khanstant posted:If they were gonna make all those drat planet spaces then the whole game should've been multiplayer so you could stumble into player constructions and poo poo and start to make the place feel populated if only by goobers willing to play "house" for no reason besides chance to be seen. So, basically, space FO76. Which... yeah, that would have been better. At this point I'm poking around lightly in NG+ hoping to actually get one of the weird variants, and only spending enough time in each one to get enough weapons/ammo to survive the Buried Temple to get to the next NG+.
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Oct 30, 2023 18:52
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