STORY
LORE
Would you believe that all of that isn’t the most infuriating part of the game? Oh no, sir/ma’am/other, it is not. You see, around 2150, humanity invents the “grav drive”, an FTL engine whose scant hints of science point to it as being some kind of space fold, like Battlestar Galactica’s jump. This is convenient, as it turns out that Earth’s magnetosphere is collapsing, giving us only 50 years to evacuate the planet. I’m not going to nitpick the science of that, because that honestly just seems kind of cruel – it’s an interesting driver, albeit the whole “Earth is dying so we have to leave Now” thing is kind of overdone, I say, as somebody including such a thing as a primary plot element in my own works.
One of the things that really gets me about this is the fact that, in that 50-year evacuation, we didn’t take dogs with us. There is absolutely no evidence of any canine (or feline!) presence in space, and in fact, there is evidence that at least one breed of dog (labrador retrievers) is extinct. As somebody who has studied humans for 26 years, this is absurd. Humans love their pets. Humans will pack bond with anything, and love them as they would a human family member. There is absolutely no way that, in a 50-year evacuation, nobody successfully convinced an evac starship to let their beloved dog/cat/lizard/snake/fish/duck/whatever aboard as well. There is absolutely no way that we have not also cloned said life forms in the 180 years between this incident and the game’s start, given that cloning technology is stated to exist, and the fact that we have the ability to print DNA from a digital format today. I don’t believe it. I just don’t.
Today, the galaxy is dominated by two major factions: the United Colonies, which can best be described as “the Terran Federation from the Starship Troopers book”, most notable for the fact that citizenship must be earned through a period of government service or great contributions to the UC; and the Freestar Collective, a mutual defence and trade pact whose main players are Akila City (Planet Cowboy) and Neon (Planet Cyberpunk).
Already we see wasted potential, as there is no mention in the game of tensions between Akila City and Neon for the latter’s attitudes towards the downtrodden. Nor are there mentions of people holding protests in the UC over the whole citizenship thing, considering that you need to be a citizen to buy property. So many potential plotlines that aren’t even considered.
There are two more minor players in the galaxy, too: the Crimson Fleet, space pirates; and House Va’ruun, an isolationist religious cult dedicated to worshipping a being known as “the Great Serpent”, which will one day kill everybody in the galaxy except for its devotees. Again, wasted potential: imagine, for instance, a breakaway element of the Crimson Fleet who are not comfortable with the piratical ways of the rest, deciding that they want to join up with the Freestar Collective. This would be a complex issue, as not only would you be inviting the ire of the pirates, but you’d also have to deal with themes of forgiveness and redemption, as a lot of these wannabe Collective members likely would have been partaking in piratical activities until recently.
MAIN QUEST
This is where the spoilers start, folks. If you don’t want to see ’em, don’t open the spoiler section. Also, fair warning, there are a lot of words here.
MAIN QUEST SPOILERS AHEAD!
So, the instigating event of the game is finding a mysterious MacGuffin, the Artifact. It gives you a strange space vision. You get picked up by Constellation, a classical Explorer’s Lodge, who are like “we want to study these fuckers”. As it turns out there’s a lot of these strange gubbins, and each one has a counterpart… uh… temple thingy. Going to a temple gives you powers, in a clear retread of Skyrim’s shouts which the game does not bother to scientifically explain. As you collect more Artifacts, you eventually discover some more information about them, when a mysterious weirdo in a weird ship is like “don’t collect these or else! It’s too dangerous!” Naturally, you ignore this, because A) it’s the main quest, and B) the stranger totally refuses to explain who they are, and why the Artifacts are so dangerous.You learn to regret this not long after, when an even more mysterious guy attacks! And if you’ve poked around, this guy should be familiar, because he’s appeared in both New Atlantis and Akila City! He’s an interesting guy! Philosophical! Funny! I liked him at first! Hell, I still liked him! Mysteriously, he attacks with a bunch of copies of himself, because he’s a stinky bastard and doesn’t believe in fighting fair.
