Comparing two quests to see a huge difference in design philosophy between Starfield and New Vegas
Support me on Patreon:   / xen42  

Starfield was great, but after playing through it for the first time there was something that really irked me about certain quests. Unlike in previous Bethesda titles, the amount of player choice really felt limited when trying to progress through questlines in an unconventional way. NPCs being marked "essential" and thus being unable to kill them, and key items only materializing when progressing in the "proper" way makes it so you can only progress through the quest in a specific way, or at the very most, within one of the two specific ways (I love binary moral choices). While I think Bethesda did a good job of giving the persuasion skill (speech checks) a good role in quest options, they really let pickpocketing and plain old-fashion killing fall by the wayside. Unless they didn't and I just happened to find two very specific quests where this was the case, maybe every single other quest in the game has an alternate resolution solvable only via the theft skill and I have made an absolute fool of myself. Only time will tell.

I think the closest they came to having some neat player choice is in one of the final Ryujin Industries missions, even if the central mechanic felt super buggy to me when I played through it. If you know you know.

Okay that's it. This is a pretty different video from other stuff I've made so if you're interested in hearing me talk about other games like this let me know. There are some other interesting quests in Starfield that I could talk about. Or maybe I'll just add to the infinite pile of "New Vegas best Bethesda RPG" videos that are already out there. If you read this far please write "patrolling the mojave almost makes you wish for nuclear winter" in the comments thank you bye bye.