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.
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.