The Artifact collection and visiting the various freaky temples are barely gussied-up fetch quests, with very little of note occurring. They are not worth mentioning beyond their existence.
At this point, you go on a really dumb hunt involving a guy going between all the major religions of the galaxy (all three of them!) and giving them stupid, vague clues that could mean anything. Somehow, this leads you to meeting both Mysterious Folk, revealing themselves as… humans! Humans that Travel The Multiverse! Apparently the Artifacts are supposed to lead you between realities to get powers for… some reason. The Hunter, aforementioned Likeable Mysterious Guy is revealed as some priest dude you meet earlier, and the Emissary is revealed as somebody that died during the Hunter’s attack on the Lodge! Whoa! But it’s not really them, because they’re from another universe. As a fan of multiversal shenanigans, this telling… does not move me, at all. There’s some race in each universe to find the Artifacts and then open the way to the rest of the multiverse (referred to as ” the Unity” here because “the Bulk” isn’t exactly the most awe-inspiring scientific term around). Not all that interesting.
Your new bestie, the Emissary, tells you to go to the Moon, which leads you to Earth, discovering the origins of the grav drive – it’s from studying alien artifacts! Finally, some actual goddamn study on them! Now it’s getting interesting (and I mean that sincerely). As it turns out, early grav drive usage directly caused the collapse of the Earth’s magnetosphere because of… gravity waves, or something. I’m a sucker for gravity waves, so I’m willing to excuse this. And, honestly, I kind of enjoy the parallel here to climate change, or rather, I like the concept of the parallel to climate change, because despite the direct comparison being drawn in the game, it’s a surface-level comparison at best. At any rate, they updated the grav drive designs to make them not ruin other planets too, but Earth is boned. Whoops.
Once you find out this terrible mind-boggling secret, the Emissary and Hunter meet you again and say “okay now you gotta pick a side. Do you want to be on the Hunter’s side and be a bitch, or the Emissary’s side and be a prissy bitch?” Fortunately, the game lets you tell them both to fuck off, because they’re both looking to gatekeep the Artifact stuff to whoever they think is worthy – the Hunter being all “might makes right” and the Emissary being all “be good little kids”, mirroring the Shadow War but approximately 95% less interesting.
At around this point, when collecting one of the final artifacts, is when you run into some really interesting multiversal shenanigans, albeit apparently ripped off from another game (nihil sub sole novum, motherfuckers). You arrive at a planet with Artifact readings, to receive a distress call from a lab! When you go down to the planet and visit the lab, though, everything is fine and everybody is a bit confused as to why you’re there… until, all of a sudden, you switch to another reality out of nowhere. As it turns out, this lab was playing with an Artifact, leading to splitting the lab into a Wrecked version, where only one guy survived because he lifted the lockdown on the lower levels instead of going for the vent controls, and a Fine version, where the same guy died because he hit the vent controls instead of lifting the lockdown on the lower levels, preventing a big boom but dying in the process.
At one point in this quest, the situation is likened to a really weird Schroedinger’s Cat scenario – the entire lab is in a superposition, where both the Wrecked and Fine versions exist simultaneously, until you collapse them back together by shutting down the experiment which has been running for something like a month, somehow. This is a really interesting element! And, in true video game fashion, there’s a way to save both if you’re willing to put in the legwork. After some puzzle solving and navigation that involves skipping between realities to get around security lockdowns and damage, you get to the Artifact and resolve the quest. It’s a really nice feeling when you get to save both realities, but I think the implications of only saving one is more interesting from a philosophical standpoint. What happens to the other? Does it just vanish forever? Is it trapped in a pocket universe, separate from the rest of reality, doomed to be trapped there for all eternity? Spooky shit.
