Raithe

Well I'm maneuvering around the oddments of life at the moment. On my Mando front, I have to admit, I have been procrastinating the last few months. For some reason I just can't focus my oomph to get back to the sanding and cleaning of my armour to get it all sorted for the app process. That, plus as I developed the basic leatherworking skills to design and craft the holsters, belts and related paraphernalia, I keep getting hit by design ideas for a full leather Early Crusader Mando kit. To try and get some crafting oomph out of the way I've started working the leather into the fantasy armour as a practice and learning process. Between juggling the work stuff, and keeping an eye on my father in case he takes any sudden health turns, I'm starting to wrap up the last few things I need to sort before heading to New Orleans in a couple of weeks. Catch up with friends, amuse their kids, deliver Cadbury chocolate, see the French Quarter, raise my cholesterol, spend an hour or two poking in the Tandy Leather store for tools and such it's a pain to find or ship normally... I should probably highlight a few other things to do.

Whomever created this obviously never gamed in the 90's, or had to sort out the IRQ for a flightstick pro....

"Riker's Nemesis...."

I think one of the things that weirded me out with the storyline is that you have all these "temples" that no humans built.. with funky gravity effects going on. At times these places are literally with a human outpost built within 800 m... And at no point does anyone actually talk about them, reference wild theories of aliens or how shocked people have been to find structures on planets when they arrived, or that research that had been carried out on them. Constellation has been looking into the "artifacts" for a couple of years, but never considered anything of note to these strange, pre-human buildings that cause stone to float until you get into the funky gravity readings...

So that's going to be part of the secrets behind House Va'ruun!! Given how much they're talked about, and a companion plotline involves them, there's surprisingly little actual interaction with them as a faction.

I just finished my first playthrough. Apparently I've managed to sink 112 hours into it. The main story is pretty much an excuse for why there's a NewGamePlus mode But I'll avoid spoilers on that. There's nothing outrightly wow or amazing about it, but it's got that standard Bethesda you just roam around and discover odd little bits and pieces and kind of engage on that level. There are some missions and moments that are very well handled, and a bunch that have interesting ideas behind with shallow execution. The explanations for what you need for Outposts is fairly minimal, so that's very much a learning process. The stealth mechanics are fairly horrible when trying to do anything seriously stealthy. Trying to design your personal starship can get a little addictive, and I'm sure there's going to be a slew of mods to break some of the "maximum modules used" aspect given some time. One thing that does feel weird is that there's minimal engagement with the Factions. Or rather, there's something like 5 factions with actual quest lines or missions, but several more factions are mentioned and you have encounters with, but you never really get any depth or interaction with them beyond specific bits from other faction / companion quests. It makes it feel like there's a hole waiting for future DLC to fill.