Just finished Barrett's companion quest.
Do any of the people in this game talk like human fucking beings, ever? At all?
The dialogue in this game suffers from the same exact problem as Mass Effect: Andromeda. It's all telling, no showing. It's shit-tons of front-loaded exposition, trivial facts about characters' lives being spewed left and right.
Imagine if real people talked like this. You walk up to a guy on the street and he turns toward you with an intense expression on his face, and he's like, "Hello, I'm Steve. My dog died when I was twenty, and I'm really depressed about it thirty years later."
Then you walk into the T.J. Maxx and the cashier is like, "Don't go to that gas station across the street! They ripped me off by double-charging on an Aquafina water bottle I was trying to buy back in 1993!"
And then you beat feet out of there, trying to get away from this crazy bitch who's telling you her life story unprompted, and suddenly, everyone you run into is exactly like this. You try going to the bank, and the teller informs you, mid-transaction, she's been going through therapy, because nothing else has worked so far, and she's been struggling with suicidal thoughts. You stop by the laundromat, and some dipshit staring at his clothes spinning in the dryer helpfully informs you that he has body lice that have been bothering him for years, and he's trying to sterilize his clothes. By this point, you're screaming in stark raving terror, sprinting out of every establishment, wondering when the Earth was invaded and everyone was replaced by fucking oversharing pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
That's what it's like, listening to the fucking dialogue in this game. Every single character in this game is a self-absorbed narcissist freak who blabbers on endlessly about the minutiae of their lives. They never relate axioms, make proposals, or speak in hypotheticals. They only vomit strings of fragmentary factoids and then ask for your opinion on them, like you're their fucking shrink. They never talk about other people, only themselves, interspersed between them sheepishly praising you for having the patience to listen to them unload their mental baggage on you. They literally don't know any other way to communicate. They don't have any intersubjectivity or shared experience at all. Like the old Chinese fable about the frog at the bottom of a well, they are the captives of their own fucking endless navel-gazing. I expected Delgado, at least, hardened criminal that he was, to eschew the useless banter about the past and focus on more practical matters, but the moment you meet him, he starts vomiting words, right on cue, about how the Crimson Fleet was founded, about the legend of Kryx's Legacy, and a bunch of other bullshit that the plot has not given us an opportunity to give the teeniest fuck about. When I unloaded Kryx's custom Magshear into everyone's faces on The Key and turned them into fish food, it was pure catharsis.
The books and slates are even worse. My god. I have never seen more boringly written text entries in a game in my fucking life. I could get better results by fucking hiring pajeets on Amazon MTurk for a dollar an hour to write me journal entries for a video game based on rough outlines. The only good text in this game is literally lifted from old classics that are in the public motherfucking domain.
Hire real writers, Bethesda, you fucking lazy bitches.
I've been playing with the ship builder for the last few days. I have fun with it, but it's kind of ridiculous how ship habs have absolutely no effect on anything and are all just cosmetic in the end.
I would think having an engineering bay or a battle station would do *something* with a ships actual stats or combat ability, but they just add crew slots, which you would think would be what living quarters do but they...don't?
As far as I can tell some of them just have research stations?
Living quarters/berths add passenger slots for the occasional passenger transport radiant quests. The engineering bays, battle stations, control stations, etc., only add crew slots (think of them as control stations for the crew to use). The crew themselves are what add the actual stats with their crew perks, which do stack with your own perks (but not identical perks of other crew). For instance, if you have a couple ranks in Payloads, and you bring on Sam Coe, who has the same perk, you'll have even more cargo space. To change your crew roster, you have to hit Tab, click on the ship section in the lower-left, then hit C.
Now, here's the shitty part. It does not matter how many crew stations you have; if you don't have the Master-level perk Ship Command, you can't have more than 3 crew stationed on your ship. Also, this perk governs the max crew you can have, which caps out at 8 crew at Rank 4. So, for instance, if your ship has a crew capacity of 9 or more due to weapons or extra crew stations, you cannot use that additional capacity for anything at all. It's capped at 8 crew, period.
Most of the other habs add little more than workbenches. The infirmary can't be used to treat injured characters; it's just a spot with the cosmetic appearance of a medbay, plus a chem station. In many cases, the science lab is completely useless, since some (but not all manufacturers') workshop habs already have a research station. Different manufacturers have completely different internal layouts for their habs. Look at how different all the Captain's Quarters modules are between the manufacturers. Deimos has the most depressing one of all; your bed is a little tiny cot opposite your desk, sandwiched between two dividers. The Nova Galactic one practically has a bedroom. The Taiyo one has a nice conference table with four seats, but a weird and cramped bathroom with toilet paper stored in a location where it would undoubtedly get wet from the shower head. Real head-scratcher, that one.
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