At the very end, you find all the Artifacts and visit the mysterious Unity. I went for telling the Hunter and Emissary to get the hell out of our universe, both of ’em. This led me to meet myself! There was a little montage of how my actions affect the universe after I leave, I asked some questions about the makers of the Artifacts and only ended up more confused (they could be aliens or humans? Removing the one point of certainty we have? Can we please have at least some answers, like WHAT THE FUCKING POINT OF THE STUPID THINGS IS!?), and then bam. New universe. To do it all over again. To the game’s credit, you can just straight-up skip the main quest of finding answers to what the Artifacts are by dint of already knowing, and also if you do choose to redo the main quest, you get a lot of opportunities to use your knowledge from the last time around to skip some bits, or provide otherwise interesting dialogue.
Wow, that got away from me. Uh. Yeah. Wow.
UC VANGUARD
Another day, another spoiler: this time for the UC Vanguard quest line! This is a series that I actually enjoyed.
UC VANGUARD SPOILERS AHEAD
Signing up to the Vanguard is shockingly easy – all you have to do is talk to the dude in the big building in the middle of New Atlantis, and he’s like “yeah, sign up and you’ll get citizenship easy!” Head downstairs, you get asked some questions, and then on your way to the piloting exam, you go through the Museum of Propaganda! I do enjoy that the characters all comment on the blatant nature of the propaganda, as well as presenting exposition to you in the format of a museum-like thingy. Good job.Once you’re done with the tour, you get to the piloting exam! The assessor tells you to “be resourceful, make use of anything you can find”, so we’re totally gonna James Kirk this Kobayashi Maru – which you can actually do, there’s a debug terminal right there in the cockpit. Your results in this test determine how long it’ll take you to get your citizenship, sickeningly – ten years for passing three waves, three years for beating the Kobayashi Maru wave, and so on. Not long after this, you get given your first assignment: the colony of Tau Ceti II has lost contact, and you gotta go and sort things out. Simple enough.
Wait, is that foreshadowing?
Not long after you arrive, you hear a terrible, animalistic roar. A voice from the nearby processing plant tells you that the terrormorph might know you’re there, and to get to them ASAP. Once you’re in relative safety, she introduces herself as Hadrian, and tells you that it’s super fucking weird that a terrormorph has shown up to this colony already. You see, terrormorphs normally only show up after 70 to 100 years of human presence, which just doesn’t match the timeline. She tasks you with killing the fucker, and getting a sample of its genes.
This mission is fucking great. The terrormorph is an immensely tough bastard no matter what level you are, so it’s ill-advised to face it down directly. Instead, Hadrian directs you to start powering up the local turrets (everything needs turrets, after all!) and recalibrate a livestock tracker (which is a fence replacement????) to track the bastard. It doesn’t give you a direction, only a distance, which scared the piss out of me. Partway through bringing up the power to one of the kill lanes… you see it. The terrormorph in all its ugly glory, snacking on some livestock.
UC VANGUARD SPOILERS CONTINUE
I’m going to come right out and say it: this mission scared the hell outta me. It’s a very well-put together spooky mission. Crawling between buildings with only a guess of where the terrormorph is, trying desperately to remain hidden until you’ve gotten the turrets up? Shivers. Actually seeing the bastard in its full glory, how it leaps small buildings in a single bound? What a well-designed spooky dude! After a lot of bullets, the bastard finally goes down, you get your sample, and go back to Hadrian. Unfortunately, the scientific equipment at a farm isn’t up to the task (surprise surprise), so she sends you to have a chat with a former colleague of hers, from the UC Xenowarfare division. Those of you that paid attention during the museum trip might remember that as one of the things banned after the signing of the Armistice that ended the Colony Wars. Good job! Now you know what kind of shit we’re getting into.As it turns out, the guy is on Mars, and he owes some debt to the Trade Authority, universally acknowledged as people that, despite the unassuming name, you do not want to be indebted to. You’re given a few options with this one: settle the debt yourself, do a bit of legwork to clear it involving selling some performance enhancement drug made out of waste rock and scrap to the TA (I recommend this way, because you get a drug that increases your carry cap by 50 fucking kilograms), and so on. Do that, clear out a mine, and have a chat to this guy who’s hanging out in a secret facility at the very bottom, and he gives you some chilling news: the terrormorph’s DNA sample bears similarities to samples taken from Terrormorphs in Londinion – a location mentioned in the Museum of Propaganda, for being a terrormorph outbreak site so severe that they had to blow up the city’s spaceport to prevent it spreading, incidentally condemning the civilians living there to terrifying deaths at the claws of the terrormorphs.
