I’d been thinking for a while now about the very worst quest in Cyberpunk (yes, I’m talking about Sinnerman and its questline) and just what makes it so awful. For anyone who doesn’t know, in that mission a man hires you to get revenge on a murderous ex-con whose been mysteriously released from prison, and wants to be there to watch; following a 100% scripted car chase (since this predated the vehicle AI they eventually added) the cop car transporting the target stops under an overpass and the driver gets out; your client gets out of the car, charges the cop, is unavoidably scripted to die after a few lines of dialogue; and then the actual questline begins as the ex-con is revealed to be a born again fundamentalist lunatic who’s intent on being killed in a corporate produced crucifixion BTL and for no discernable reason has decided he really wants to hang out with the player character to the point that the studio exec responsible for his release from prison pays you to come hang out with them.
Everything about it is awful, from the premise to the heavily scripted execution and the way that you literally cannot make it go any way other than it does even if you stop time and try to kill the target and driver before the conversation can happen: they’re all locked to not go below 1 hp until the conversation finishes. But despite this, you can just take out the target as soon as that initial dialogue has finished, and the dialogue if you accept the contract to go and hang out with him does let you criticize the whole absurd farce, call the target a lunatic, and just leave, ruining the whole mad plan. That “but” is relevant for the sake of contrast: that questline was the absolute lowpoint of writing and quest design for that game, and even it let you go off on the characters or just outright kill them and leave.
Now let’s compare that to Starfield. In true Bethesda fashion, quests are usually heavily linear with a single branching end of “do good thing (for money)” or “do bad thing (for more money, maybe)” that don’t lead into anything else most of the time and (at least so far) never actually matter beyond their own little self-contained questline. They’re also bland and full of brainworms, with only the occasional hint of decent writing hiding somewhere in there.
For example, in the one I’m on now you have to serve as a liaison between an ancient slower-than-light colony ship and the corporate owners of the planet they were headed towards. Both parties are insufferable, but the corporate resort is actively monstrous and proposes three solutions: you can pay the resort to enslave the colonists, buy the colonists a jump drive and get them to fuck off, or kill the colonists. The executives that give you these choices are flagged as essential and can’t simply be killed, and those are your only choices for resolving the situation. Your options for dissent are little more than saying “gee that sounds mean” as a side option that just directs you back to choosing one of those three resolution paths.
It hits every note for what made Sinnerman such an awful questline, and then manages to be even worse on top of that. And that’s just the normal baseline level for Starfield: quest relevant NPCs are always invincible and the quest doesn’t account for the possibility of just killing them no matter how awful they are, there’s never any option to tear into anyone over how awful everything about what they’re doing is, and the options are always a very limited set of choices that are usually dumb.
Trying to play games with a large narrative component designed for mass appeal after playing Disco Elysium makes me wanna take a Dremel to my skull so I can carefully remove my brain and throw it into traffic.
every TES game since Morrowind. : p At least Skyrim was a little weird around the edges.
Morrowind had a wild plot, and it let you actively fuck questlines because there was no such thing as ‘essential NPCs’ (that was not introduced until Oblivion).
It would tell you if you did so (or if the NPC got murdered some other way), but otherwise…do whatever
Are there any games that come close to the story of DE?
Outer Wilds comes to mind although it tells its story in a very different manner.
I’m so mad about the Outer Worlds because it’s a bad game with a similar name and release timeframe to a good game. They’re forever tangled in my brain argh.
I played Outer Worlds for an hour and a half and uninstalled lmao
Agreed. It’s the only game that impacted me on nearly the same level as Disco, even though the presentation is significantly different.
Sure, but they’re old. Planescape Torment is the one that immediately comes to mind.
Would also add Torment: Tides of Numenera, the spiritual successor. It starts a little slow, but does have a similar super deep story telling thing. You can make it through the whole game without ever getting into combat if you want, though there are some sections you may still want to do turn based to get the timing right.
What was that game where you play an enforcer for the evil overlord and have to do a lot of legitimate lesser-evil choices because if you don’t find a solution your boss will magic-nuke entire regions, or let his much less hinged minions do it? That supposedly has some good storytelling and actually makes being “evil” more complicated than just 'press x to kick puppies".
Tyranny. I had a pretty good time with it, but I wouldn’t say it’s outstanding.
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While I wouldn’t say it’s in the same league as DE in terms of style or impact, I feel like Pentiment scratched a similar itch.
Pentiment was really tight.
Planescape Torment’s story rocks. The gameplay sucks ass though.
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Very different feel, but Night in the Woods had a similar effect on me. It’s definitely not as poetic/high minded, but it’s got a strong POV and good characters.
be gay do crimes
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nailing that guy on the cross was fun doe ngl. the studio execs being content demons was hilarious.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if the NPC has a name they’re just invincible and even sometimes random unnamed guards are invincible. Coming right off the heels of BG3 where I generally had the freedom to pick my solution, it’s very frustrating. If I wanted to take a fight that was extremely disadvantageous to myself, I could, I’d more than likely die, but I could take the fight. My first reminder of it being a Bethesda game was when while lost in New Atlantis desperately trying to find a vendor because I’m overencumbered 90% of the time and it’s not even 2 hours in, I pick up and throw a box. Suddenly the entire city’s population, guards and civilians, have their guns trained on me and they’re all trying to kill me. In BG3, if I moved someone’s box they’d look at me grumpily and then pick the box up so I couldn’t touch it again.
