We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I’ve done has been:
- Go to this random place
- Gun down everyone in sight because my mandatory companion can’t stealth.
- Talk to the named bad guy.
- See if I win a coin flip. 4a. Walk out with a McGuffin. 4b. Gun everyone down again, then walk out with the McGuffin.
It’s nothing but, “Go there, kill guys,” as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
You’re absolutely right and if I can muster up the energy to start the game back up then Ryujin is probably going to be my first stop.
You’re expected not to kill anyone during the entire Ryujin storyline as it’s “bad for business”. It’s all social and sneaky stealth.
Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
I’m curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not that would’ve actually changed with prior gameplay.
I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I’ll admit I didn’t bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don’t know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn’t care about. Maybe if I’d gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would’ve been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.
If you’re liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn’t.
I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.
Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.
Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.
my mandatory companion can’t stealth
So tell your mandatory companion to “wait here” when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the “stealth archer” meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you’re complaining because it isn’t working well for you.