Unfortunately, there’s a snag: as part of the Armistice, all data relating to xenowarfare research was locked up, requiring authorisation from the UC, Freestar Collective, and House Va’ruun to access. Your next job is to go with Hadrian to meet the UC’s governing council and tell them that you need to do exactly that. This conversation is interrupted, however, by no less than three terrormorphs attacking the New Atlantis spaceport. On-site assets are nowhere near enough to handle them, and the nearest anti-xeno team is weeks away, so you’re sent down to deal with them. Oh joy.
Incidentally, during this mission, it’s revealed to you that some terrormorphs can also PSYCHICALLY DOMINATE THEIR VICTIMS, CAUSING THEM TO FREEZE UP, GO INTO A PANIC, OR EVEN ATTACK OTHERS, when you go down into the train station and see some folk going ape shit. Handle these folks, and you go to the spaceport. It is not in a good way. Folk are going wild, security’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, the security shutters between the spaceport proper and the rest of the district have been ripped open, and in the distance you can hear the sound of terrormorphs roaring. All the security folks can give you is a small squad and a generous helping of ammonition. Good luck!
Once the terrormorphs are handled – which is fortunately not as hard as it sounds but still utterly terrifying because, as it turns out, your character isn’t actually immune to terrormorph psychic domination, demonstrated through creepy voices and occasional screen fuckery as you fight them – you head back to the UC council, who are in agreement: these terrormorphs have gotta go down. You’re then instructed to go have a chat with the UC’s chief ambassador, who tells you to have a chat with the Freestar guy, and then the Va’ruun guy, so you can grab their authorisation bingle thingies. The Freestar guy is easy enough to deal with – either talk them around, or authorise yourself through less-than-legal means. such as blackmail. Key card get.
The Va’ruun guy is a much harder sell, mostly because their embassy’s been abandoned for decades, and nobody’s quite sure if he’s even alive anymore. With your work cut out for you, you enter into a surreal, lurid landscape – when Va’ruum left the embassy, it apparently included their gardening staff, because some kinda mega-tree has grown all over the show, and the robots aren’t too happy to see you. Your only guidance throughout the place, reminiscent of an Earth covered in the Red Weed except if it were a brown tree instead, is a mysterious voice speaking over broken intercoms. Make your way through this strange hellscape, and you meet the Va’ruun ambassador, who’s apparently been living in the abandoned embassy for years? A bit of chatter, and he’s actually surprisingly cooperative, more than happy to give you a key card to access the Armistice Archives, on one proviso – that the data retrieved be used only in peace. With that nice little diversion aside, and the only other friendly Va’ruun character we meet in the entire game behind us, you head back to the Armistice Archives, filled to the brim with forbidden knowledge – including data on banned mechs. Unfortunately, the conditions of accessing the archives preclude you from taking anything other than the data gathered on terrormorphs, which is a damn shame, because I would have loved to steal their mech research and become the scourge of the seven stars.
Data in hand and given to Hadrian, you head back to the President of Space–er, the UC, who gives you your citizenship (stopping a potentially deadly attack on the UC’s capital is a big deal, you know). You’re then directed to a place called “Subsection 7”, some kinda super-classified UC facility, where somebody has requested to speak. Pass through a very secured airlock (where they actually tell your companion, if you have one, that they have to stay outside, nice touch), and you find yourself on one side of the glass of a prison apartment, faced down by a mysterious figure – who reveals himself to be Vae Victis, none other than the very man who ordered the bombing of the Londinion space port, war criminal who was supposedly executed for his crimes at the end of the Colony War, per the terms of the Armistice. Plot twist – and a very interesting plot twist – he wasn’t executed, the previous UC administration lied and kept him alive because he’s too useful! God damn Space America.