I pick up and throw a box. Suddenly the entire city’s population, guards and civilians, have their guns trained on me and they’re all trying to kill me.
God even fucking Morrowind did this better- they had a whole system for “How much do I hate you, plus how bad was that thing you did, plus did you do it to me, plus how many times did you do it” that would prevent the majority of people from getting bloodthirsty over little shit.
The OG Dishonored is still a high bar for open ended solutions to quests in my book. Probably helps that it was much more contained and engineered.
No kill no detection run is bonkers
That run killed all of my love for the game. Still haven’t played the DLC or sequel.
Dishonored 2 made that run fun, D1 was frustrating to not know things at the end of the mission
It really is corporate memphis INNNNNN SPAAAAAACE
quest relevant NPCs are always invincible and the quest doesn’t account for the possibility of just killing them no matter how awful they are, there’s never any option to tear into anyone over how awful everything about what they’re doing is, and the options are always a very limited set of choices that are usually dumb.
Why are you upset or surprised? It’s just liberalism and the rules based order. Game is mainstream and made by a US based multinational like Microsoft, there is literally no possibility for the game to be anything but liberalism.
Cyberpunk 2077 was made by a Polish company, culturally they had a little more wiggle room on ideas of “how the world has to work”. In Starfeild the game mechanics have to conform to the rules based liberal order where killing or when punishing “job creators” for being monsters is never an option.
I’m not surprised, I’m ranting because it just hit me that a quest in Cyberpunk 2077 that was so bad that I keep remembering how egregiously bad it was was still meaningfully better than the slurry of bland mush that is Bethesda’s quest design. Like for all the criticism that can be leveled against CDPR I can’t help but keep thinking just how much better their writing consistently is compared to the typical AAA slop of Bethesda, Actiblizzard, or Ubisoft (I’d include EA but I genuinely couldn’t tell you if EA even make games with writing anymore. They’re just like Apex, the Sims, and the same sports game over and over aren’t they?).
Starfield is probably the best thing Bethesda’s main studio has put out in the past twenty years, but the writing is basically like if Mass Effect had even less to say and played it even safer and milder with its themes and tone.
God i just finished the same quest and had the same reaction, it pushed me to turn my playthrough into full lying/stealing/killing. This game wants you to shovel the liberal slop down your gullet every step of the way and it’s nearly gotten in the way of my enjoyment.
I think I’ll actually attempt my first bethesda mod with this game to add some better quest branches/anti-corpo actions
Here’s my mini rant about 2 questlines, haven’t gotten very far in either so who knows, maybe I’m completely off base.
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Ryujin questlines has got to be the most dogshit quest since joining the stormcloaks. You get railroaded into defending the honor of one megacorp against intellectual property theft from other megacorps. I could not give less of a shit. Polar opposites of any “punk”, only fun part was when they told me to break into their own building quietly so I went in guns blazing. Can’t kill the CEO though
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Space pirates, you get told to infiltrate a massive space pirates organization as penance for stealing a loose apple. I get to the main pirate base and start blasting, can’t kill the main pirates nor can I fail the quest, they just ignore all their dead friends after a while. Dumb as hell let me kill important npcs
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I just shot everyone in Sinnerman after the client died the first time around. You CAN do it, as you said, but the game kinda hints that you “Did this the WRONG way.”
A lot of people loved the quest though, apparentely nailing a guy to a cross is peak writing to some
Damn, I reloaded a couple times and was able to kill the cop but never before the client got domed, no matter how far away I stopped.
I tried a few times too, and had a sandevistan on that character so I could literally stop time, run up to the cop, and lay into him with mantis blades to just delete his health bar before he could move, but it does not go below 1 hp until his gun goes off. It also became clear that he doesn’t actually mechanically shoot the client: you can basically turn him the wrong way with melee attacks and flinch him so hard his gun is pointing straight down or otherwise away from the client, but as soon as it plays the firing animation the client dies and the unkillable flags get removed.
I found the worst part about the Sinnerman questline is that at no point can you or anything other character point out that the murderer is a self-serving prick trying to martyr himself. The only two choices are to go along with it and act as if it’s some odd noble thing he’s doing while the execs are drooling for more Content, or to take the stance that he’s a weirdo because of his religious beliefs. At no point does the quest entertain the idea that he’s doing this to get a bit of a last laugh spotlight on him before his execution.
I found it was a very Bazinga Brain concept for a quest, like a shitty Black Mirror episode.
Yeah, and then you’ve got Johnny - a character who’s consistently an incoherent asshole but whose takes are generally at least somewhat on point - going on about how Joshua is “a true rebel” for his plans when it’s like no, commodifying and worshipping his own death is literally the most conformist and status quo supporting thing anyone could possibly do in a society ruled by a capitalist death cult that commodifies and worships death. His plan is literally to turn himself into a consumer good that reinforces the worship of death and violence that suffuses the setting, there’s not an ounce of resistance or rebellion to that.
Not only that, but commodifying his death in order to get people to pity him after death. I get the same vibes from the quest as all those glowing articles about McCain just prior to and after his death: yeah sure he did some awful stuff but by golly he tried to do better at the end. It’s disgustingly cynical and not in the way I think Cyberpunk intended.
I think it would have worked better if the guy wasn’t repentant and instead it was made clear that he was choosing the crucifixion BD route out of corpo coercion rather than an attempted sacrificial martyrdom. Make it about how the death penalty is awful regardless of who gets it, and how commodifying death is worse.
