No spoilers, but man, did it just seem to drag on and on or was it just me?
Here I thought it was going to be a fun little one-off… go to the kiosk, send in a job application… this might be good for a laugh… then it just… never… ends…
I’m glad I got the operative level, but jeeze louise, the mission board quests afterwards are more interesting than doing the questline.
I’m partway through it, playing as a character with good stealth and persuasion. The only other faction line I’ve done is the Ranger one, and this one is much more fun & interesting. My only complaint is that the missions are a little too quick & simple, especially considering I’m still trying to get the hang of travelling without fast-travelling but I always manage to make multiple jumps instantly by accident.
I had a real crazy time completing the final main Ryujin mission. My companion decided they wanted to randomly rejoin me in the middle of the mission, breaking my stealth just as I was trying to get past a hazardous corridor, all hell broke loose and I ended up having to kill a lot of guards.
andreja kept alerting the guards and killing them i had to tell her to fuck off
and that last part with the turret and the guard was damn near impossible
First time through, it was a bloodbath and I got told off back at Ryujin HQ.
Second time I did it, I sniped the turret and took the guards down with EM weapons. No problem after that and no complaints at HQ.
One thing that really annoyed me about that mission; I’ve had a v strange bug for many days now, where my controller freezes whenever I take damage (shot, ship collision, whatev). So I’ve been forced to use keyboard & mouse. The neuroamp / social skills are completely broken with this input method, because to use it I have to either let go of AWSD movement, or let go of mouse movement. I cannot track running NPCs like this, so I cannot engage the neuroamp stuff in the split second before the NPC runs into cover or just two feet to one side.
It’s also broken ship combat w/ targeting. Once locked on, to switch between different ship systems targeting requires the arrow keys, which means letting go of AWSD or mouse, which means I quickly lose targeting lock.
There were two parts that made me dislike the quest line.
First it was how the quests kept making me run back and forth across the whole length of Neon core multiple times just to talk to a single person. It got so tiring.
The other part was the final stealth mission. That shit was the worst fucking stealth mission I’ve ever played in a Bethesda game. The stealth mechanics were completely broken in that place and it was only possible for me to stealth it by save scumming 60-70 times in that building.
I expected it to be more… cyberpunk? There was no real twist. There was no betrayal. The “hidden plot” was just a sentence in a note and not even really shocking. The coolest part about it was sneaking around and trying not to even be seen for bonus money.
It was really quite dull but could have been so much better if they just took a bunch of elements from popular cyberpunk media, having you start with the company, find out they’re the ones doing fucked up shit, they try to kill you, you fight back and shut 'em down or take over. Or be more of a corpo hitman kinda thing; be the typical bad guy/heavy from those cyberpunk things. I found the preference to non-violence a bit weird considering the vibe they tried to set with Neon as a whole.
Even the mind manipulation thing is pretty lacking. It’s only marginally useful in dialogues outside of that quest. It should have been an option any time you persuade anyone, anywhere.
I confess, I rather enjoyed the Ryujin questline. The last two stealth missions were a bit of a nightmare, first time through, admittedly. One you know what you’re doing though [Starborn] they can be q lot of fun.