Vae Victis sends you on a mission to get rid of a dude, some kinda weapons researcher, so you do that. A note: even if you try to take him non-lethally by disabling and boarding his spaceship, he dies anyway. But you do get some mysterious insights into who he is and what he’s been doing… take his ID back to Vae Victis, and he gives you the information you want from him: the location of another of Hadrian’s old coworkers, a robot by the name of Kaiser. Now, despite the existence of AI in the setting, you only meet one actual AI during the course of the game. Except, I think that Kaiser might be a person too. The planet you find him on was one of the roughest battlegrounds of the Colony Wars, mechs and xenoweapons alike unleashed on its unsuspecting surface, turning entire parts into devastated wastelands. He’s on the planet in what can only be viewed as… I guess he feels responsible, and refuses to leave until you take out one particular xenoweapon – something of his white whale, hence the local scavvers’ nickname for him: Ahab. Take out this particularly nasty critter, and he comes with you back to the secret base.
At the base, Hadrian brings you up to speed on the latest developments: the team has come up with two potential ways of getting rid of the terrormorphs, either making use of a bioweapon targeted at terrormorphs, or resurrecting a species that is the terrormorph’s natural predator. Both of these require going to Londinion for scientific guff and gubbins, so it looks like it’s off to Terrormorph Town. Past the UC checkpoint and into the city proper, you end up fighting off some terrormorphs and their related cousins, before heading down into the steam tunnels beneath the former city. There, you find some super weird plants – Hadrian calls them “Lazarus plants”, and apparently they can only grow near Londinion. As you traverse the tunnels, you pass by a small swarm of heat leeches, ubiquitous pest in the galaxy. This surely isn’t important.
One room on, and you’re treated to a shocking revelation: heat leeches, when exposed to the pollen(?) of a Lazarus plant, undergo a metamorphosis into… terrormorphs! They’ve been related all along! Surprise, motherfuckers! This is a highly compressed version of the metamorphosis that heat leeches naturally go through, a process that takes around 70 to 100 years – thus perfectly explaining where terrormorphs come from, why they happen so consistently, and how they’ve gotten from world to world. With this data in hand, you press on, your destination being the bombed-out spaceport.
Today is a day for shocking revelations, as during the journey, you come across a place that Vae Victis himself visited before the bombing, and hear a recording from him: a recording that reveals he’s known about terrormorphs the entire time! His bombing of the spaceport wasn’t just to prevent the terrormorphs escaping, it was also preventing the information about their origins escaping! When you go back to him to confront him about this, he gives you his justification: it was in the middle of a terrible war where creatures just like this were being weaponised on the reg. If the knowledge had gotten out, Freestar or the UC would have heard sooner or later, and wanted a slice of the terrormorph pie for himself. He was also behind the Tau Ceti II and New Atlantis attacks, using the guy you hunted down for him earlier as a catspaw, spreading the Lazarus pollen to demonstrate the terrormorph threat. As for why he never said this himself, instead sending you and Hadrian on this wild goose chase? Because he wanted to clear the family name, so to speak, and to save the UC from the terrible threat of terrormorphs and their heat leech siblings.
Before all that, though, you get to the Londinion spaceport and face down Mummy Terrormorph in the most obvious boss arena I’ve ever seen. It’s a boss fight. Pretty standard. An interesting note, though, is that during the fight, Mummy Terrormorph summons local critters to her aid with her psychic nastiness – nastiness that you can block during the course of the fight, with the interesting effect of not only stopping the critters from fighting you, but turning them on her instead! Take her down and you not only have an anti-crazy field defence, but also a sample from Mummy Terrormorph to program your bioweapon. With that, it’s time to go.
Back at New Atlantis, the UC council hails you as heroes. Pass on your recommendations for whether to make use of the terrormorph’s natural predator or the bioweapon for terrormorph cleanup (I went for the natural predator because I’ve seen movies and I know that bioweapons always go out of control), and who was responsible for the terrormorph attacks earlier (I chose to pin it on Vae Victis, because he’s a motherfucker and I hate him because he’s right and my only argument against him is that what he did was wrong from a moral standpoint), and you’re given the title of Class One Citizen for your trouble. Aside from a generous weekly stipend, you also get a fancy penthouse in one of New Atlantis’ residential towers, putting a neat little bow on the storyline!
UC VANGUARD THOUGHTS BELOW
I loved this quest line. I’m not afraid to admit that. It was well-written, well-designed, a lot of spooky shit, plenty of twists and turns… aside from a couple of gripes like the fact that a genetic analysis would reveal the relationship between heat leeches and terrormorphs, thus spoiling the fun; and also the fact that the instantaneous transformation from heat leech into terrormorph caused by the Lazarus plant is straight-up scientifically impossible for multiple reasons… I really, really liked this quest line. In no small part because the villain was right to do what he did, and my only argument against him was along ethical lines. You really don’t see that much!RYUJIN INDUSTRIES
You play a street samurai for knockoff Arasaka Industries. There’s some kinda cyberware thing. Corporate espionage. Mole hunt. Yawn.
PORRIMA II
FUCK THIS QUEST. DETAILS BELOW.
PORRIMA II SPOILERS AHEAD
So, when you show up at Porrima II, you see a massive ship in orbit, and receive a transmission from the surface asking for help figuring out just what in the goddamn is going on there. Trying to hail the ship gets you dial-up noises, and a suggestion to board from your dialogue options. Boarding reveals that they’re humans! Humans that left Earth nearly 200 years ago in a generational ship! Cool, I love generational ships, and I love the kind of issues that come from dealing with them when their target planet has been colonised in the interim by faster spaceships. I’m really excited to see the cultural clashes, folk being upset by getting beaten there…FORESHADOWING.
So, from talking to the Constant‘s captain, it’s pretty clear that they don’t want to share Porrima II, and they don’t really have the option to leave for another planet because they don’t have an FTL engine. The captain asks you to head down and have a chat to the current owners! Okay, cool. The CEO is a piece of shit. He suggests, to your face, that maybe you should just blow them up. Those of you with a single moral bone in your body will likely have responded to them reasonably, by drawing your gun and shooting this motherfucker in the face. HE’S FUCKING ESSENTIAL. HE CAN’T FUCKING DIE. FUCKER DOESN’T EVEN FLINCH. And the worst part is, he’s not, like, the president of space! He’s the CEO of a fucking space hotel! He’s not important! He’s not cool! He’s a piece of shit that makes his workers live in abject poverty so some rich motherfuckers can have a fucking PARTY PLANET!
Fortunately, you don’t ,have to take this route. You can also suggest to the colonists that they PUT THEMSELVES INTO INDENTURED SERVITUDE ON THE PLANET SO THEY CAN “”””””””EARN”””””””” THEIR PLACE DOWN THERE. Or, you can say “sorry, planet’s occupied, you gotta go somewhere else” and install a grav drive on their ship. You cannot tell the corpo fucks where to shove their deals. The best possible option is to tell the Constant to fuck off somewhere else. And once you do that, you can’t actually help them in any way beyond installing their grav drive, like giving them survey data for good planets to go to! Even The Outer Worlds, most mid RPG I’ve ever played that wasn’t a Bethesda game, lets you have more choice than this! God.
So, uh, full disclosure: there are way more quests and quest chains in the game than this; I just got bored before playing them, or otherwise completely forgot about their contents. Crimson Fleet questline, for instance? The only thing that really comes to mind is the fact that it cleverly justifies playing pirate content as a morally good character, by putting you into the role of an undercover agent sent to infiltrate the pirates. Everything else is just… meh, with some mildly infuriating moments sprinkled in.
INTERMISSION 2
Nearly there, folk. You’re doing damn well if you’ve made it this far, especially if you’re a die-hard defender! I’m very proud of you. Let’s take another break.
